Achna, Ormidhia and Xylotymbou: Ohnefalsch-Richter's 1882 campaign for the British Museum

Peasants came by chance on the sanctuary at Achna in 1882, an enclosure holding offerings that were mostly limestone sculpture and terracotta figurines¹. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter excavated it for the British Museum; in a later letter he wrote of resuming the Achna excavations in September 1882². The 1899 Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum names Sir Charles Newton as the man for whom the work was undertaken, and says that over a thousand figures in stone and terracotta were found³. It also lists a Graeco-Phoenician necropolis explored close to Achna, on the south side³.

Fourrier dates the figurative material from the Archaic period, probably not before the sixth century BC, to the Imperial period, and calls the Achna terracotta group Salaminian in style. She reports that Ohnefalsch-Richter took the female figures accompanied by deer as evidence of a cult of Artemis-Cybele¹.

The same campaign reached other places. At Xylotymbou two late Graeco-Phoenician tombs of fine masonry, with roofs built as false arches, were opened for Newton in 1882³. At Salamis a Roman house and bath near the forest-guard's house were recorded, with a mosaic showing Orpheus attended by animals².

Fourrier states that the Achna finds were dispersed among several museums, including the Louvre and the British Museum¹. In 1894 C. D. Cobham presented duplicate Akhna specimens from the 1882 excavations to the Cyprus Museum, among them a terracotta figure holding a bird, Cyprus Museum 3015³. Several figurines said to come from Achna are in the Pierides collection at Larnaca, but their exact origin is unknown¹.