Illicit Digging under British Rule, 1878 to 1960

Under British rule, from 1878 to 1960, Cypriot villagers went on opening tombs as they had under the Ottomans: men from villages beside the old cemeteries dug out tombs and sold what they found to dealers in the towns and to collectors on the island. The colonial state answered with a law of 1905 that made the digging an offence, a Museum curator who asked the police to watch the known sites, a Department of Antiquities from 1935, and fines that were small. Alongside the digging ran a lawful trade on a large scale: the division of excavated finds, the Cyprus Museum's own sales of duplicates, and from 1935 licensed dealers whose stock the Department checked and cleared for export. This page sets out what the record shows of the illicit side, case by case and in the officials' own words; the 1905 and 1935 laws and the Cyprus Museum saleroom describe the lawful side. The photograph at the head of the page, from one of Rupert Gunnis's albums, shows Gunnis holding a fragment of the bronze statue of Septimius Severus, which he secured for the Cyprus Museum after the find near Kythrea (Tunbridge Wells Borough Council t/a The Amelia).

Village digging after 1878

Britain took over the administration of Cyprus in 1878 and kept the Ottoman antiquities regulation of 1874 in force until 1905. The early cases, among them the trial of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola in 1878 for digging after Wolseley's ban, are set out in the entry on legal export. Under the British law of 1905, as under the Ottoman regulation before it, a chance find was divided: one third to the Government, one third to the landowner and one third to the finder, or two thirds to a finder digging on his own land [3, p. 41]. The finder's share made a find a lawful source of money for a villager who reported it. What the law forbade was digging for antiquities without a permit, and that is the activity the officials of the period called illicit.

The best description of the trade at the start of the period of strict control is Menelaos Markides's. Appointed Keeper of the Cyprus Museum in 1912, he was instructed at once by the High Commissioner to act against illicit excavation, and in his first published report he described what he faced: widespread digging and dealing, quick profits, specialised tomb-diggers in the villages near ancient sites, and antiquities dealers in the main towns and in some villages [1]. He called the illicit trading a "widespread evil", in the phrase that Hardy quotes from that report [2, p. 461]. Markides answered with police surveillance, with excavations of his own and by J. L. Myres to forestall the diggers, with registers of the private collections that the 1905 law required, and with a strict limit on export permits, which he held to fewer than twenty a year [1].

Not every official thought the digging general. In 1925 the Governor, Malcolm Stevenson, held that illicit excavation was not widespread, and George Jeffery, Curator of Ancient Monuments for twenty years, agreed with him, though he described the damage that rumours of treasure did to the floors and walls of medieval monuments such as St Hilarion and the churches of Famagusta [1].

Milia and the police reports of the 1920s

The police were the Museum's eyes. Under the 1905 law a finder had to hand a portable find to the nearest police station within five days [3, p. 41], and reports of digging reached the Museum the same way. In 1928 the police reported clandestine excavations near Milia, eighteen kilometres north-west of Famagusta; some of the diggers were caught and a few vases were brought to the Museum. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition then obtained a permit to excavate there in February and March 1928 and found rock-cut tombs around the village, most of them already looted [4, p. 406]. The Milia case shows police, Museum and an excavating mission acting together on a report of digging, and the usual result: a few objects recovered, a cemetery largely emptied before the archaeologists came.

Rupert Gunnis, aide-de-camp to Governor Ronald Storrs from 1926 and a member of the Museum Committee, spent much of the next years on such reports. He worked closely with the police, crossed the island to make salvage excavations at looted sites, and in Lefka discussed with them "the best means of stopping the incessant digging for antiquities" as part of what he called an "intensive campaign under the Antiquities Law" [1]. After a visit to the Karpas he wrote that "as the pottery has been taken from the tombs and all their provenance unknown, it is much better the museum should have it than that the villagers should sell it to the local collectors" [1]. That sentence states the policy of the whole colonial period: when a tomb had already been emptied, the Museum's aim was to get the contents before a local buyer did.

Gunnis, the "duplicates" and the minute of 1936

Gunnis also collected for himself, and his case is the one in which the official campaign against digging and the private market met in a single person. The story of his work in the Museum's saleroom is told in full in How the Cyprus Museum Sold Antiquities and is not repeated here. What matters for this page is the account of his exports given by John Hilton, the first Director of Antiquities, in a confidential minute to the Colonial Secretary dated 18 March 1936, two weeks before Hilton left the island [1].

Hilton wrote that Gunnis had "a widespread reputation, both in the island and outside it, as an unauthorised exporter of antiquities on a considerable scale". As a member of the Museum Committee he had been "given authority to sign export permits for antiquities sold in the Museum", and "this authority he used to sign permits (of a new type without duplicates) for the export of a large quantity of antiquities taken out of the island for himself", while "the choice of objects in the Museum for sale was I believe largely determined by Mr. Gunnis" [1]. As evidence Hilton cited the sale of Gunnis's antiquities to the Wellcome Museum in London and the sale at Sotheby's on 12 December 1933 of "some 390 objects belonging to Mr. Gunnis, most, if not all of which were, I believe, from Cyprus" [1]. Stanley-Price, who prints the minute in full, notes that the Museum's file on the sale of duplicates ends in April 1928 and that carbon copies of export permits were required again only from May 1932 [1]. He concludes that many of the several hundred objects Gunnis sent to England were "probably the products of illicit excavations", bought from dealers or from villagers [1].

The Gunnis exports were unlawful in the way they left the island, whatever the objects' origin. They are the clearest case in the colonial record of an official using the lawful channel for objects that should not have passed through it.

The police raids on the Palma and Gaffiero collections

Hilton's minute also records how the law was enforced against collectors. He described "the apparently arbitrary manner in which before, and since, he became Inspector of Antiquities Mr. Gunnis has conducted police raids of private collections such as those of Mr. Palma of Famagusta, and Mr. Gaffiero of Nicosia, while the notorious collections of more prominent members of the community were left untouched" [1].

George Basil Palma, a Famagusta chemist, had submitted a list of his collection on 6 April 1924 and been authorised to keep it; the Curator had seen it from time to time and had taken objects from it for the Museum, and on at least one occasion Palma had bought for the Museum at the Curator's request. In 1927 Gunnis, in the neighbourhood, sent the police to seize the whole collection. Palma was given a paper stating that he gave everything over and was told that if he signed it he would not be brought to court; he signed, and his later request for the return of objects the Museum did not need went unanswered. The case of Joseph Claudio Gaffiero of Nicosia was taken to court, where the Curator testified that he had seen the collection many times, and Gaffiero was allowed to keep it [1]. Both collections were registered. Hilton added that "the result of such raids was sometimes that other private collections were broken up in fear", and Stanley-Price cites Theophilus Mogabgab's account of the same episode, in which holders of unregistered pieces smashed them and "the loss was irreparable" [1].

These are the two best-documented raids of the colonial period. Both fell on registered collectors, whose holdings the 1905 law allowed and whose lists the Museum held, and neither touched the diggers.

Prosecutions, fines and rewards

The 1905 law set the penalties: up to fifty pounds or six months for failing to report a find, with the finder's interest forfeited, and up to one hundred pounds or twelve months for exporting without the High Commissioner's written permission [3, pp. 41, 47]. It also allowed a court to pay up to half of any fine to the informer whose evidence had secured the conviction [3, p. 51]. The 1935 law kept a fine of up to fifty pounds or six months for unlicensed digging and for buying what had been dug, and added that the finder "shall not be entitled to any payment" for such an object [8].

The fines actually collected were small. The Cyprus Antiquities Fund published its accounts in the Cyprus Gazette, and Stanley-Price's table of them shows fine income of a few pounds to about forty pounds a year between 1922 and 1934, nothing at all in 1928, and a single year above one hundred pounds, 1932 [1]. In 1929 Gunnis was reported as holding that "the sentences imposed by Judges for contravention of the Law are farcical & no deterrent", and the Acting Governor proposed a minimum penalty [1]. The same discussion concerned American officials of the Cyprus Mines Corporation at Skouriotissa, reported to be exporting antiquities through contacts at the ports; Markides told the police that the only people expert enough to search suspects at the ports were themselves dealers [1]. No list of prosecutions for the colonial period has been published, and no figures for the rewards or payments made to finders who reported their discoveries.

The Department under Megaw, 1936 to 1960

A. H. S. Megaw arrived as Director of Antiquities in 1936 and served until independence [6, p. 46]. He began by putting notices in the hotels used by foreign visitors: "Visitors are urgently requested to purchase antiquities only from dealers displaying a license from the Department of Antiquities ... To neglect this precaution is directly to encourage illegal excavation" [6, p. 46]. He checked the stock of the licensed dealers himself and approved pieces for sale and export, on the view that it was "in the interests of the Department to stimulate the trade in antiquities through the authorised channels" [6, p. 46]. The policy rested on a judgement that a controlled trade would draw buyers away from the diggers.

Megaw also knew that the controlled trade could create digging. After the war, when the archaeologist J. R. B. Stewart and his wife Eve were buying for the Nicholson Museum of the University of Sydney, Megaw wrote to him: "the scale of your purchases from the local market is embarrassing as we are bound in controlling the licensed dealers to have in view their connection between their trade and clandestine excavations ... the point has been reached where your purchases must be regarded as a potential inducement to them" [6, pp. 125, 126]. The Department's answer was pressure on the buyer, not a prosecution.

The Department's own reports record the digging plainly. The review for 1953 notes pottery from the Kafkalla cemetery between Dhenia and Akaki that "reached the Cyprus Museum through confiscation of pottery looted in the south area", the excavation of two large looted tombs there, and, "in following up illicit excavations at Grotrí near Peristerona", a Bichrome IV amphora found in the dromos of a looted tomb and a painted model chariot that "the Cyprus Museum acquired by confiscation" [5, pp. 172, 173]. In his Chronique of discoveries for 1958, Vassos Karageorghis wrote that the cemeteries around Polis, ancient Marion, "ont été depuis longtemps l'objet de fouilles clandestines" [7, p. 340]. In the Director's summary, as Hardy quotes the annual reports, communities came to support the protection of antiquities (1951), and in 1955, "due to full employment and increased security, there was nearly no illicit digging" [2, pp. 461, 462].

The pattern in these reports is a village activity that rose in hard years and fell in good ones. Stanley-Price links the world depression of 1931 to 1932 to "a likely increase in illicit excavation as a potential income source" [1]; Megaw linked its near disappearance in 1955 to full employment. The cases are single tombs and single cemeteries near villages, reported by the police or found by the Department after the event.

The case that the lawful trade fed illicit digging

The strongest evidence against the view that the colonial digging was opportunistic and separate from the lawful trade comes from officials of the time. In 1925 George Jeffery wrote that "the buying and selling of antiquities at the Museum tends to keep alive a commercial interest in such things, and a desire to supply the market" [1]. In 1909 the classicist Jerome Farrell said of the elected members of the Museum Committee that their "only interest ... in Archaeology is of a commercial rather than a scientific character" [1]. Megaw's letter to Stewart states the same mechanism for the licensed dealers [6, p. 126]. Stanley-Price, the historian of the saleroom, concludes that its sales did not reduce illegal excavation: "authorised sales of 'duplicates' have not been effective in suppressing the illicit market for antiquities" [1]. Hardy goes further for the material abroad. In the Louvre's collection of Cypriot antiquities acquired before 1963 he counts 214 of 319 objects, 67 per cent, that were "neither scientifically excavated nor found through survey or by accident", and of the 19 probably looted Bronze Age pieces with fairly reliable find-spots, 16 came from Greek Cypriot villages such as Dali and Aradippou [2, pp. 466, 467]. On this reading much that left the island lawfully had first come out of the ground unlawfully, and the lawful buyers gave the diggers their market.

The record answers part of this and confirms part. Jeffery's complaint of 1925 cannot refer to the scale of the Museum's sales, which, as Stanley-Price notes, "were very few at this period": the Antiquities Fund recorded no sales income in 1923 and only shillings in 1924 and 1925 [1]. The village digging Markides described in 1912 was in place before the saleroom grew. When the Museum's sales rose to their peak between 1926 and 1930, the fines did not rise with them; the one high year for fines, 1932, was a year of falling sales and economic depression [1]. In 1955, when Megaw reported almost no digging, the licensed dealers were still trading under his supervision. The variable that moved with the digging in these sources is the state of the village economy, not the volume of the lawful trade.

Hardy's figures confirm the scale of undocumented village digging, which is the subject of this page. His category of "probably looted" counts every object without a record of excavation or chance discovery, and his find-spots point to old village cemeteries with a long tradition of opening tombs. The distinction that matters is between how an object came out of the ground and how it left the island. The 1905 and 1935 laws gave title and an export permit to registered collections, to the excavator's share and to objects released by the Museum, whatever the earlier history of an object found by a villager; Gunnis's exports show that the permit system could also be misused by an official.

What this means for an object on the market today

An antiquity exported from Cyprus between 1905 and 1960 left lawfully if it went out under the written permission of the High Commissioner or the Governor (1905 to 1935) or under a licence from the Director of Antiquities (from 1935). Such papers prove the export and the title; they do not prove that the object came from a recorded excavation, and for most village finds of the period no find-spot was ever written down. The records most likely to survive are export permits and licences, Museum sale certificates, the lists of registered private collections in the State Archives in Nicosia, and old collection numbers; lawful and illicit in the record and the article on export licences and labels describe them. For the Gunnis years, roughly 1928 to 1932, the Museum's own copies of export permits may be missing, so an object's export from that period can be hard to confirm from the Cyprus side. Objects in British collections that came from Gunnis, including those sold through Sotheby's in 1933 and the Wellcome collection, have a recorded history but an export that Hilton described as unauthorised.