Department of Greece and Rome

Excavations at the international harbour town of Naukratis in the Nile Delta have been crucial in exploring how ancient Egypt shaped the development of Greek culture in the first millennium BC and how Egypt, in turn, was influenced by contact with the broader Eastern Mediterranean World.

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Excavation at a site called the Pantanello ('little swamp') close to the magnificent country residence of the Roman Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli, Italy in the 18th century unearthed many sculptures and architectural fragments. These objects are now in major international collections, including the British Museum. This project combines archival research and fieldwork that aims to better understand the site, including its excavation history.

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The British Museum is home to the largest and archaeologically most important collections of ancient Cypriot artefacts in the world outside of the island itself. This project, funded by the AG Leventis Foundation, aims to produce a comprehensive digital catalogue of the collection and its associated archives in order to highlight the central role played by Cyprus in ancient Mediterranean social, economic and cultural life.

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The city of Knidos in south-western Turkey was an important maritime and trading community found in 360 BC.

It was most famous in ancient times for its statue of Aphrodite, the first naked represented of this goddess by the renowned sculptor Praxiteles. Excavations at the site in 1857–1859 by the pioneering British archaeologist Charles Newton, focused on the Sanctuary of Demeter and her daughter Persephone and the so-called gymnasium, bringing many objects to the British Museum.

These items and their associated archives are the subject of renewed study in collaboration with colleagues in Turkey.

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We have three Collaborative Doctoral award students.

1) Jan Sienkiewicz (British Museum and University of Cambridge)

Rhodes and the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean world

Jan’s thesis focuses on a Late Bronze Age community at Ialysos, Rhodes, and its relations with the Mycenaean and eastern Mediterranean worlds in the later second millennium BC.

Part of this project involves reconstructing tomb assemblages from the part of a cemetery at Ialysos cemetery excavated by Sir Alfred Biliotti, British Consul in Rhodes, between 1868 and 1871 on behalf of the British Museum, and to integrate this material with archival material also held in the BM archives.

2) Nelly (Eleanor) von Aderkas (British Museum and University College London, Institute of Archaeology)

Containing Commodities: Determining Organic Residues in Greek Painted Pottery

Nelly's PhD examines the organic residues in decorated Greek pottery vessels in the 8th – 4th century BC Mediterranean. She's adapting current analytical techniques to determine the contents in Greek finewares to better understand questions about their use, function and trade in the Mediterranean.

She also hopes to explore the conservation and display history of vessels in the British Museum collection to better interpret her results.

3) Mark Dolan (British Museum and University of Southampton)

Miniature boats and Maritime culture: Cypriot terracotta boat models reassessed.

Mark's research focuses on a group of terracotta models of boats, many preserved in the British Museum, that were placed in tombs and shrines in Cyprus in the second and first millennia BC and what they can tell us about the island's maritime culture in this period.

Although commonly illustrated in books and exhibition catalogues, especially to do with the sea and daily life, relatively little is known about why they made or how they were used or understood. Mark aims to explore their object histories, from the time they were made and deposited to their discovery and display in modern times.   

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A large survey conducted by an American team between 1977 and 1983 explored more than 30 ancient sites in an area of about 800km² in the south-western Nile Delta.

The project, led by WDE Coulson in collaboration with A Leonard Jr and N Wilkie, was a bold attempt to investigate a previously largely unstudied cultural and socio-economic landscape using modern survey and excavation techniques.

The sites they surveyed, and sometimes excavated, encompass fortress towns, port cities, industrial installations and domestic contexts, dating from the Pharaonic to the Islamic period. The American work frequently provides the richest and sometimes only record of the sites in this historically important region, but only parts were ever published.

The ongoing Western Nile Delta project makes this important research (preserved in extensive archival documentation as well as objects) available to scholarship.

Analysis of the material is beginning to shed new light on the settlement patterns and historical development of this under-studied region of Egypt. Many sites hitherto identified as Ptolemaic or Roman foundations were actually settled by the Late Period, if not much earlier in the Old Kingdom (Kom Dahab), First Intermediate Period-early Middle Kingdom (Kom Kortas) and New Kingdom (Kom Abu el Humar el-Kebir).

This research will provide insight into the scale and resolution of settlements within a dynamically changing natural landscape that was a substantial inter-cultural contact zone. It also provides us a glimpse of sites and landscape before the rapid urban expansion and agricultural development of the late 20th to 21st century.

Project team:

Aurélia Masson-Berghoff, Ross Thomas, Neal Spencer, Alexandra Villing with Nora Shalaby, Jeffrey Spencer and Nancy Wilkie

In collaboration with the Coulson Archives at the University of Thessaly, Volos(Opens in new window) and Bryn Mawr College.

Supported by:

Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications

This is a major project bringing together for the first time all of the fragments of sculpture which formed the little known metopes from the Temple of Apollo at Bassai created between 420 and 400 BC.

The interior frieze of the temple, the best preserved form the entire Greek world showing battles between Athenians and Amazons and between Lapiths and Centaurs, is much better known among scholars and the general public, but the metopes have been neglected.

Only one publication including an analysis of the fragments of sculpture has appeared, and only as part of a broader text. Since the publication of Brian C Madigan's The Temple of Apollo Bassitas II: The Sculpture in 1992, more evidence has emerged and research has enhanced our knowledge of the subject generating a renewed interest in this series of Greek architectural sculptures, for which the British Museum is world famous.

Research over the past decade by the author has yielded fresh discoveries in the British Museum, in Athens and at the ancient site itself.

Further sculptural fragments have been added to this marble jigsaw puzzle, making new joins possible and connections viable, which has greatly enhanced our knowledge about the appearance and subject matter of the metopes from this famous temple.

We now see that the metopes celebrate the god Apollo's power of healing through light, dance, music and rituals. The temple was, after all, described by Pausanias, the second century AD travel writer, as belonging to the cult of Apollo Epikourios (Saviour).

The god was protecting humanity from the world of barbarism, ailment and adversity. This research has also involved the analysis and interpretation of drawings of the metopes over the past two centuries by both antiquarians and scholars. This project will be published as a book by the Institute of Classical Studies, London in 2020.