Unnumbered pageScan 4 of 8
Continued from scan 3
… on the neighbouring coast of Salamis.
South of the same east-west street of the town, a series of houses of the Post-Mycenaean period have been cleared, whose ruins occupy four levels separated by layers of debris. They bear witness to two destructions by earthquakes and other catastrophes, after which the floors of the houses were each time relaid, so as to adapt to the raised level of the streets. During these works, the inhabitants salvaged from the debris everything that was still usable, which explains the relative poverty of finds in these layers. The stratigraphic observations make it possible to establish that these catastrophes followed one another at fairly close intervals of time. The occupation of the town by the Peoples of the North and of the Sea therefore did not last more than four generations, from the beginning of the 12th c. to the start of the 11th c. B.C.E.
The pottery used during the period of occupation of Cyprus by the Peoples of the North and of the Sea is clearly distinct from Cypriot pottery and from the fine painted Mycenaean vases in use in the 14th and 13th c. It is foreign to the traditions of Cypriot potters and, in its forms and painted decoration, resembles that found in southern Greece and in the Aegean islands, in archaeological layers which overlie, as at Enkomi-Alasia, destroyed and abandoned houses of the end of the Mycenaean period. The disappearance of the Mycenaean civilisation therefore occurred at the same moment in Cyprus and in the Peloponnese, towards the end of the 13th c. or the beginning of the 12th c. B.C.E. In these two countries there then settled populations related to one another, that of Cyprus having been designated by the Egyptian historiographers of the court of Ramsès III under the name of Peoples of the North and of the Sea.
However - the new finds at Enkomi-Alasia confirm this - the first Achaean occupation of Cyprus is two centuries earlier, and dates from the arrival of Mycenaean immigrants coming from the Peloponnese. Thanks to them, the island experienced, in the 14th and 13th c. B.C.E., an era of prosperity and a remarkable cultural flowering.
The installations of the Peoples of the North and of the Sea bear witness to a much lower degree of culture, compared with those of the Mycenaean urban centres of Cyprus, and in particular Enkomi-Alasia, the largest, with its strictly geometric town plan, the noble architecture of its houses in stone
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain