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… devastating earthquake, and its transfer to the neighbouring coastline of Salamis (XIth c. B.C.).
To the South of this same East-West street of the city, a series of post- Mycenaean habitations were cleared. Their ruins occupied four levels, separated by layers of building debris. They testify to two destructions by earthquake and other catastrophes, after which the floors of the habitations were each time remade so that they might be adapted to the heightened level of the streets. During these works, the inhabitants saved from the debris all that was still usable, which explains the relative poverty of finds in these layers. Stratigraphic observations permit us to establish that these catastrophes followed one another at rather close intervals of time. The occupation by the Peoples of the North and of the Sea did not therefore last longer than four generations, from the beginning of the XIIth c. B.C. to the beginning of the XIth. The pottery used during this period in Cyprus is clearly distinguishable from the Cypriot homemade pottery and from the beautiful, painted Mycenaean vases of the XIVth and XIIIth centuries. It relates by its forms and its painted decoration to the pottery found int the South of Greece and in the Aegean islands, in archaeological layers which overlay the destroyed and abandoned habitations of the end of the Mycenaean period. It is now clear that the dispartition of the mycenaean civilisation took place at the same moment in Cyprus and the Peloponnese, at the end of the XIIIth or the beginning of the XIIth c. B.C. Both countries were then occupied by related populations, those of Cyprus having been designated by the historiographers of the court of Ramses III as the Peoples of the North and of the Sea.
The settlements in Cyprus of the North- and Sea-Peoples bear witness to a lower degree of culture, when compared to those of the preceding mycenaean urban centres of Cyprus, and in particular the most extensive among them : Enkomi-Alasia, with its strictly geometrical urbanism, the noble architecture of the houses with massive walls, its vast cyclopean fortifications, its terracotta tablets covered with long texts of an evolved script, as well as the jewels, faïences and alabasters, found among the rich offerings deposited in the family vaults of the same site.
The North- and Sea-Peoples who succeeded the Mycenaeans in the island, as they did in Southern and Aegean Greece, drew their wealth principally from the metalworking industry, and from their production of arms. This is attested by the recent discovery of four late Bronze Age swords of European type, 60 cm long, in an armourer's cache in Enkomi-Alasia containing approximately
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain