Coming Across A Greek Vase

By Brock L.

It was the year 1986 and something wasn’t fair; all of the other archeologists were finding vases, statues, and other valuable pieces of Greek art.  My team and I were not having good luck, well, not any luck at all.  All I wanted now was to find just one vase; at least, I prayed and prayed for this to occur… nothing.  

All of the other archeologists were finding everything I dreamed of. For example, a team that was working about 100 meters away from my camp found statues of Zeus and Athena.  They also had found scripts that looked like poems, and rules, and some of them no one was able to translate.  Another excavating team a few miles west of mine had found walls of palaces, city-states, and of regular civilian houses.  Seems as if we were just in the wrong place, a barren part of the land where no civilization had ever flourished or where one had been completely destroyed.

Finally, after I would say about twenty-four months we finally found something.  I raced to the site where my comrade was excavating, and behold, a Greek vase depicting Hercules attacking two Amazons on one side, and on the other, were two Amazons attacking a Greek.  My researcher looked this up and what he found was that the Amazons were presumed to have existed but no dates could be located.  But they apparently lived close to the Black Sea in modern-day Turkey, and they were a race of female warriors.

I was delighted out of my mind!  I immediately brought the work of art to my camp on the Greek island of Rhodes to clean it off.  The vase was clearly intact, with only a few scratches and one crack at the top.  Like other vases, this one has orange for the characters and the background is black.

It was my prize possession at the time; I guarded it inside two fireproof safes and a closet.  I was almost obsessing about it. I did all of the possible research on the Amazon civilization and Hercules.  Turns out the vase made a lot more sense than I had thought.  About two weeks later, my squad found a dozen more vases, all different shapes and sizes, depicting scenes ranging from wars to flowers.  But the first one we found remained my favorite.  I am not sure why, but I just liked it more than the others. 

A few years later I was faced with a decision – do I sell my vase, or do I keep it?  The museum that wanted to purchase my vase promised it would be taken great care of, as would all of the other vases my team of archeologists had uncovered.  It took me three weeks for my mind to rest on one choice; I was going to sell all of my Greek vases to the University Museum in Pennsylvania for a pretty good price.  I later visited my formerly-owned vases once they were put on display.  They were in a very nice room, on clear glass shelves, with clear glass dividing the vases from the other side of the shelf case.  I was also impressed by the other vases and the museum’s Rome exhibit.  I then was happy with my decision and very proud of my excavations.