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THE GREEK STONES SPEAK by Paul MacKendrick

THE GREEK STONES SPEAK

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Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1962
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

This story of archaeology in Greece is a companion volume, in a way, to the writer's The Mute Stones Speak, in which he wrote of archaeology in Italy. His goal is to present the evidence, to show archaeological inference in operation- and to draw cultural history from this evidence. With the fast growing interest in Greece and with the immensely significant findings of the archaeologists in this past generation, this book will find interest alerted as would not have been likely even ten years ago. Tourists are turning to Greece. finding an inexplicable sense of a link with Greece's past which somehow was never true of Italy's pre-history. This traces the beginnings with Schilemann at Troy and later in Mycenac,; it cuts across the discoveries in subsequent digs as scientific excavation came into its own- the contributions of men like Evans and Dorpfeld and Blegen, and many others less well known. The story comes down from prehistory, when legend was proved fact, through the Dorian invasion, the lyric age, the classical age, to the Hellenistic age and the Greek world under the heel of Rome. It is a great sweep of history, drawn from findings in excavation -- from work done by of many nations, in the Aegean, in Asia Minor, in many parts of the Greek mainland, in the colonies as far as Sicily. One glimpses much of the cultures, the ways of life, the interplay of influences- and some of the assumptions and conclusions of the past are constantly being changed with the findings of the present. Too technical, perhaps, for the general traveler; this demands far more than the casual interest aroused by visits to Knossos, to Delos, to Athens and Corinth and Olympia and Delphi- but certainly nobody could visit those shrines of the past and not find immense reward in studying these pages, and the 170 odd photographs and diagrams which bring the text to life. (The recent publication of Mycenaeans and Minoans (Knopf) by Leonard R. Palmer of Oxford elaborates some of the findings reported here by Blegen at Pylos, but the two books supplement each other and- for the layman- the MacKendrick book reach.