Ancient CyprusAncient Cyprus

Collection·Penn Museum Archives, Philadelphia

The Penn Museum's excavations at Kourion, 1934–1954

440 items: 17 field photographs, 15 object photographs, 86 photographs, 4 drawings, 2 plans, 37 documents, 35 letters, 110 manuscripts, 134 object cards.

Held by Penn Museum Archives, Philadelphia. Rights, sources and how to cite

In the spring of 1934 the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, now the Penn Museum, began excavating at Kourion, near Episkopi. B. H. Hill directed the expedition. The digging was led by George H. McFadden, a research associate of the Museum whose money paid for all its work at Kourion, with J. F. Daniel. McFadden excavated nearly all the major buildings of the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates. Daniel worked on the city site, where he found the theatre, the main basilica, the House of Achilles and the House of Eustolios, which he first called "the Palace", and from 1937 at the Late Bronze Age town of Episkopi-Bamboula. The expedition also dug at the stadium and in the Kaloriziki and Ayios Ermoyenis (St Hermogenes) cemeteries, and joined Porphyrios Dikaios of the Department of Antiquities at the Neolithic site of Sotira. Virginia Grace, DeCoursey Fales and others took part in some seasons. The excavations ran until 1954, with a break during the Second World War, which the finding aid dates 1941–1945 and Costello 1942–1946.

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Daniel died in Turkey in 1948, just after his last campaign at Bamboula, and McFadden died in a sailing accident in the spring of 1953. In September 1953 G. Roger Edwards went to Cyprus for a year to settle McFadden's affairs for the Museum, with J. L. Benson, who undertook to publish Bamboula and the Kaloriziki cemetery; after a study season the excavations were closed. The finds were divided between Curium House at Episkopi, the Cyprus Museum and the University Museum. There was no single final report. The results appeared in separate studies: Benson's Bamboula at Kourion (1972) and The Necropolis of Kaloriziki (1973), J. H. and S. H. Young's Terracotta Figurines from Kourion in Cyprus (1955), and later studies of the theatre, the architecture of the sanctuary and the water supply. Diana Buitron-Oliver excavated in the sanctuary's Archaic Precinct in the late 1970s and early 1980s; her records are also at the Penn Museum.

This collection is the expedition's own archive, the Penn Museum Archives' Kourion, Cyprus Expedition records (PU-Mu 1050), dated 1933–1985: some 440 folders in eight series. Nearly two-thirds of its 31,391 scanned pages are object cards (137 folders, filed by site, class of object and the expedition's field numbers) and photographs (121 folders of roll lists, contact prints and prints). The rest are 93 folders of field notebooks and extracts from them, 35 of correspondence, 21 of catalogues and lists, 19 of reports and manuscripts, 8 of accounts and 7 of drawings. Penn scanned each standard-size folder as one file, in its original order; oversize plans and drawings and the negatives were not scanned.

Each folder appears here as one item, shown page by page as Penn scanned it, unaltered, with Penn's box and folder reference and title. The page images are reproduced by permission, courtesy of the Penn Museum, and are not under an open licence; every item links to Penn's finding aid, and publication-quality scans are available from the Penn Museum Archives. As the Penn Museum notes, some items in the collection document human remains.

Sources

  • Penn Museum Archives. Kourion, Cyprus Expedition records, PU-Mu 1050. Finding aid by K. T. Baxter, L. Rosen and L. Zych, 2014. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Penn Museum Archives. https://findingaids.library.upenn.edu/records/UPENN_MUSEUM_PU-MU.1050 (accessed 4 November 2026).
  • Benson, J. L. 1972. Bamboula at Kourion: The Necropolis and the Finds Excavated by J. F. Daniel (University Museum Monograph, Haney Foundation Series 12). Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, pp. ix–x.
  • Costello, B., IV. 2014. Architecture and Material Culture from the Earthquake House at Kourion, Cyprus (BAR International Series 2635). Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 17–18.
  • Buitron-Oliver, D. 1997. "Kourion: The Evidence for the Kingdom from the 11th to the 6th Century B.C." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 308, pp. 27–36 (esp. 27–28, 35–36).

Explore

440 items

Notebooks and papers

440 folders, every page with its scan and a transcription

Notebooks · 65

Field notes · 28

Correspondence · 35

Reports and manuscripts · 19

Catalogues and find lists · 21

Object cards · 137

Photographs · 121

Drawings and plans · 6

Accounts · 8

Series

8 series

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