Letter on the 1966 Enkomi excavations sent to Mr Karageorghis, with a photograph enclosedClaude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

Continued from scan 2

… fragment of a vase stand in greyish earthenware on which are painted some twenty signs of the Cypro-Mycenaean syllabary, more or less legible, identical to the signs incised on the clay balls and on the some tablets or fragments found in recent years.

Other wells, cut in the rock, from a central quarter of the town yielded very interesting fragments of Cypriot kraters of the finest rough style, decorated with large bulls painted with dappled fleece.

Finally, from one of the numerous tombs cut in the calcareous rock table of the North quarter of Enkomi, formerly looted, two vessels ceramic were removed ques of types rarely associated until now in the grave goods of the site: the characteristic bowl with antithetic spirals of the beginning of Cypriot Iron I (or Mycenaean III C 1) and the truncated conical bowl with two small horizontal handles at the rim and painted concentric bands.

New research in the area of the West Enceinte of the town .

The aim was to clarify certain earlier stratigraphic observations and architectural data relating to the West Enceinte of the town at the end of the Bronze Age, notably to the north, west and east of the Gate . The defensive work is lined with remains of houses contemporary with Cypriot Iron I which were partially cleared? One of these houses yielded a bronze bracelet and two iron tools, including a sturdy billhook, among jars and narrow-necked jugs with semicircular vertical handle, broken on the floor of the last phase of the town's existence, around a circular hearth area.

In the zone extending north of the West Gate, the resumption of excavations made it possible to clarify the contemporaneity of the construction of the Cyclopean enceinte of large blocks and of the internal rubble packing, broad of two mètres . La date du XIII ème siècle finissant s'est trouvée également confirmée by sherds of Close Style pottery, of Final Mycenaean or of the beginning of Cypriot Iron I . South of the West Gate , the excavations revealed new 'casemates', backing onto the internal face of the enceinte, and sometimes provided with furniture still in place (quern and grinder in stone, jars and wall lamp in earthenware , as well as a lot of five olive-shaped sling bullets in solid bronze.