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people truly appreciated the depth of antiquity or its complexity; fewer still recognised how much would increasingly be discovered through scientific methods as yet unknown. The 1930s was the age of the ‘corpus’, enormous catalogues of museum material collated and categorised. It seemed only reasonable to Jim and Eleanor that a similar body of work could collate Near Eastern material.
    In Australia Jim spent time trying to raise funds for future excavations, admitting to Wace that he had to ‘shelter a lot behind Sir Flinders Petrie and the British School in Egypt … His name here is very nearly magical’. 30 It is probably on this visit that he first made contact with Walter Beasley, a Melbourne businessman, devout Christian and owner of Young’s Transport. With luck, Jim might tap into this financial resource, writing his first published paper on three Cypriot pots in Beasley’s collection of Biblical antiquities. 31 Besides the Wilkins Fellowship, Jim was prepared to use the couple’s wedding money on excavations if necessary.
    Full of plans, they boarded the SS Maloja late in 1935 bound for the Near East. ‘The family still considers I am insane but the obstacles have been cleared away. ’ 32 They would travel to Turkey, where they were to join excavations directed by the archaeologist Winifred Lamb. Eleanor’s experience made her the perfect excavation cook. 33 Noel Wheeler, who they had met at ’Ajjul, invited them to join him on Cyprus, where he was digging for the Cyprus Museum. Although they knew nothing of the place, Jim speculated: ‘I suppose Cyprus is a Greek land, because it seems to me, heretically I suppose, that several Asia Minor problems can be understood by Cypriot studies.’ En route they planned to visit Jerusalem, Damascus, Istanbul, Ankara, Troy and Pergamum. Jim left with ‘some regrets for my old home but keen anticipation for our wanderings’. 34
    By November Jim and Eleanor were in Jerusalem. They met up with Sir Flinders Petrie, who took them to a meeting of the Palestine Oriental Society, where discussions concerned ‘some wretched Biblical site’ but ‘the German nearly made one weep—and Père Abel’s French was inaudible’. 35 They were charmed by the German archaeologist Kurt Bittel, met friends of the American Hetty Goldman and planned site visits with the biblical archaeologist William Albright, but these were cancelled because of bad weather. Eleanor was developing into an excellent draughtswoman and photographer and Jim spent time visiting museums investigating Luristan daggers. Both scoured the markets for souvenirs as all young tourists do—they bought embroideries and an old Armenian chest. 36
    At the end of the month they sailed for Cyprus, where Noel Wheeler met them and became their host and guide. They were enchanted with the island and its people and antiquities. Not only did Jim come to love the island’s landscapes but he believed they taught him more about the effects of erosion and deposition than anything he had encountered in print. Looking at the mad shapes of the Pentadactylos, those five fingers of the Kyrenia Range whose stumps leer up at the sky like a madman’s curse, he felt he had ‘a much better understanding of the influence of the environment which must had led to such weird pot forms. I feel that if I had been a Cypriot Bronze Age potter I would have made some very extraordinary shapes’. 37 No one who has wondered at the bulging mounds of the Pentadactylos Mountains could disagree.
    For some time Jim and Eleanor stayed with the Director of Antiquities, John Hilton, who also lent them his car to explore the island, and through him met the curator at the Cyprus Museum, Porphyrios Dikaios. Dikaios was interested in the earliest periods on Cyprus; Jim moaned that he had ‘Neolithic on the brain’. But Dikaios was helpful, and together they