July–December 1947

[printed: NICOSIA, CYPRUS.]

Stamp: 15 Jul 1947

July 8, 1947Dear Mr. Hill,

This letter is somewhat overdue, since we had various things to finish during the month of June and wanted to report to you on all of them. We came here on July 1st, as scheduled, and are staying at Peter Megaw's house, which we find very pleasant although busy ever since midday heat is trying. We have been extraordinarily busy ever since you left, but now that we have got off June accounts etc. which George wanted we have time to write you the rather long letter which is called for.

The week after you left I worked in the Stadium in a search for the aphesis and terma. As you suggested, I found a shallow trench, were interesting. I found a shallow trench, or rather cutting, going right across the track, and two square dowel holes in the rock (one was rather in a block set in the rock) which were about the same distance in from the north and south outer walls respectively. The cutting is irregular and I am not sure how to explain it; scarcely most likely guess is that it held a pipe-line, since it seems the even enough to have served an architectural purpose. However, the limits of dowel-cuttings may well have been for posts marking the whole the race-track proper, and I am inclined to think that the starting-line. business, taken together, is what there is left of the starting-line. It certainly falls in about the right place and there is nothing else to be found in the conceivable aphesis area. Presuming the long cutting to be the bedding for a drain-pipe - and this is the least it can be - it is the only one of its sort, and a starting-line might well require drainage.

At the other end, I had less luck. The soil is very deep there, the bedrock uneven but generally way below the ancient ground-level. blocks I suspect that if posts were set into doweled into blocks which have since disappeared. Only in one place does the bedrock rise to near ground-level; I cleared this and was lucky enough to find a single square dowel-hole precisely like those at the other end. This may or may not have held one of the terma posts; again it falls in about the right place, and I am inclined to think it did. In any case, Joe came out last week before I have described do for me, and assuming that the remains I have described represent the aphesis and terma, the figures with me) - 186 m. (I do not have the length of the track comes to 186.? (I cum is ca. 186 m. and we are dealing with a Roman building. Since the standard stadium itali- ]

Handwritten marginalia: 15 Sept