Bamboula, Area E–F

Area E

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The edge of the bluff serves as the dividing line between the settlement, which lies above it, and the tombs below. The chambers of several tombs run under the outer rooms of the houses[handwritten: and give at] first glance the impression of burials within the houses however, were all entered from dromoi cut in the face of the cliff [handwritten: and] outside the houses. None was accesible from within the houses; they are too all intents and purposes separate.

The edge of the rock has retreated since antiquity, and most of the tombs in the face of the cliff are poorly preserved. Tomb 26 is an exception to this, and tomb 28 is nearly so. Elsewhere we must reckon with a loss of as much as two or three meters from the [handwritten: surface] of the bluff. See below, p.000

A special problem concerns the tombs in the area approached by the street. Our excavations indicate that this inner necropolis runs from the central part of Area E back to the rock ledge north of trench 15, an area of perhaps thirty meters square. The plan of the tombs excavated by the British Museum expedition, published in Excavations in Cyprus, however, gives a totally different picture, entire and suggests that the whole northern and western slopes of Bamboula were covered with tombs.

Ideally it should be possible to determine the scale of the map in Exc.Cyp., [handwritten: 1:16] and reduce its information to a scale uniform with that of our excavations. Unfortunately this is impossible. A superficial glance suffices to show that the published map is highly inaccurate. Three long rock-girt terraces are shown on the northern slope of the hill; there are only two. The northernmost bluff is represented turning south by tombs 29 and 93, and fading into the hillside. In reality the bluff follows the Paphos road fairly closely as far as its junction with the "road from Episkopi", which it then follows south. The turn south shown on the map may be the shallow bend which begins by the ancient street and runs to a point just north … continues