Copy of a letter on discoveries made during excavationsClaude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

COPY

Enkomi Monastery of St.Barnaba 6 May 1949.

Dear friend,

... We have so far been able to establish three floors (1-III) of LCIII. The first is encountered beneath the surface layer and the pottery, painted or not, is found in rooms of the "palace" or of houses built on the north part of the palace. The second floor is separated from the first by a deep layer which has no other explanation than a catastrophe. It is present both in the "palace" and in small houses. This layer is composed of the same earth as the pisé wall that we have pierced, that is to say reddish earth mixed with small particles of limestone. Elsewhere it contains bricks of reddish earth, and everywhere it gives the impression of being the result of a collapse of pisé walls. The depth or rather the thickness of this layer varies in the different parts of the excavation and depends on the dimensions of the rooms. I am of the opinion that we have here the evidence of a catastrophe, more precisely of an earthquake. Evidently you place this event in the 14th c. but if you have the evidence stratigraphic of such a catastrophe in the layers of the 14th c., analogous to those I find, one must think there were two earthquakes, one in the 14th c. and a second in the 12th-11th c. The third floor, which precedes the 2nd and which is still of LCIII, is close to the 2nd and the intermediate layer is simply the result of natural accumulation. This leads to think that the thick layer which rests on the 2nd floor is the result of a catastrophe of seismic origin and that in certain places this layer is associated with the fall of masonry. I have a striking example, which I will keep until your return here, of the western door of the "sanctuary". There a block which formed the north side of the door has collapsed and remained in place, inclined and resting on this layer of demolition. Following the demolition, one had built precisely on the block in question an "altar" which consists of a slab and other stones around it. This is how it presents itself:

In a room of the palace I found under a layer of rubble a skeleton of a child of about 8 years. The child is surrounded by some vessels and other objects of domestic character (moulds etc.) and also an iron instrument in the form of a sickle. The pottery is typical of LCIII (your Cypriot Iron I). The floor in question is at a level similar to that on which the block of the door drawn above rests. For it I must mention that the first floor is not present everywhere, which indicates that certain parts of the building or of the small houses had been abandoned following the earthquake. Evidently one could think of a burial in the room in question, but the layers resting on the child do not permit such a theory, and then a child in a room containing objects such as querns etc. is not in place. One must therefore think that the child had been caught by the collapse and killed on the spot.