Tomb-Digging in Ottoman Cyprus, 1860s to 1878

Before the British took over the administration of Cyprus in 1878, most of the antiquities that left the island came out of tombs opened by Cypriot villagers. They dug for wages paid by the European consuls at Larnaca, for a price per object on top of the wage, or on their own account for whoever would buy. The trade began in earnest at Dali, the village on the site of ancient Idalion, in 1868, and within a few years the men of Dali were a skilled workforce hired from one cemetery to the next. This entry describes that digging: who did it, what they were paid, who bought, how the finds were got off the island, how much was destroyed, and why it is best understood as a poor rural economy working an open market rather than as an organised crime. The lawful side of the same years, the firmans and the division of finds, is in its twin entry, firmans and partage, and the whole sequence of laws is in the legal export of Cypriot antiquities. The engraving at the head of this page is from Luigi Palma di Cesnola's book of 1877 (public domain).

The Dali rush of 1868

Robert Hamilton Lang, manager of the Imperial Ottoman Bank at Larnaca, gives the clearest account of how it started. In 1868, after torrential rain, peasants of Dali walking below a hillside north of the village found pottery washed out of the slope, one piece in the shape of a duck. They dug and "got into tombs". The discovery came in a bad year: "as the villagers were in much distress, having lost most of their crops from the ravages of locusts, they repaired in great numbers to the pottery-diggings" [1, p. 331].

The buyers came at once. Lang and his friend Demetrios Pierides sent an agent, who found the French consul Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi already on the spot; "nearly all" the first finds went to one or the other. Then the British vice-consul Thomas Sandwith began buying, and after him the American consul, Luigi Palma di Cesnola. The peasants of Dali "came to spend all their time in searching for tombs and rifling them", and the consuls' houses at Larnaca "became like earthenware shops. The pieces found might be counted by tens of thousands, and the tombs opened by thousands" [1, p. 332]. Cesnola describes the same years from his side: the villagers of Dali "became infected with the fever of digging, and both Greeks and Turks began to work in the employ of either one or other of my colleagues" [2, p. 83].

The digging fitted round the farming year. Cesnola notes that at harvest time it was hard to find labour "for other than agricultural purposes", so his own diggings were kept up "on a small scale only" until the crops were in [2, p. 83]. Tomb-digging was what the men of Dali did when the fields failed or did not need them.

Wages, piece rates and the Larnaca market

The diggers were paid by the day, with their finds bought on top. Lang, looking back in 1878 on the five young men of Dali who found a vase of gold coins, describes them as "working in the hope of gaining a shilling or two a day" [1, p. 338]. Lang's own gangs were paid two piastres a day each, with finds bought separately, according to the account in Anna Marangou's biography of Cesnola [6, p. 70]. Alessandro Palma di Cesnola, Luigi's younger brother, set out the system he used at Salamis in 1877 and 1878: "To the workmen I generally paid the fixed wages of one shilling a day, paying them every Saturday also for the objects they had found, at a rate fixed beforehand by my foreman and the workmen. The gold was paid for by weight" [3]. The price per object was agreed in advance with the men, which made every digger a finder with a stake in what came out.

The gap between that price and the next one up was wide. Lang paid £4 10s. for a gold coin of the Evagorid kings of Salamis; General Fox "at first sight gave me £80" for it [1, p. 331]. The five young men of Dali who found the coin vase divided it among themselves by handfuls and kept quiet for two days, until the wife of one told Pierides. Lang and Pierides bought "about 600 gold staters of Philip and Alexander the Great, for an equal number of Napoleons", and over the following months the rest of the find except about a hundred coins. Lang sold five hundred of the common types at Constantinople and fifteen to the Duke of Sutherland [1, p. 337]. In his words, the men had "stumbled upon a treasure which brought them about £800" [1, p. 338]. For a village digger that was a fortune; for Lang it was stock.

Below the consuls was an older and cheaper market. Town goldsmiths bought metal finds for their bullion: the traveller Edward Clarke wrote in 1801 that "the goldsmiths part with such antiquities for a few paras" at Nicosia [6, p. 54]. Gold from the tombs was always worth its weight, and a find that no collector saw first could go into the crucible. The goldsmiths' trade, and the uncertain story of the Phoenician silver bowl bought off a Larnaca bench in 1850, are told in the price of rough metal. The market had a single centre. Alessandro di Cesnola told his judge in October 1878 that "in nearly every house in Larnaca there were antiquities owned and for sale", and that the British district commissioner himself had bought them [5].

Foremen, independent diggers and the consuls' competition

The Dali diggers were led by two men. In Lang's account they "were led chiefly by two men, the one, Hasen, a Turk of Dali, who became attached to the American Consulate, and the other old Hagge Georgi, the finder of the 'Tablet of Dali'". Hasan "had an extraordinary aptitude for such work"; Hadji Georgi "was chiefly my man, and had wonderful luck" [1, p. 333]. A Turkish Cypriot ran the American consul's gang and a Greek Cypriot ran the British banker's, in the same village. The men themselves learned fast: they "attained a proficiency in tomb-finding quite extraordinary, and, unfortunately for the purchasers, became knowing in the value of the pieces" [1, pp. 332-333]. Cesnola called Hadji Georgi "the pioneer digger of Dali". Having handed his property to his sons, the old man supported himself by digging; imprisoned at Larnaca for a relative's debt that he had guaranteed, he came home broken and was found dead the next day in one of the tombs he had worked [2, pp. 84-87]. His life is told in a separate article.

Not every digger was on a payroll. Cesnola wrote that "in addition to the large number of men whom I daily employed at regular wages, others dug without permission from me, on their kismet as they termed it" [2, p. 79]. These "independent diggers" were sellers, not employees, and the consuls bid for what they brought in: Cesnola's colleagues at Larnaca "now began to purchase antiquities of the 'independent diggers' at a very high valuation, and thus a lively competition was created" [2, p. 82]. Ceccaldi obtained his own firman to excavate; Lang was, in Cesnola's words, "the most serious competitor I had" [2, p. 82]. Rival buyers bidding against each other set the diggers' prices, and the diggers knew it.

The local authorities' objections, where there were any, were religious and fiscal rather than archaeological. The Cadi of Dali wrote to the Governor-General that the digging would leave the fields barren and the Government without revenue from them; the Hodja told his congregation that no Muslim who worked for Cesnola would be rewarded with the houris. When a party of independent diggers, "all Greeks", was stopped on a Friday carrying baskets of "human skulls for the American Consul", the Cadi had them arrested and accused Cesnola of "encouraging by rewards of money the Christian population of Dali to desecrate the sepulchres of the faithful". The Governor-General, Said Pasha, rode out to Dali, heard that the skulls were older than Islam, laughed, and reprimanded the Cadi [2, pp. 79-80]. The digging went on.

Getting the finds off the island

Digging and buying were done in the open. Export was where the consuls used their privileges, and sometimes evaded the rules. Lang, the only consul who could not obtain a firman, was told by the governor during his excavations at Dali that he ought to stop him for want of one; Lang "answered him jokingly that he needed a firman to stop me, which he had not". Of shipping the finds he wrote: "The shipment out of the island was attended with considerable difficulty, but it was somehow managed. Cela se fait, mais ne se dit pas" [1, p. 339]. The phrase is Lang's; it is sometimes credited to Cesnola. His seven-foot statue from the sanctuary at Pyla, which "seemed destined to become Turkish property", he sold for "a nominal price of a few pounds" to the captain of an Austrian frigate, whose sailors came ashore after sunset with a stretcher and carried it from Lang's courtyard to their pinnace [1, p. 339].

Cesnola's consular status protected his diggers and his crates. When the kaimakam of Larnaca arrested two of his diggers for digging without a firman, and later seized his consular guard, Cesnola took the case to the American minister at Constantinople. Two American warships arrived in the bay of Larnaca, the kaimakam was dismissed, the fortress fired a salute of twenty-one guns to the American flag, and the authorities thereafter became "extremely courteous", which reminded him of the proverb "the hand thou canst not cut off thou must kiss" [2, pp. 56-59]. His firman was renewed through the American minister, who once wrote that Cesnola seemed to intend "sinking the island one of these days, with all the holes you are boring everywhere" [2, p. 66]. How his first collection was shipped in 1872, against the Governor-General's ruling that his licence did not cover export, is told in firmans and partage. His younger brother applied for a firman, "never received a positive answer; so I continued digging without it", and wrote that he had always worked "with the countenance and indulgence of the authorities" [3, p. xviii]. He stopped digging at Kourion in 1877 after villagers objected and a landowner talked of informing the kaimakam, and the Ottoman Government complained about him to the Italian Government [3, p. xvii; 4].

The scale of the destruction

The numbers come mainly from the men who did the damage, and the largest from the least reliable of them. Cesnola wrote that "by the end of my third year's explorations at Dali, I had opened some ten thousand tombs" [2, p. 83]. His accounts of where he found things are not reliable: Joan Connelly notes that "conflicting reports by his contemporaries ... suggest that Cesnola's account of his excavations is not entirely accurate", and that his Golgoi sculptures reached New York mixed with material from many other sites [7, p. 101]. His tomb count is best read as an order of magnitude. Lang, a more careful witness, gives the same order for Dali alone: tombs "opened by thousands", pieces "by tens of thousands" [1, p. 332].

A second measure is the objects themselves. Cesnola is reckoned to have taken "about 35,000 objects" out of Cyprus in his years on the island, and the Russian scholar Johannes Doell catalogued 7,919 objects of his Golgoi material alone in 1870 [7, p. 101]. Almost none of it was recorded by tomb, and much of it was broken in the digging and the transport [7, p. 101]. The loss was of context more than of things. The pots, figures and sculpture survive by the tens of thousands in museums abroad; the tomb groups, the order of burials and the find-places of most of them do not.

Why this was a trade, not organised crime

Read together, the sources describe a labour market, not a criminal network. The diggers were farmers, in Dali in a year of locusts, working round the harvest [1, p. 331; 2, p. 83]. They dug in daylight for named employers who were foreign consuls, or on their own "kismet" for sale to the same men [2, p. 79]. The price of their work was set by open competition among buyers [2, p. 82]. Their leaders were village men from both communities, and the money they made was a daily wage and, very rarely, a lucky hoard [1, pp. 333, 338]. The Ottoman authorities knew all of it, intervened occasionally and were overruled by consular pressure [2, pp. 56-59, 80].

The law treated the digging lightly. Before 1869 there was no general Ottoman antiquities regulation, and permission to dig was a matter of personal firmans [4]. The regulation of 1869 gave every antiquity found on private land to the landowner, so that from 1869 to 1874 a villager who dug his own field, or sold what he found to the man who had bought or leased it, was dealing in property the law recognised as his [4]. The regulation of 1874 vested buried antiquities in the Government, but it gave a third of a licensed find to the finder and a third to the landowner, and it punished unlicensed digging with confiscation of the finds and a fine of one to five Turkish pounds or a few days in prison [4]. That is the penalty of a regulatory offence, not of a serious crime. The rules that were broken, where they were broken, were the firman requirement and the customs house, and the men who broke them were Lang, Cesnola and the younger Cesnola rather than their diggers. The first case under the 1874 regulation after the British arrived was brought against the younger Cesnola, three months into the occupation; he was fined £4, which was remitted, and his finds were confiscated [4; 5].

The economics point the same way. The digger's share was a shilling or two a day and a negotiated price per object; the profit lay with the buyers, in the step from a Dali field to a London or New York saleroom, as Lang's £4 10s. coin resold for £80 shows [1, p. 331]. Nobody needed to organise the supply, because the consuls hired it openly. The later pattern of the south, where illicit digging followed poverty, farming and building rather than any network, is already visible at Dali in 1868, and is followed into the colonial years in illicit digging under British rule.

The evidence against: unrecorded digging behind the museum collections

The strongest objection to calling this a lawful trade is that most of what it produced was dug without any record and, by any modern standard, destructively. Much of what reached the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and the European university collections in these years came from the digging described here. Samuel Hardy's study of the Louvre's Cypriot antiquities acquired before the conflict of the 1960s found that about two thirds had no excavation record and no innocent account of their finding, and he classes them as probably looted [8]. On his reading, much of what "left lawfully" was dug illicitly first. Cesnola's own find-places are not trustworthy, and his collection mixed sites [7, p. 101]. Even Lang's careful work at Idalion began as tomb-clearance with the same gangs [1, pp. 332-333].

That objection is right about the digging, and the record should say so: most of these tombs were opened by men paid by the day to strip them, with nothing written down. Hardy's category of "probably looted" also counts every object without an excavation record, and his figures are discussed in full in how many Cypriot antiquities left lawfully. What the record shows about title and export is narrower and firmer. Ownership passed by purchase from the finders and landowners whom Ottoman law recognised as owners [4]. The great collections were then sold in the open, Lang's to the British Museum and Cesnola's to the Metropolitan Museum, and bought by those institutions under their trustees' names. Some of the export before 1874 evaded the customs house and, for Cesnola's first collection, the terms of the 1869 regulation; from 1874 the regulation allowed export with the Minister's leave, and after 1878 Britain kept that rule in force [4]. Whether an object came out of the ground lawfully and whether it left the island lawfully are two questions, and for this period the answers differ.

What this means for an object on the market today

An object that left Cyprus through this trade can usually be traced only to a buyer, not to a tomb. The useful documents are the buyers' records: the Cesnola collections in New York and the Metropolitan Museum's later sales of them, Lang's sale to the British Museum, Sandwith's and Ceccaldi's collections, and the Lawrence-Cesnola sales in London in 1883 to 1892, set out in how many Cypriot antiquities left lawfully. A pot with a documented history back to one of them left the island more than a century before the export rules that govern the modern market, and its title rests on that history. Its find-spot, in most cases, was never recorded and cannot now be recovered; a dealer's or museum's "said to be from Dali" for such a piece is a label from the trade, not a record of excavation. The difference between the two is explained in provenance and provenience, and the checks a buyer should make today are in collecting Cypriot antiquities today.