Enkomi report 1970Jacques-Claude Courtois

Continued from p. 2

… is attested in the Aegean world, at Rhodes (necropolis of Jalisos), and in protohistoric Europe in the earliest Urnfields of the Tyrol , Bavaria and Bohemia. Its presence now on the island of Cyprus, sewould in our view be to be compared with the parallel and contemporary development of the famous tanged swords with parallel edges of the type from tomb 18 and the bronze shaft of Enkomi 1967 (type known as Nenzingen in Europe).

In the adjoining rooms south-west of the house of the knives, one has observed the constant superposition of level and floor IV, at about fifteen centimetres above the fine white floor V, here without a layer of ash. At the foot of a N-S wall in brown mudbrick on a foundation of three courses of rubble, a single burial was cleared, individually, oriented east-west, the skull at the west having been anciently destroyed by a "pit"; this burial of Cypriot Iron I was accompanied by a dome-shaped seal of the Sea Peoples type, decorated with an engraved bird.

Further east, two other seals of the same style, and of good workmanship, procome from levels III and IV of Cypriot Iron I; from level III again, it is worth mentioning a circular kiln measuring one metre in diameter, in a rectangular room of 2 m 90 by 1 m 60. Around this room, the stratigraphic excavation revealed thick layers of ash fine grey filled with sherds of pottery of Mycenaean III C 1 (Close style); these layers reach 60 cm in thickness in certain places. Below, fills contained sherds of the end of Middle Bronze and the beginning of Cypriot Late Bronze, while the periods intermediate to Late Cypriot here largely were absent. They were, however, found in another trench (N-S) opened parallel to the trench-sounding of the 1949 campaign. There, important remains of walls of Late Cypriot 2 were identified, despite the disturbances due to the abundance of 'pits' or clandestine excavations. Several terracotta bovid figurines, and a lamp with a bull's head come from this sector, which by contrast lacked constructions of Cypriot Iron I.

-( Jacques-Claude Courtois )

30 . XI . 1970 … continues