Amargeti: the Cyprus Exploration Fund (1888)

In May 1888 the Cyprus Exploration Fund dug in a vineyard at Amargeti and found inscribed dedications to Opaon Melanthios among numerous fragments of rude statuettes and doves. The walls it uncovered were thin and poor, and David George Hogarth took them for a small dwelling, not a temple¹.

Hogarth ran the work in the field for the Cyprus Exploration Fund. Amargeti was chosen as a small third site near at hand once the Kouklia temple was nearly cleared. Rumours of finds at the village, among them cylinders and bronzes that had reached Colonel Warren and dealers at Ktima, prompted the choice, and the dig was meant to determine the site's name and the character of its worship¹. Ernest Arthur Gardner directed the expedition through the British School at Athens, and M. R. James, a Fellow of King's College, took part in the March visit¹.

The permit took time. A concession was applied for at Nicosia and officials delayed it; contracts for three plots had been concluded on 8 April, and the limits of the concession were fixed on 9 May, the day digging began¹. The party moved to the village on 8 May and packed up on 23 May 1888¹. The 1899 Cyprus Museum catalogue dates the dig to 1886; Hogarth and Mitford give 1888^2,3.

The vineyard and the yard

Digging began in the Petrasanthropos vineyard, on a spit of land near the fork of two torrents below the village. The party trenched the lower end, then the eastern end, then the plateau above, in case fragments had washed down from it¹. Numerous fragments of statuettes and doves in soft stone and terracotta lay at no great depth across the vineyard, mostly rude and some phallic. Two statuettes held grapes and several held doves; there were groups of three, a cone with phallus, a small bronze bull and ribbed hollow terracotta figures¹.

The first inscribed round base came out on the first day and a complete dedication on the 15th. Hogarth counted ten of thirteen inscriptions from the one site with the formula to Opaon Melanthios; one, scratched on the drapery of a male statuette, reads Apollon Melathios Phaliarchos¹. At the eastern end of the vineyard, three to four feet down, thin walls of poor construction belonged to what Hogarth described as a very small building, more like a dwelling of several rooms than a temple. The statuettes there were mostly headless or broken and seemingly thrown in heaps, and he thought Aristides's earlier dig may have destroyed part of the walls¹.

The yard of Stilianos Paphios gave three bronze figurines: a naked female holding a fish to her breast, which Hogarth called an Aphrodite, and a figure in short chiton and cothurni, probably an Artemis. It gave no statuettes, and its walls were modern¹. The plateau held only traces of houses, one with a flag pavement left in place, none large enough for a temple. Two other village spots, one where Byzantine coins had once been found, showed no building traces, and Hogarth concluded that the ancient site lay in the valley, not under the village¹.

Dating and reading the god

Hogarth judged the site later than Warren's cylinders and "not very early", and the lettering of the dedications supported this. He took the remains to be a small hill-village with a shrine rather than a large temple, and its god probably a local Apollo, and that the ancient name of Amargetti might have been Melanthus¹. Mitford, writing in 1946, dated the inscriptions by lettering from the early Hellenistic to the Septimian period, with no. 4 in the first half of the third century BC and the Apollo text among the latest. He counted nine dedications to Opaon Melanthios, one to Apollo Melanthios and three without a divine name, and disputed details of Hogarth's readings, such as the date of no. 11 and the marble of no. 5. He regarded Amargeti as the only known cult-centre of Opaon Melanthios, and said that Opaon had not been satisfactorily explained³. Ochał-Czarnowicz describes the cult as that of a rural god of shepherds and huntsmen, and reports Mitford's view that it may have outlived the Severian period⁴.

Dividing the finds

Gardner had agreed with the Government a division of spoil under Ottoman law, on terms very favourable to the expedition, and the Government did not take over the site. Hogarth divided the spoil with the Government's representative in August 1888. The cases were shipped from Larnaca and reached England at the end of September, to be divided between the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum¹. A group of three statuettes from the vineyard went to the British Museum¹. Two inscribed statuettes (JHS nos. 2 and 3) stood in the Ashmolean until 1940, when they were packed away in the war, and inscriptions JHS nos. 4, 5 and 13 are in the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge³.

The Cyprus Museum kept an Amargeti collection, listed in its 1899 catalogue from no. 5901: a limestone slab in very low relief with three male standing figures (5901), stone statuettes 5902 to 5908, stone heads 5909 to 5912, terracotta heads and a torso 5913 to 5918, and limestone doves 5919 and 5920. Two inscribed bases are 5921, with two shod feet, and 5922, inscribed Opaoni Melanthio, Artemidoros, euchen². Mitford found 5921 lost and some other inscribed pieces missing or perished by 1946³.

Hogarth published the work on pages 171 to 174 of his narrative of the Fund's first season in the Journal of Hellenic Studies 9, and stated that no separate article would treat the site¹.