The 20th season of excavations of the French archaeological mission at Enkomi-Alasia; November–December 1969Claude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

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In a quarter south of the town, near the house known as the Bronze House, where the French Mission discovered, 35 years ago now, the first ruins of the town of Alasia, the research last November revealed the existence of a another of these large Late Bronze houses, whose walls xx of ashlar rest on the natural rock, which here is only one metre below the level of the present fields. Under a floor of white earth in this house, in a small cavity of the underlying rock, was found a fragment of a clay tablet covered with an inscription in the still enigmatic script of the Late Bronze Age, invented by the scribes of Alasia. Arranged in two columns, this text, carefullywritten in very small signs, contains a long narrative and recalls the tablets mythological, religious or "epopaeia" of the same form found in the ancient Phoenician city of Ugarit by the French Mission at Ras Shamra.

Thus, it is certain that the scribes of Alasia, from the period of the Late Bronze Age, possessed a great experience, probably based on a tradition then already ancient. Unlike the much smaller tablets of Mycenaean Greece (Linear B) and of Minoan Crete, which so far have revealed only administrative or economic texts and records, the large tablets of Alasia must contain texts which certainly have historical importance. The possibilities of deciphering them are increased by the discovery of the new tablet, and their decipherment is awaited with impatience.

At some distance north of the place where the new tablet was found, other evidence of the use of writing at Alasia has been encountered in the form of small clay balls, probably used for games, and each bears a few signs incised before firing. These signs are different from those of the tablets. Some of these balls - we have uncovered more than fifty so far at Enkomi -, according to their stratigraphic position, belong to the Niveau I of the post-Mycenaean Iron Age (12th and beginning of the 11th c.), where large inscribed tablets have [handwritten: been] [handwritten: yet] not been encountered. Writing was therefore used right up to the very last period of existence of the town of Alasia, before its final disappearance, probably after another particularly devastating earthquake, followed by the definitive abandonment of the city in favour of Salamis, closer to the coast.

During the 19th campaign of excavations at Alasia (Enkomi) of the French Mission, in autumn 1967, in a well near the workshop of a bronze-worker and armourer, were discovered several bronze swords of European types, and several tools of bronze (cf. J. Lagarce, in Ugaritica VI, p. 349 et suiv.). A large number of other objects were moreover uncovered there, and could not at first be identified, given their advanced state of oxidation, as a result of their stay for more than 3000 years in the damp mud of the well.

The Laboratory of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum of Mainz, directed by Professor H.-J. Hundt, known for his methods which have made it possible to save antiquities that threaten to crumble to dust, agreed to take charge of treating the bronzes from Enkomi after subjecting them to X-rays. The fragments of a cult chariot could thus be identified and reassembled.

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