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NEW RESEARCH IN THE TOMBS OF ENKOMI
After the discovery in 1934 of building remains at Enkomi, I said that the city had encroached upon the terrain of the necropolis.[handwritten: 19] I must now modify that hypothesis: in reality, city and necropolis form a topographical unit. Serving as family vaults, the tombs were placed under the habitations, conforming with a tradition current in the second millennium in many of the cities of the East, notably at Ras Shamra-Ugarit opposite Enkomi on the Syrian coast. As at Ras Shamra, so too at Enkomi the tomb was built at the same time as the habitation, or at least its place was foreseen in the plan. The entrance shafts and the dromoi are usually situated in the corner of a room of the ground floor and have the same orientation as the room. After a burial, the monolithic slab closing the vault was put back in place, wedged, and the openings carefully filled in. Then the dromos was refilled and the floor of beaten earth was restored over it. In a dry climate such as that of Cyprus, whose long summers exert a mummifying effect, these precautions were sufficient to avoid all the inconveniences which might result elsewhere from such a procedure.
I shall not return here to the 12 [handwritten: nineteen] new tombs discovered during my excavations of 1934 nor to their contribution to the study of Bronze Age chronology, nor to the whole question of relations of the island with Syria and Palestine on the one hand and with the Creto-Mycenaean world and Asia Minor on the other. Certain of these problems have already been discussed in my preliminary report.[handwritten: 20] I shall take them up again in the definitive publication and in chapter V, dedicated to the chronology of Cyprus, of my work on the stratigraphy and chronology of Bronze Age sites in Western Asia,[handwritten: 21] now in course of publication. Here I shall explain only certain problems relating to the Late Cypriote period, for the study of which my excavations at Enkomi have furnished new material.
Late Cypriote I. The first attempt to subdivide the Late Cypriote period was by Gjerstad who, in his Studies (1926), proposed the following three
Handwritten: Gjerstad?
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain