John Myres

John Lynton Myres was the son of the Rev. William Miles Myres and his wife, Jane Linton, and was educated at Winchester College, then an all-boys independent boarding school. He studied Literae humaniores (i.e. classics) at New College, Oxford, achieving first class honours in both Mods and Greats, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1892. During the same year he was a Craven Fellow at the British School at Athens (BSA) with which he excavated at the Minoan sanctuary of Petsofas on Crete. ==Pre-war career==

Following his graduation, Myres was elected as a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford in 1892. He was additionally a university lecturer in classical archaeology from January 1903. In 1894, Myres participated in the British Museum's excavations at Amathus on Cyprus; he also excavated for the BSA, with the assistance of the Cyprus Exploration Fund, various sites such as Kalopsida, Laxia tou Riou, Kition and the Bronze Age site of Ayia Paraskevi. Myres gave his share of the finds to the University of Oxford, where they form a large part of the Cypriot collection of the Ashmolean Museum. In 1899, Myres published the first catalogue of the Cyprus Museum, in collaboration with the German archaeologist Max Ohnefalsch-Richter. He founded the anthropological journal Man and was its first editor from 1901 to 1903. He contributed to the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, published between 1910 and 1911. He also performed excavations at Lapithos in 1913 with Leonard Halford Dudley Buxton, and in 1914 published a handbook of the Luigi Palma di Cesnola collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. == First World War ==

During the First World War, Myres served in Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as part of the Naval Intelligence Division of the British Admiralty. He was given command of three former civilian vessels – a motorised caïque (fishing boat), a tugboat and a former royal yacht – which he used to raid along the Turkish shore of the Aegean Sea, stealing cattle to prevent them from being shipped to Germany. During one such raid, he captured around 2000 cattle. Myres's raids earned him the nickname "the Blackbeard of the Aegean": Francis Elliot, the British minister in Athens, complained about them to John de Robeck, Myres's naval superior, who dismissed the complaint as "extremely silly". According to Myres's subordinates, his operations attracted the commitment of 6,000 Ottoman troops; he received the Order of the British Empire and the Greek Order of George I for his service, and was promoted to lieutenant commander. == Later career and legacy ==

Myres was a member of the Folklore Society and served as its president between 1924 and 1926. Later he became president of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 1928 and 1931. He was also president of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies between 1935 and 1938. He was an advisor during the drafting of the 1935 Cypriot Antiquities Law and the initiation of the country's Department of Antiquities. He was a major influence on the British-Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe. The Myres Archive is located in the Ashmolean Museum. At Oxford, Myres worked for the Director of Naval Intelligence. He contributed to the British Naval Intelligence Division Geographical Handbook Series that was published during the Second World War. In the 1943 King's Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor "for services to learning", and thereby granted the title sir. He was knighted by the King during a ceremony on 13 July at Buckingham Palace. ==Works==

• Excavations in Cyprus in 1894 (1897) • Copper and Bronze in Cyprus and South-East Europe (1898) • A catalogue of the Cyprus museum, with a chronicle of excavations undertaken since the British occupation, and introductory notes on Cypriote archaeology (1899) • Notes on the History of the Kabyle Pottery (1902) • The value of ancient history (1910) • The Dawn of History (New York/London: Holt/Williams and Norgate, 1911) • : Outline Analysis of Books I-Vl'' (Oxford: Hart [printer], 1912). • Handbook of the Cesnola collection of antiquities from Cyprus (1914) • ''Notes on the 'Prison of Saint Catharine' at Salamis in Cyprus'' (1915) • The influence of anthropology on the course of political science (1916) • Sarcophagus from Amathus, Sarcophagus from Golgi (1926) • The Political Ideas of the Greeks (1927) • Who were the Greeks? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1930), Sather Lectures • The Early Pot-Fabrics of Asia Minor (1930) • The Cretan Labyrinth: A Retrospect of Aegean Research (1933) • The Amathus Bowl: A Long-Lost Masterpiece of Oriental Engraving (1933) • A Modern 'Kernos' Vessel from Tiflis (1937) • A 'Kernos,' or Ring-Vase, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts (1939) • Excavations in Cyprus, 1913 (1940–1945) • Lápithos (Lampousa: Acheiropoiétos): Acropolis devastated by Quarrying (1945) • The Ancient Site at Lampousa (1945) • Concentric Circle Ornament on Vessels of Wood from the Taurus (1952) • Herodotus, Father of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953) ==References==