Report addressed to Mr Karageorghis on Enkomi 1962Jacques-Claude Courtois

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… in opposed pairs. These remains of offerings of sacrificed animals are distributed in the three layers covering the three floors (I to III) reported above. These bull skulls, whose horns were generally quite well preserved, are seen to be coated with discontinuous plaques of white lime and particles of charcoal, while the nape or the forehead showed black traces due to the action of fire. Not far from these numerous bull skulls, were recovered the fragscattered fragments of a very large pithos in greyish earth with two snakes with sinuous bodies modelled in relief on the shoulder and bearing an inscription of five signs of the Cypro-Minoan script incised before firing on the rim. Here too was found a small bronze fibula, incomplete, with semicircular bow, as well as several bowls and vessels painted. The varied pottery recovered on floors I and II made it possible to date this new cult place at Enkomi to the Protogeometric period, or Cypro-Geometric I, i.e. the 11th-10th centuries before our era: indeed the pottery is of the type called " Proto White Painted I " and "White Painted I" (amphora with two horizontal handles and neck cylindrical, kalathos with very flaring rim and two horizontal handles, footed kylix, pots ovoid and jugs with raised handle). For the first time, the site of Enkomi has yielded thus evidence of a final phase of the existence of this town, which had until now been held to have disappeared at the beginning of the Iron Age. A late analogous pottery is known notably at Lapithos, Curium and Kition ( BCH, 1961, p. 263). Note the persistence of bowls with "wavy line" decoration alongside these new pottery types. The overlapping of the "Granary" and Protogeometric styles has also been observed in the excavations in progress of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus at Kition-Larnaca, as well as in the tombs of Curium and in Greece. At Enkomi, stratigraphic indications recovered in a sounding allow us to admit that there existed an earlier phase of the sanctuary, not yet excavated, where bulls were already being sacrificed.

The whole of these new discoveries recalls both those of the sanctuary of the great horned god in bronze at Enkomi, cleared by the Department of Antiquities in 1948, with the same offerings of bulls, on the latest floor ( cf. Dikaios, in Arch. Anzeiger, 1962, 1, p. 30, fig 17) and those of the excavations of the Swedish Mission at Ayios Jakovos. The same cult persists at Ayia Irini, where the statuettes of centaurs are about four centuries later and were associated with the very numerous human figurines. These new discoveries thus foreshadow those of the sanctuary … continues