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The XVI e Campaign of excavations of the French Archaeological Mission at Enkomi-Alasia, in Cyprus.
A god on a Cyprus ingot
In autumn 1963, the French Archaeological Mission carried out its XVIe campaign of excavations at Enkomi-Alasia near Famagusta, in which Mr and Miss Courtois, of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Messrs J. Lagarce, boursier of the French Archaeological School of Jerusalem (Jordan), J.-P. Nicolardot, collatechnical collaborator of the Collège de France, W. Johnstone, of the University of Aberdeen and R. Tamassia, of the University of Padua.
In the course of this campaign, on 4 October, the discovery of a statue of bronze, 35 cm high in total, depicting a god standing barefoot on a Cypriot-type ingot in the form of an animal skin. Wearing a helmet with horns of a bull and wearing greaves or cnemides, the god brandishes in his right hand a spear pointed forward and protects himself with a slightly conical oval shield, held at the end of his left arm, fig....
The god was placed upright between 0 m 80 and 1 m 10 deep in a carefully made hiding place beneath two later floors found intact in the cella of a sanctuary dated by its stratigraphy and its pottery to the initial period of the Iron Age or Cypriot Iron I (the Late Cypriote III of the classification Swedish) i.e. in the XII th century before our era.
As he points out in his note below, Mr J.-C. Courtois, in charge of the archaeological studies in the southern sector of the excavations, the sanctuary of the god on the ingot had succeeded in time a place of worship of the end of the Bronze Age or Cy- Late Cypriote III (Late Cypriote II C) which had preceded it on the same spot . Thick layers of ash dated by Mycenaean pottery fragments attest that this early sanctuary of Alasia, like the whole town of which it formed part, had been burnt at the end of the XIIIe or at the beginning of the XIIe century before our era.
The god on the Enkomi ingot was the object of a fervent cult, attested by the discovery in its sanctuary of nearly a hundred bulls' skulls and others
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain