Preliminary report on the excavations at Enkomi in 1963Jacques-Claude Courtois

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These bowls served the cult rites at the time when the style flourished Proto-Geometric style peculiar to Cyprus, called "Proto-White Painted Ware" according to the terminology, a style which recent excavations at Enkomi will allow to be better known. The fragments of a large krater whose diameter at the rim exceeds 60 cm, originally provided with four handles, were recovered from the debris of the very last sanctuary period, on either side of the north wall of the hall, immediately west of the Cella of the god in ingot. This krater bears a rich geometric decoration with a very ambitious bow-hunting scene of a type still unique in Cyprus, and strongly recalls sub-Mycenaean art and Proto-Geometric art of Crete.

Although a monolithic altar was already known at the end of the 1962 campaign, one still did not know its dimensions (total height 80 cm) or the fact that it had succeeded an almost identical earlier altar (height 72 cm) situated at two metres to the West and at the foot of a large pierced block, firmly anchored in the floor-floor of the late sanctuary, and which probably served to tie the heads at the moment of sacrifice. This earlier altar was used only at the time when the Late Mycenaean or Mycenaean IIIC 1 b/c pottery was in vogue (XII e century). It itself rested on a floor of the end of the Bronze Age, dated by the pottery of the type called "Bucket Style", of the end of the XIII e century before our era.

Thick layers of grey ash and more or less burnt pisé cover this floor of the end of the Bronze Age and bear witness to the violence of two fires which ravaged the primitive sanctuary as well as the rest of the town. It is on these ashes and remains of pisé walls level that the large hall was rebuilt on, restangular, and a little later, sample-4-11, the series of benches marked ai characteristic of the sanctuary of the beginning of Iron I.

On the main floor of this last sanctuary, a beaten earth floor at 1 m 10 to 20 depth below the present surface, a large number of characteristic pottery was recovered: bowls of the so-called "wavy line" type of the Granary style, associated with cream bucchero jugs with red slip and with Canaanite-type jars or Palestinian in red clay, with handles sometimes curved at a atgne. This type is common in Iron I (XIIIe-XIe c.) at most archaeological sites in Palestine (Tell Ta'anek, Megiddo, Tell Qasile, etc.). At Enkomi, we these vessels rather

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