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of ashlar, its vast Cyclopean enclosure wall and its clay tablets covered with long texts in an advanced script, but not yet deciphered, as well as the jewellery, faience and alabaster of the rich grave goods found in the family burial chambers of the same site.
The Peoples of the Sea who succeeded in the island, as in southern and Aegean Greece, to the Mycenaeans, drew their prosperity mainly from their metallurgical industry, and in particular from the manufacture of weapons, as attested by the recent discovery of four fine swords of the European type of the Bronze Age, 60 cm long, in the hiding place of a weapon-maker at EnkomièAlasia containing about a hundred other bronzes, including a small cult chariot.
The island of Cyprus was renowned for its copper deposits since high antiquity, from the beginning of the second millennium, as attested by the texts found at Mari, on the Middle Euphrates, where copper is designated as "alasean" metal. The bronze founders and weapon-makers of the Peoples of the Sea, occupying the island at the beginning of the 12th c., had seized its particularly abundant mineral riches. The analysis of slag collected during the excavations at Enkomi has shown that the copper could have been extracted from it totally or with residues of 3 to 6%, whereas the percentage of iron oxide they contain reaches 65%. Iron was therefore obtained in Cyprus as a by-product of the treatment of the chalcopyrite. The qualities of this metal, its solidity and hardness must have been recognised as early as the 12th c. by the founders of the Peoples of the Sea, who used it alongside copper and bronze. This has been proved by the discovery at Enkomi of large iron knives in tombs and houses post-Mycenaean of the 12th c. B.C. And new examples have been cleared in the houses of the west sector of Enkomi.
One of them, with a bronze blade, was found in place on the floor of beaten earth of one of the houses of the period of occupation of the town by the Peoples of the Sea. It is fitted with an ivory-plated handle ending in a suspension ring. Hundreds of knives of this type are known from cremation cemeteries dating to the 12th and 11th c., and found in Europe Central (Bavaria, Tyrol, Switzerland, Veneto, Etruria) and Southern (southern Italy and Sicily). In some of these finds, these knives were accompanied by long bronze swords identical to those - four in number - which have been removed from the well of the weapon-maker at Enkomi discovered in 1967. These two types of weapons are therefore contemporary in northern, central and southern Europe, … continues
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain