Unnumbered pageScan 2 of 6
The XVIth Campaign of excavations of the French Archaeological Mission at Enkomi-Alasia, in Cyprus.
A god on a Cyprus ingot
In the autumn of 1963, the French Archaeological Mission carried out its XVIth campaign of excavations at Enkomi-Alasia near Famagusta, with the collaboration of Mr and Miss Courtois, of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, MM. J. Lagarce, scholarship holder of the French School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (Jordan), J.-P. Michaelidet, technical collaborator of the Collège de France, W. Johnstone, of the University of Aberdeen and R. Tomasini, of the University of Padua.
During this campaign, on 4 October, there occurred the discovery of a bronze figure, total height 35 cm, depicting a god standing and clad in a plaid on a Cypriot-type ingot in the form of an animal skin. Wearing a helmet with bull's horns and greaves on his legs, 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 this of a sanctuary dated by its stratigraphy and its pottery to the final period of the Iron Age or Cypriot Iron I (the Late Cypriote III of modern classification), i.e. to the 12th or 13th century before our era.
As he notes above, Mr J.-C. Courtois, in charge of the archaeological studies in the southern sector of the excavations, the sanctuary of the god with the ingot had succeeded in time a cult place of the end of the Bronze Age or Late Cypriote III (Late Cypriote II C) which had preceded it on the same bloux. Thick layers of ash dated by pottery fragments belonging that this primitive sanctuary of Alasia, like the whole town of which it formed part, had been burnt at the end of the 13th or the beginning of the 12th century before our era.
The god with the ingot of Enkomi was the object of a fervent cult, attested by the discovery in his sanctuary of nearly a hundred bull skulls and of others … continues
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain