THE PAST RECOVERED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 721, 8 May 1953, Page 12

THE PAST RECOVERED

GODS, GRAVES AND SCHOLARS, by C. W. Ceram, translated by E. B. Garside; Victor Gollancz and Sidgwick and Jackson. English price, 21/-. N enormous winged lion is dug out of the earth near the Tigris. Appalled and delighted the local bedouins celebrate the occasion with burst of rifle fire. The lion, says their sheik, is the work not of men but of the infidel giants, it,is "one of the idols which Noah... cursed before the flood." The bedouin was expressing very adequately the shock of contact with the

remote but still potent past. It is this shock that emerges again and again from C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves and Scholars, published in Germany in 1949 and now translated into English. Ceram discusses separately, and very vividly, the history of archaeological research into the Hellenic culture, Egypt, the Sumerian lands, and Middle America. The emphasis is put frankly on the picturesque incident and personality. Thus Ceram does not discuss the Incas, although almost as much is known of them as of the Mayas, because "there is neither a Stephens nor a Thompson among the archaeologists who worked in the Andes." And when we read of Thompson descending in his diving-suit into the Mayan Well of Sacrifice at Chichen-itza (permanently injuring his hearing in the process) we do not feel inclined to cavil at Ceram’s canons of selection. This is not to say that the book does not cope with situations of considerable complexity. One of these (and one of the most stimulating chapters of the book) arises from the nature of the finds that Schliemann made by taking Homer literally. Ceram seems to me to have succeeded admirably in his stated intention of achieving for archaeology the dramatic presentation given by Paul De Kruif to medical science, that of "leading the reader by the hand along the same road that the scientists themselves have traversed from the moment truth was first glimpsed uritil the goal was gained."

Hubert

Witheford