Enkomi C.F.F Schaeffer Plates IV-VIIClaude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

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… closely on these events, and before the influence of the local elements has a chance to counteract. From this point of view, the stone vases and the scarabs in the tombsof the beginning of the Cypriote Iron Age, indicate for the tombs a date close to that of the invasion, roughly, the transition from the thirteenth to the twelfth century.

It should be noted, furthermore that the tombs in question do not contain any of the characteristic painted vases of the Iron Age, so widely distributed over the island, nor any fibulae.

Taking into account these various signs, I proposed in a preliminary report that these tombs should be given a date somewhere between 1150 and 1000 B.C. After having weighed again the arguments, I would like to propose that the initial date of the period of these tombs be pushed back a century, thus placing them roughly between 1250 and 1050 B.C. This period corresponds with the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age in Cyprus, designated by the abbreviation Cypriote Iron I in our chronological scheme. The final date of 1050, for which there is no positive evidence, is only approximate.

Figure: red bracket marks in the margin beside the section heading; labels: none

For the classification of the archaeological material attributable to the Late Bronze Age, we have been able to keep, after adjusting the dates, the tripartite division introduced by Gjerstad in 1926. The initial date of Late Cypriote I might be placed toward 1550. I prefe , however, to adopt the approximate date of 1600 proposed by E. Gjerstad. It has the advantage of not pressing too closely the material already known, which is subject to new discoveries, and it is in agreement with the corresponding limit in the chronology of Ras Shamra, whose strict parallelism with the chronology of the island has many a time been substantiated.

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