Recent discoveries of the French Archaeological MissionClaude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

Handwritten: illegible annotation in blue ink, top right, written diagonally

Recent Discoveries of the French Archaeological Mission.

The French Archaeological Mission, organised by the Commission des Fouilles of the Direction Générale des Relations Culturelles and directed by Mr Claude F.A. Schaeffer, Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Curator of the Musées de France, has just made important discoveries near Famagusta on the north coast of the Island of Cyprus. The ruins of a vast maritime town of the 3rd and 2nd millennia have been identified there, from which the ships loaded with copper drawn from the Island's mines, indispensable to pharaonic Egypt and to the neighbouring countries of Western Asia, appear to have sailed.

The as yet anonymous town was protected by a cyclopean-type rampart reinforced with square towers with walls 5m thick. The quarter of the town in contact with the rampart was composed of buildings of the 14th and 13th centuries destroyed by an earthquake, followed by two towns of the post-Mycenaean period (13th-12th c.) burnt in their turn, and then abandoned in favour of the Greek Salamis situated nearer the present coast.

In the north quarter of the town, the Mission has just uncovered several houses and other very well-preserved constructions, one of which appears to have been a sanctuary of the Mycenaean period built of fine ashlar. Thick layers of ash indicate that these buildings were engulfed in a vast fire. Inside a niche cut into the wall of the sanctuary has just been discovered a hoard of bronze objects containing horned bird idols in the round and various types of weapons and tools of a type almost unknown in Mycenaean Cyprus. In the vicinity several funerary vessels installed in the cellars of the houses have been uncovered, several of which are intact and filled with a large number of funerary offerings: painted pottery vases, alabaster, necklaces, engraved seals and gold plaques.

Some of these finds go back to around 2000 B.C. and attest the commercial relations between the Island and Western Asia, Egypt, and to the West with Crete, the Aegean and Greece.