The new discoveries at Enkomi in Cyprus, excavation season of autumn 1950Claude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

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So it was a change of regime, during which the house that had reigned at Enkomi from the end of the 14th c. and during the 13th c. was dispossessed by a chief, probably of the same origin.

The weaponry, the pottery and the jewellery, as well as [handwritten: the] their funerary traditions, clearly indicate their Achaean descent.

The Mycenaean or Achaean penetration of Cyprus, (we now know that these two t[handwritten: Enkomi]erms are interchangeable at [handwritten: Cyprus]) therefore passed through three phases.

The first essentially commercial, to judge by the volume of pottery imported to Enkomi, began as early as the second half of the 15th c., and occupied most of the 14th c.

During the second phase, which begins as early as the end of the 14th c. and occupies almost all of the 13th c., and which is characterised from the ceramological point of view by locally made Mycenaean pottery, Achaean chiefs seized power on the eastern coast of Cyprus and in its capital: Enkomi, where they built the palace found during our recent excavations.

We thus confirm the great antiquity of the Achaean settlement on the island, which we had until now doubted, and which is still disputed by certain authors.

It helps to understand the importance that the Hittite kings, from the end of the 14th c., [handwritten: /] more precisely from Mursil II, attached to an alliance with this maritime power which was then beginning to settle in the islands, and perhaps even on the coasts forming part of the Anatolian sphere of influence.

It may perhaps be permissible to suggest, in passing, that the Trojan War, an Achaean enterprise as tradition has it, may have constituted the first consequence of this Mycenaean expansion of the end of the 14th c.