Arsos: Markides's excavation of the sanctuary of Aphrodite Golgia

The sanctuary outside the village of Arsos was excavated in a single season by Menelaos Markides, Director of the Cyprus Museum.¹ Connelly dates the season to 1917; the introduction to the third volume of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition gives 1914.^1,2

By the time Markides dug, the walls showed extensive robbery, and Connelly reports that earlier unrecorded activity complicated the investigation. His plan recorded rectilinear walls, though it does not show whether the east-west walls bonded to the longer north-south wall. Northwest of the walls he recorded a packed floor above a level of fragmentary stone sculptures. A deposit held terracotta votives, beads, scarabs, iron objects, a pot with two necklaces, two bronze bowls and one gold bowl.¹

Connelly reports that Markides dated the beginning of worship to the Late Bronze Age on ceramic evidence, continuing until destruction in the Early Christian period, and that he thought the later walls were built with reused material after that destruction. When Westholm undertook the publication, the pottery could not be identified among the groups in the Cyprus Museum. Connelly assesses the bulk of the early terracotta and stone sculpture as late seventh or early sixth century BC and suggests it may mark the formalization of worship in an architectural setting.¹ Connelly writes that illness interrupted Markides's plans for publication; a brief report submitted to the museum and a short inventory of inscriptions published in 1923 are among the only surviving records of the season.¹

Connelly counts 95 Arsos pieces in the Cyprus Museum inventories, under a combined classical and Hellenistic sculpture heading.¹