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Handwritten top: Communicated to Mr Parrot for the Commission des Fouilles
Stamp: 15 MARS 1963
26.3.63
French Archaeological Mission to Cyprus. Excavations at Enkomi-Alasia, 1962.
On the island of Cyprus, at the site of Enkomi, where the French Archaeological Mission has recovered the ruins, vainly sought by several earlier archaeological expeditions, of the capital of the Bronze Age (1800 to 1200 before our era) the excavations have been continued in the final layers of the city. Several levels of destruction and ash mark the agony of the Bronze Age civilisation around 1200 at the approach of the great upheavals accompanied by movements of uprooted peoples who sought lands to settle and feed themselves, from the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean, as far as the Nile delta in Egypt.
Recent excavations [handwritten: (1962)] have shown that Cyprus, doubtless because of its insular situation, was nevertheless less affected than the neighbouring countries of Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, during these historical and archaeological events, still so poorly known, which precede what has been called the Mediterranean "Middle Age" before the dawn of Greek civilisation. Recent excavations have confirmed that the ruins of Alasia explored at Enkomi had been broken up, refitted and reoccupied by populations of the early Iron Age, skilled in metallurgy. They restored to a large extent the prosperity of the town and its export trade in copper. To this period belongs in particular a sanctuary founded at the end of the Late Bronze Age (13th c.) and still in use in the 10th century before our era, judging by the numerous finds of offerings and votive objects recovered in stratified position on several successive floors.
In the main hall of the sanctuary and the adjacent rooms were encountered {underline: in situ} and for the first time at Enkomi, vases characteristic of the Cypro-Geometric I, chronologically corresponding to the Protogeometric of mainland Greece and to the Iron Age I of Palestine. Among them are some very curious terracottas representing two-headed quadrupeds, precursors of those fabulous beings later known as centaurs. Associated with these strange figurines were the numerous traces of cultic practices consisting of the sacrifice of many bulls and sometimes of deer. Their skulls, at least 26 in number, were uncovered, sometimes in facing pairs. These bull skulls, whose horns were generally fairly well preserved, appeared coated with discontinuous plaques of white lime and fragments of charcoal, while the nape or the forehead show black traces due to the action of fire. One gets the impression that after the sacrifice, the bulls' heads were burned and then coated, perhaps with white lime, under the floor renewed several times in the inner courtyard of the sanctuary.
These cultic witnesses of the final period of Enkomi-Alasia reveal a hitherto unknown phase of the protohistory of Cyprus which, chronologically, forms the link with the recent finds in the royal necropolis of neighbouring Salamis, and which was finally succeeded by the Greek and Roman Salamis facing it on the present coast.
Handwritten: C.F.A. SCHAEFFER
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain