Page 5Scan 40 of 42
tide by Ramesses III around 1186 according to the short chronology (Newton).
At Enkomi, the same reverse: craftsmen set up their workshops d among the walls still standing of the burnt palace and there fit out their modest dwellings. The archaeological material is characterised notably p by the appearance of the first everyday iron objects and of an original pottery hitherto unknown on the island. There is a complete absence of the Mycenaean pottery, replaced by pottery of the sub-Mycenaean type (in debased Levanto-helladic ware of Gjerstad and the decorated LCIII ware of Furumark). We were then able to establish that all the copper ingots coming from Amko- ent at time were attributed to the 14th-13th c. actually date from this period later, our Cypriot Iron I (1200-1050).
The new occupants of Cyprus at the beginning of the Iron Age enjoyed for 4 or 5 generations a peace that no external intervention disturbed. They had brought at Enkomi, facing a threat whose nature one would not easily suspect in a country with today's dry climate: flooding during the rainy season in the western quarters of the town, allying lower down. The levels of floors III and II were considerably reworked in relation to the earlier floors. At the same time all the openings of the façade onto the palace were walled up and blocked. The street runs along this façade and follows the gentle south-west slope of the town site had been transformed as a result of the rainy season into a veritable running stream carrying numerous pottery sherds from the quarters to the east of the town, slightly higher. We were able to identify in the layers of gravel alternating with as many layers of sand according to the rhythm of periodic floods and subsidences, which represents about six consecutive years of particularly abundant precipitation. At the end of this period, in the region of Enkomi and palace, a layer of alluvium of nearly one metre in thickness had accumulated. According to the archaeological material recovered in and on floors III and II, this climatic disturbance of Cyprus took place in the period between 1250 and 1100 in round figures. We are thus led to link it with the general deterioration of the climate that one observes in protohistoric Europe precisely in the 12th century, which profoundly influenced land occupation at the end of the Bronze Age and at the beginning of the Hallstatt age (cf. our study of the question of climatic variations in the Bronze and Iron Ages, Bu. Int. Archéolo. 1939/29, p.451 et seq.).
From the period corresponding to floor III (first half of the 12th century) it is appropriate to refer to the remains of Cypriot Iron I, the witnesses of … continues
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain