Amathus: the French School at Athens mission

The French mission at Amathus, begun in 1975 by the École française d'Athènes, excavated the sanctuary of Aphrodite and a palace on the acropolis¹. A second School mission worked the Hellenistic harbour, which lies today under a maximum of four metres of water^2,3. The mission was created on the invitation of the Department of Antiquities. Pierre Amandry and Vassos Karageorghis chose Amathus as the only major site on the island, apart from its cemeteries, that had no systematic excavation¹.

Founding the mission

The French Foreign Ministry allocated 65,000 francs in 1975 for an excavation at Amathus, at a time when the French missions at Enkomi and Salamis lay in the area occupied by the Turkish army since the invasion of 1974⁴. Thély describes the mission as organised under exceptional political and archaeological circumstances following the Turkish invasion⁴. Ludovic Thély writes that the mission was born essentially of the will of one man, Karageorghis, who did not accept defeat before the lack of interest of the French education ministry⁴. Karageorghis, for his part, saw a major excavation as a chance to draw attention to the need to safeguard the heritage of the area, as tourist development was beginning on the coast⁵.

Pierre Aupert surveyed the median wall of the acropolis with an architect in 1973 and fixed bases that served in 1975 to lay out the general grid and the height references⁴. The first campaign ran from 24 March to 26 April 1975. Five archaeologists opened four sectors by the Wheeler method, with many workmen⁴. They included Marguerite Yon, Marie-Françoise Boussac, Jean-Paul Thalmann, Frieda Vandenabeele and Patrick Marchetti⁴.

Aupert had effective direction from the start⁵. Antoine Hermary co-directed with him from 1979 to 2002; Sabine Fourrier directed from 2003 to 2007, and Hermary again from 2008¹. The French ministry's page lists Hermary to 2015 and Anna Cannavò since 2017⁶. Cannavò and Ludovic Thély were recruited as scientific members of the School in 2013, and Hermary describes a real renewal of the mission⁷. A geographic information system for the ancient city has been built since 2014⁶.

The acropolis: palace and sanctuary

The objective was to study the urban space of Amathus, which had never been explored in an organised way, and work began on the acropolis, where part of the median wall was visible⁷. Excavations in 1975–1977 uncovered rooms equipped as storerooms and numerous pithoi in the palace sector⁸. Marie-Christine Hellmann found the second monumental stone vase of Amathus in 1976⁹. In 1994 Thierry Petit was overseeing the excavation of a large building on the terraced south side of the acropolis, mostly storerooms with pithoi, Greek and Levantine amphorae and Attic pottery, with a kiln and evidence of bronze-working. Petit interprets it, by parallels with Vouni, as a palace with an associated sanctuary; it was destroyed by fire¹⁰.

A sounding in 1997 under the floor of room V gave Cypro-Geometric III pottery, which dates the initial construction to the mid-8th century BC according to Steel's summary¹¹. The original publication put this first phase in the second half of the 9th century, while Georgiadou's study places the sherds around 800 BC; Hermary presents the sounding as evidence for a monumental occupation on the acropolis around 800 BC and thinks it plausible that the building, the immediate predecessor of the palace, was the residence of the first local rulers⁷. Campaigns from 2004 to 2007 established the eastern and western limits of the storerooms⁸. In 2006 the sounding was enlarged into room IV and recovered local Geometric pottery and fragments of Euboean skyphoi, which the authors called among the earliest Aegean Iron Age imports found in a Cypriot settlement; the layers were disturbed⁸. Blandin, Petit and Tassignon report that the palace was pillaged before its destruction, at the beginning of Ptolemaic rule; seven bronze units of Antigonus dated 306–300 BC lay on the floor, and two coins of Demetrius Poliorcetes came from the destruction layer⁸.

On the summit, two dedications of King Androkles, in the local syllabary and in Greek and dated 330–310 BC, identified the sanctuary as that of Aphrodite, called Kypria⁷. Hermary reports two deposits of discarded objects, principally vessels, associated approximately with Cypro-Archaic I and II⁷. A coin of Augustus and Gaius Caesar, sealed in the rubble laid below the floor, showed the temple to be early imperial¹². Hermary, citing a small foundation deposit of coins, dates the start of the first monumental temple to no earlier than the end of Vespasian's reign, and a small Christian complex built with blocks of the dismantled temple to the end of the 5th or beginning of the 6th century⁷. The architect Martin Schmid attempted a reconstruction of the temple's superstructure¹².

The city wall and the harbour

In 1989 excavation with Pierre Leriche showed that the great wall and the wall seen to its right in Luigi Mayer's engraving are not contemporary¹³. Near the north gate, a bronze jug dedicated to Helios Adonis came from a well, and a stela of AD 79–80 was found; Hermary attributes the last phase of the walls to defence against the Arab attacks of the mid-7th century⁷. In 2008, after the Department of Antiquities restored the walls, work resumed at Cistern 18 near the northern city gate, a chamber 2.20 x 1.90 m cut 10 m deep in the rock; the fill held many terracotta jugs and an intact bronze hydria of probable Hellenistic date, destined for the Lemesos District Museum¹⁴. Finds from the sanctuary, the palace and the north wall that Hermary illustrates are in the Limassol District Museum, among them a pendant of Ptah-Pataikos (AM 656) and an incense burner supported by two sphinxes from the palace (AM 12)⁷.

Jean-Yves Empereur directed the harbour mission¹⁵. Its aims were to survey the port structures, understand their construction and establish their history before possible restoration. A four-week campaign in autumn 1984 made one sondage; eight weeks in September and October 1985, with Colette Verlinden, made nine more, helped by aerial photography and photogrammetry². The excavation series is reported as running from 1984 to 1986¹⁶. The harbour had three large moles with dressed-stone inner faces and an entrance to the south-east; the South Mole measured about 180 m, and the East and West Jetties survive to 145 m and 130 m². Empereur and Verlinden dated the principal pottery to the end of the fourth or beginning of the third century BC and concluded that the harbour was abandoned soon after construction, perhaps having served a military rather than a commercial purpose². Demesticha later described the evidence for attributing the harbour's construction to Demetrius Poliorcetes as thin¹⁶. The harbour volumes appeared in 2017 and 2018^17,18. The harbour remains underwater³.