The XXIst Campaign of Excavations of the French Archaeological Mission at Enkomi-Alasia (Cyprus) in 1970, a preliminary reportClaude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

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terminal and blade sword in bronze, sometimes in iron, are associated, fig. of long bronze swords (cf. op. cit.), and by the same author, Germania, 1952, fig. 15, and Bericht der Römisch-Germanischen Kommission, 1955, p. 65, fig. 1) of a type identical to that of the four swords removed from the well of the armourer of Enkomi in 1967 (cf. Lagarce, in Ugaritica VI, fig. ....). These two types of weapons are therefore contemporary in northern, central and southern Europe as in the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, where their association has been shown, in particular at Rhodes (Rhodes) and now at Enkomi- Alasia (Cyprus).

It is here indisputably a type of weapon originating in Europe northern and central, having arrived, through warlike invasions and the arms trade, into the countries and islands of the Aegean Sea, via Italy and the Balkans.

In Cyprus, the finds from Enkomi-Alasia prove it, weapons of this type were even manufactured on the island, and the copies are so well made that one could not distinguish them from their European prototypes of the Bronze Age. One is therefore tempted to conclude that the armourers of Cyprus who copied and forged them arrived on the island at the time of the invasion of the Peoples of the North and of the Sea, and were joined among them.

14.— As the knives and swords removed from the occupation levels of Enkomi- Alasia by the Peoples of the Sea have been dated precisely, thanks to their Near Eastern archaeological context and to Egyptian and Ugaritic epigraphy at the time of the reign of Ramesses III and of his contemporary Hammourapi, king of Ugarit, at the beginning of the 12th c. B.C. These dates clarify the still-developing chronology of similar finds from Europe northern, central and southern. Thus, in the field of the European Protohistory, Cypriot archaeology makes a contribution for a large share in the research.

As a former protohistorian of Alsace who became an archaeologist in the Near East, I am particularly delighted by this.

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