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

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… in facing pairs. These remains of animal offerings sacrificed are redistributed in the three layers covering the three floors (I to III) noted above. These bull skulls, whose horns generally remain fairly well preserved, are found coated with several discontinuous patches of white lime and fragments of charcoal, while the sheet or front shows black traces due to the action of fire. Not far from these numerous bull skulls were recovered the 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 flask, incomplete, with semicircular bow, as well as several bowls and vessels small. These varied pottery gathered on floors I and II allowed dating this new place of cult to about the Protogeometric period, or Cypro-Geometric I, i.e. the 11th-10th centuries B.C.: the pottery offered is of the type called "proto white painted I" and "white painted I" (amphora with two horizontal handles and neck cylindrical, cuisinos with very flared rim and two horizontal handles, kylix with foot, pots ovoid and jugs with mafeveée handle). For the first time, the site of Enkomi has yielded thus evidence of a final phase of the existence of this town, of which it had only been realised until now that it had disappeared at the beginning of the Iron Age. A late analogous pottery logue is notably found at Lapithos, Ourium and Kition (SCE, 1901, p. 283). Note the persistence of bowls with "wavy line" decoration alongside these new pottery types. The content with "Urnfield" and Protogeometric styles has also been observed in the excavations in progress of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus at Kition-Bamboula, the same as in the tombs of Ourium and in Greece. At Amathus, stratigraphic indications gathered in a sounding allow us to accept that an earlier phase of the sanctuary existed, not yet excavated, where bulls were already being sacrificed.

The whole of these new discoveries recalls at once those of the sanctuary with the great horned god in bronze from Ankomi, cleared by the Department of Antiquities in 1960, with the deposits of bull offerings, on the most recent floor (cf. Dikaios, in AJA Ansilger, 1962, I, p. 90, Fig 17) and those of the excavations of the Swedish Mission at Ayios Iakovos. The same practice is found at Ayia Irini, where the statuettes of centaurs are about four centuries later and were found associated with the very numerous human figurines. These new discoveries thus foreshadow those of the sanctuary … continues