Amathus: the British Museum (Turner Bequest) excavation

Between late 1893 and mid-March 1894 the British Museum opened some 312 tombs in the cemeteries of Amathus, from the Cypro-Geometric to the Roman period, among them tombs 83, 88 and 291 with their terracotta figurines^1,2. The campaign was funded by the Turner Bequest, the legacy of Emma Turner, under the British Museum Turner Bequest Excavations in Cyprus^1,2.

Smith, Myres and the agents

The practical work was organised by two expatriate businessmen in Limassol, J.W. Williamson and Charles Christian, acting as agents of the British Museum; most of the agents' work was delegated to Percy Christian, who also transcribed the official notebook^2,3. Local workers did the digging, and the archaeologists oversaw it and documented it in notebooks³. A government inspector, the Teacher, appears in the caption of an 1894 photograph of Myres with his assistants, which also names the foreman Grigori, the cook Demitri and the water carrier Argyro⁴.

Arthur Hamilton Smith, an Assistant in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, supervised the first part of the work. Hermary gives 20 November 1893 for the opening of the first tombs and Ulbrich and Kiely give October 1893; the end came in mid-March 1894^1,2. John Linton Myres, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, then studying at the British School at Athens, took over around 16 January 1894^1,3. Smith and Myres worked together for a few days on tombs 100 to 110, and Smith's tomb 83 and tomb 88 were dug on 10 and 12 January 1894¹.

The Turner Bequest was meant to fund British Museum excavations in Cyprus. Amathus was chosen partly for the convenience of the Limassol agents and mainly because it was a very well-known source of antiquities, especially since Cesnola's work in the 1870s². The agents were instructed to stop work if they found buildings and to report to London, so the work concentrated on tombs². Ulbrich and Kiely suggest that all the sites the Museum chose were cemeteries to increase the chance of finding intact objects fit for display². Smith reported to London that tomb robbers had already been at Amathus and that little except plain Cypriote pottery was found³.

The tombs

The excavators worked five areas lettered A to E; most tombs lay on sites D and E, close to the shore about half a mile east of the acropolis, and neither the acropolis nor the lower city was explored^5,6. Hermary and the 1899 Cyprus Museum catalogue count 312 tombs; Ulbrich and Kiely give some 320 numbered tombs. The 1899 catalogue reports all periods from early Graeco-Phoenician onwards, with no Bronze Age necropolis and no Mycenaean or quasi-Mycenaean vases or metalwork even in the earliest tombs^2,5.

Smith kept a schematic record of the first c. 100 tombs, in a notebook headed 'Notes at Amathus 1893–4', and photographed the site and tomb groups; almost all the photographs are now lost. Myres, who recorded the tombs numbered from 100 to 312, noted finds and often tomb architecture and burial customs in detail^2,3. Ulbrich and Kiely call his field notes more meticulous and forward-looking than Smith's, and say that much of their information was left out of Smith's schematic 1900 account and Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter's brief 1899 survey². Myres's notebook also contains a first rudimentary seriation of the pottery and a relative and absolute chronology of the tombs². On 18 January 1894 he noted that the decoration of the objects from tomb 37 resembled new ceramics in the last room of the Alexandria Museum³. According to Ulbrich and Kiely, the excavators discarded many coarse or plain vessels, decorated vessels (especially Iron Age) and fragmentary items, and Smith and Myres did not keep tomb groups together².

Tomb 83, in zone E, measured about 2.60 x 2 m and probably lay unrobbed. It held a group of terracottas: a figure in a shrine with uraei, a head with the Upper Egyptian crown, birds, horses, a horseman, chariots, a large grimacing mask and boat models. Hermary dates it to the second half of the sixth century BC from an Attic black-figure cup and a lekythos, and notes two skeletons on the right side with the figurines heaped beside them¹. He cautions that the notebooks and Walters's catalogue disagree on which tombs the boat models came from, so conclusions from an apparent concentration in tomb 83 should be avoided¹.

Smith dug tomb 88 in the same zone: several bodies lay on rough beds with terracottas (chariots, boats, birds, a Bes and a Ptah-Pataikos figure), faience amulets, gold jewellery, silver and bronze bracelets and bronze mirrors, but no vases. Hermary dates the figurines to the end of the Archaic period¹. Tomb 291, dug by Myres some distance south-east, held five figurines, among them A 154 and A 155, pregnant-goddess types of Phoenician style paralleled on Cyprus only at Kition. Myres noted that their clay, technique and type were not Amathusian and referred them to Egypt¹. About 170 figurines or fragments came from the 312 tombs¹.

Dividing the finds

Under the law of the time the tombs were divided immediately, two thirds going to the British Museum and the rest to the Cyprus Museum¹. In 1895 a considerable number of British Museum duplicates were dispersed to museums across the United Kingdom, mostly unpublished, and some are in the Ashmolean Museum¹. Walters's 1903 catalogue lists only 76 Amathus figurines from a lot of about 110¹. The Cyprus Museum share was briefly listed in the 1899 catalogue; its inventory numbers were reassigned in 1935 without systematic concordances, which makes the Cypriot part hard to identify¹. The 1899 catalogue says its entries for tombs 1 to 100 were catalogued from the objects without check, because the Government inspector's inventory was worthless, so those entries rest on the diaries of Myres and Smith⁵.

The British Museum's Department of Greece and Rome holds Smith's notebook of about 71 numbered pages, Myres's notebook 'Amathus' of about 134 pages and the official transcribed 'Excavations at Amathus' by Percy Christian; photocopies were given to the French mission^1,3. Smith published the tombs allocated to the British Museum in 1900 in Murray, Smith and Walters, Excavations in Cyprus, pp. 88 to 126.