How Many Cypriot Antiquities Left the Island Lawfully?

Between the 1860s and 1996 Cypriot antiquities left the island through a succession of lawful channels: the personal permits and consular privileges of the late Ottoman years, the division of finds under the Ottoman regulation of 1874, the colonial Antiquities Law of 1905 and its amendments, the Cyprus Museum's own sales of "duplicates", and the export licences of the Department of Antiquities from 1935. This entry counts what went through each channel. Some channels have a published figure, such as the 35,000 objects Luigi Palma di Cesnola took to New York or the two thirds of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's finds that went to Stockholm. Others leave only a licence number, a stock figure or a sale catalogue, and their totals are estimates. The legal history itself is set out in the legal export of Cypriot antiquities, and the Museum's saleroom in the article on how the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities. This entry deals with volume.

The channels and their volumes

The table gives each channel with the best figure in print. Where a source gives only a stock, a tomb count or a numbering sequence, the table says so rather than turning it into an object total.

Consuls and excavators before 1878

The largest single export was the first. Luigi Palma di Cesnola, American consul at Larnaca, worked on the island until 1876, shipped his first collection to England in January 1872 and sold it to the Metropolitan Museum that December; it reached New York in 275 crates. The Met's own catalogue of 2000 gives the total plainly: "Of the thirty-five thousand objects that Cesnola removed from Cyprus, about six thousand remain in the Metropolitan Museum" [1, pp. 22-23]. The difference of some 29,000 objects is not a loss. Much of it left the Met again through the museum's own sales, described below.

R. Hamilton Lang, the banker whose excavation of the sanctuary at Idalion began in 1868, "dispatched numerous Cypriot antiquities that he excavated to the British Museum" [1, p. 24]. No published count of his whole export exists in the sources used here, and the table leaves it without a figure.

The third collection of these years is the most mixed in its legal standing. Alessandro Palma di Cesnola, Luigi's brother, dug around Salamis in 1876 to 1878 with money from Edwin Lawrence, and went on digging after the High Commissioner banned all excavation in August 1878. He was tried, and the finds of the illicit digging were confiscated [3]. Part of what he had already gathered was sold to Berlin [1, p. 23]. The rest, "more than 14,000 items", was offered to the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum, refused by both, and sold at Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge in four sales between 1883 and 1892 [2]. Anja Ulbrich and Thomas Kiely put the proceeds at "only around £2500" [2]. At under four shillings an object on average, it is the clearest early sign of how cheap ordinary Cypriot material was, and of how widely it was scattered.

The 1874 partage and the British Museum's digs

The Ottoman Règlement sur les antiquités of 1874 divided the finds of a licensed excavation in thirds, one each to the Government, the finder and the landowner. A finder digging on his own land kept two thirds, and the regulation let him export his share unless the Imperial Museum asked for a particular object [3]. Britain kept the law in force after 1878, and when the Ottoman Government banned all export in 1884, the High Commissioner replied that a law passed after the British occupation did not apply to Cyprus [4, p. 290]. Cyprus was therefore the one place under Ottoman sovereignty where an excavator could still lawfully export most of what he found, and it remained so until 1905.

Two kinds of excavator used the channel on a large scale. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter dug for the Government, for museums and for private licence-holders, and "for payment, he supplied large numbers of the antiquities he unearthed to Berlin's Antiquarium and other European institutions" [1, p. 24]. The British Museum, funded by the Turner Bequest, "explored seven sites between 1893 and 1899": Amathus in 1893 to 1894, Kourion in 1895, Enkomi in 1896, then Maroni, Hala Sultan Tekke, Kouklia and Klavdia [2]. About 320 numbered tombs were recorded at Amathus alone. The London share was then given on to museums across Britain and further afield, and the excavators at Amathus "routinely discarded or sold large quantities of coarse and plain ceramic vessels" judged to be duplicates [2]. Ulbrich and Kiely give tombs and sites, not object totals, so the British Museum channel enters the table as a scale rather than a number.

The Swedish division and the Cyprus Museum saleroom

The Antiquities Law of 1905 made antiquities Government property and required written permission for export. Its amendment of 1927 allowed the Swedish Cyprus Expedition to receive a share of its finds, and the division was settled in October 1930. Kristian Göransson quotes the terms: tomb-groups and deposits were not to be split, and "on the basis of these terms Sweden received about two-thirds of the nearly 18 000 finds", with all the sherd material of scientific value [5]. The terracottas of the Ayia Irini sanctuary, about 2,000 figures, were the exception and were divided between the two countries [5]. Some 12,000 objects from Ayia Irini, Enkomi, Idalion, Amathus and the other Swedish sites went to Stockholm, where they are now the core of the Medelhavsmuseet.

The 1905 law also allowed the Museum Committee to sell duplicates. Nicholas Stanley-Price's study of the saleroom, published in 2025, follows Rupert Gunnis, who ran the sales from 1926 and raised the number of items on sale "from 500 (mostly Iron Age and Hellenistic glass) to about 2000" [6]. The saleroom survived the 1935 law, and Stanley-Price records that the practice "continued in the Museum until finally being abolished in 1991" [6]. A stock of 2,000 is not a sales total, and no annual sales count has been published. What the record shows is a standing stock in the low thousands, replenished for about sixty years, and sold to visitors who took their purchases home with an export permit. One object in this site's collection came through that door: a large Bichrome amphora carries the Museum's Sales Register number SR 3477/65 and was exported under licence in 1969. The photograph at the head of this entry shows the gallery rows from which the duplicates were drawn in the late 1920s.

Licensed export, 1935 to 1996

The Antiquities Law of 1935 created the Department of Antiquities, licensed dealers, allowed declared private collections and made every export depend on a licence from the Director. That system ran, under the Republic's Cap. 31 from 1960, until the amendment of 1996 ended dealing and the licensed export of private antiquities. Its volume is the hardest to measure, because the Department's register of licences has not been published. What survives is the licences themselves.

Licence No. 2655, dated 6 November 1953 and issued "under the Antiquities Law, 1935", covered a consignment bought four days earlier from the Nicosia dealer Petros Kolokasides, jugs, bowls, lamps and a small head for twenty-three pounds in all [7]. The research on the Malios collection in Leipzig found permits numbered 550 in March 1935 and 7070 in January 1978, the second of them covering 62 objects in a single consignment [8]. Those numbers suggest something like seven thousand licences in four decades. They are an indicator, not a count. The surviving licences do not form a clean sequence: the site's own list of licences seen includes numbers below 1,000 dated to 1937 and 1939 and numbers that run out of order in the 1960s, so more than one series may have been in use. A licence could cover a single object or several dozen. The table of dated licences in the guide to export licences and labels is the best way to date a licence by its number; it should not be multiplied out into a total.

Old stock sold again by museums

A lawful export did not stay in one place. The Met is the largest example. Before 1928 it disposed of Cesnola pieces through "over-the-counter" sales and a large group to Stanford University; in 1928 it sold "a large portion of the Cesnola Collection" at the Anderson Galleries in New York, and "two thousand three hundred objects were bought by the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota" [1, p. 23]. The catalogue of 2000 adds that "there is no complete record of the destination of the pieces" [1, p. 23]. That gap is why Cesnola material turns up today in regional American museums and family estates with an old museum number and no other paper.

The Lawrence-Cesnola collection had already gone the same way in London: the more than 14,000 items sold between 1883 and 1892 passed to General Pitt Rivers and to a great many private buyers [2], and Pitt Rivers's own collection stayed in his family until the 1950s or 1960s, when it too was sold. Each of these dispersals put lawfully exported objects back on the market in quantity, and each of them broke the link between the object and its first record.

How much of the old stock still circulates can be measured at one end of the market. Fehlmann, writing from Eastern Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta, counted every antiquity offered by Christie's and Sotheby's from 1988 to 2008: 52,482 in all. "Of these, only 1,842 items (4 per cent) could be identified as being of Cypriot origin"; 377 of them "had a provenance or previous history of ownership that dated back to the time before 1970, and 15 of these could even be traced back to" Cesnola, through the Met's sales of the 1920s [9, ch. 8]. Fehlmann's purpose was to argue that the loss figures for the north are too high. The count is useful on its own terms: at the two largest houses, about one Cypriot lot in five carried a documented history from before 1970, and the remaining four in five carried none that the catalogue printed.

Adding the channels together

No published total exists, and any figure is an estimate. The channels with numbers in print give a floor. Cesnola's 35,000, the Lawrence-Cesnola 14,000 and the Swedish 12,000 come to about 61,000 objects from three sources alone, before Lang, Ohnefalsch-Richter, the British Museum's seven sites, the Cyprus Exploration Fund, six decades of saleroom sales and four decades of export licences are added. An earlier article on this site, How many Cypriot artifacts exist outside of Cyprus?, worked through the channels in this way and reached a minimum of about 83,000 lawfully exported objects, a likely figure of about 110,000 and an upper estimate of about 165,000. The upper and lower bounds differ by a factor of two, mostly because of the licence years, where the number of objects per licence is unknown.

Three things are unknown and would change the estimate. The first is the Department's register of export licences from 1935 to 1996, which would turn a numbering sequence into a count. The second is the Cyprus Museum's own record of saleroom sales, which would give the channel's actual output. The third is the share of each excavator's export that was later broken up and sold, since the same pot can appear in several channels in this table. Until those records are published, the honest statement is a range: lawful export of Cypriot antiquities between the 1860s and 1996 ran to well over 100,000 objects, most of them pottery, lamps, glass and small terracottas.

The evidence against: lawful export is not lawful excavation

The strongest objection does not concern the export figures. It concerns where the exported objects came from. Sophocles Hadjisavvas, later Director of Antiquities, wrote of the collections formed on the island in 1963 to 1973 that they were "illegal in the sense that they all came from illicit excavations", and that more than 1,250 people had become collectors in those years (Hadjisavvas 2001, as quoted by Samuel Hardy [10, p. 462]). Hardy's own study of the Louvre's two catalogues of Cypriot antiquities acquired before the conflict points the same way for the earlier period. Of 125 Bronze Age objects, 74 came from excavations and 51 were "probably looted"; of 194 objects from the Chalcolithic to the Roman period, 31 were found "archaeologically or otherwise innocuously" and 163 were probably looted [10, pp. 467-468]. Taken together, 214 of 319 objects, about 67 per cent, in one major collection formed before the conflict had no excavation record and no innocent account of their finding.

The saleroom had the same problem from inside. Stanley-Price shows that the Museum's duplicates were "often the result of seizures of illicitly excavated material that was considered redundant for the national collections", and that Gunnis's own exports were "many of them probably the products of illicit excavations" [6]. The Lawrence-Cesnola collection includes finds from digging that a court condemned in 1878 [3]. A lawful export licence or a saleroom label therefore says that the state let the object leave. It does not say how the object came out of the ground.

Hardy's figures need to be read as he states them. His category "probably looted" covers every object that did not come from an excavation or another innocent find, and he calls his approach a "crude categorical method" [10, p. 459]. On his Louvre figures the illicit digging of the colonial years was carried out by both communities in about their share of the population, which he finds "accords reasonably well with the demographic ratio" [10, p. 468]. Neither point weakens the conclusion that much exported material was first dug illicitly. Both show that the objects concerned were dug, sold and exported decades before 1974, in the south as much as the north, and that their export was recorded and lawful. The distinction this section keeps throughout applies here in full: the argument for lawful export is about title and the right to leave the island, and on that the record is clear. It makes no claim that the digging was lawful.

What this means for an undocumented Cypriot pot abroad today

A Cypriot pot without papers in Europe or North America belongs, on the numbers, to a very large population of objects that left the island lawfully before 1996, most of them before 1974. On the estimate above, well over 100,000 objects went out through the channels in this entry, and the two great museum dispersals, the Met's of 1928 and the Lawrence-Cesnola sales of 1883 to 1892, scattered tens of thousands of them with no record of where each went. The paper that once went with a pot, a saleroom label, an export licence or a lead seal, was often lost, and the published counts show how few objects keep it: at the largest auction houses, about one Cypriot lot in five.

That does not settle the history of any one pot. An object with no record may still have left after 1974 or without a licence, and the numbers cannot say which group a particular piece belongs to. The practical steps are the ones described in collecting Cypriot antiquities today and in the guide to export licences and labels: look for a Met, Ringling, Pitt Rivers or Cyprus Museum number, an export licence or a sale catalogue entry, and, where none survives, record what the family knows of when and where the object was bought. The distinction between a find-spot and a collecting history is explained in provenance and provenience.