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Recent Discoveries of the French Archaeological Mission.
The French Archaeological Mission, organised by the Commission of Excavations of the General Directorate of Cultural Relations and directed by Mr Claude F.A. Schaeffer, Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Curator of Museums of France, has just made important discoveries near Enkomi on the north coast of the Island of Cyprus. The ruins of a vast town maritime of the 3rd and 2nd c. ... located, from which set out the ships loaded with copper drawn from the mines of the Island indispensable to pharaonic Egypt and to the neighbouring countries of Asia Anterior.
The still anonymous town was protected by a rampart of the cyclopean type, reinforced by square towers with walls 5m thick. The quarter of the town in contact with the rampart consisted of buildings of the 14th and 13th c., destroyed by an earthquake, followed by two towns of the immediately later period (13th-12th c.) burnt in their turn, and abundantly enriched in favour of Salamis Greek, situated nearer to the present coast.
In the north quarter of the town, the Mission has just brought to light several houses and other very well preserved structures, one of which seems 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 was discovered a hoard of bronze objects containing idols decorated with birds in the round and other differing forms, types of tools and weapons of a type 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: vessels of terracotta, and alabaster, caskets, engraved seals and trays dated to gold.
Some of these finds go back to about 2000 before our era and attest the commercial relations between the Island and Western Asia, Egypt, and to the West with Crete, Greece and Greece.
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