Golgoi and Athienou: the Vogüé Mission

The architect Edmond Duthoit dug deposits of broken limestone sculpture around Athienou in 1862 and 1865, and the finds of the Vogüé and Duthoit mission make up most of the Louvre's collection of Cypriot sculpture¹. Melchior de Vogüé took over the Cyprus part of the mission from Renan, and the work stood under the Mission de Phénicie^2,3. Duthoit's letter of 8 February 1862 gave its purpose as gathering material on the Phoenicians, with a programme of searching for inscriptions first and digging afterwards^3,4. Counts calls it the earliest documented organised exploration of the Athienou region³.

The 1862 campaign

Vogüé and Waddington left for Syria on 11 March 1862, and Duthoit settled at Athienou to run the digs⁴. He had about 150 workmen on three points, paid 7 piastres 20 paras a day, the rate set by the Athienou farm of the Larnaca merchant Tardieu^5,6. Grasset, who lived in Larnaca, accompanied him at Athienou and Dali; Duthoit found him of little use, while Bonato judges his help not negligible^6,7.

Duthoit dug at Golgoi because Vogüé had greatly hoped for it, and found only poorly bonded rubble foundations and no cut stone^5,6. He then opened Ayios Photios and Malloura, which villagers had named as the source of the heads Vogüé had bought in passing⁶. Both held pit deposits of heads, limbs and torsos⁴. Duthoit described the search as guided by chance and by two Turkish workmen who "had luck"; the deposits lay shallow, in pits cut into virgin soil without surface marks⁶. Hermary joined a Louvre head to the "Mazarin torso", recorded on card 235 as from Malloura, and read the pair as an Apollo citharode of the third quarter of the 5th century BC (Louvre AM 2973 + MA 690)⁸.

Three days with about ten men at "Alesso" (Arsos) produced male and female body-part ex-votos, some inscribed⁶. At Dali, in late March and early April, he found little: a fragment of an early Ptolemaic inscription naming Arsinoe Philadelphos, a letter fragment, small figures, and in a cleared tomb a broken marble sarcophagus lid with traces of paint, already smashed by treasure hunters⁶. By his own count, eight carts and 23 mule loads had gone to Larnaca⁶. Vogüé came back in late May⁴. Duthoit's overall tally for 1862 was 150 to 200 heads, mutilated statues, countless limbs, and 100 to 150 inscriptions⁵.

The 1865 deposit

Duthoit returned to Cyprus on 29 May 1865⁹. His Louvre commission was to survey Assos and organise the removal of the Amathus vase, and he added an Athienou dig^4,5. Near Iorgos, about 50 paces from the trench where in 1862 he had set 150 men to work for 22 days in vain, he dug a new statue deposit over about 1000 square metres to a mean depth of 60 cm⁵. Counts says its exact location is unknown³. It held 500 to 600 heads from 3 to 50 cm and thousands of fragments "of all periods, all styles"⁵. Duthoit judged the fragments to run from the earliest Greek art to a "barbarous" art of the 4th century⁵. He packed over twenty cases and spent nearly 2,000 francs¹⁰.

In 1862 Duthoit proposed that a sect had broken and buried the statues in the 3rd or 4th century AD. Caubet and Masson, through the editor, read the pits instead as deposits by priests clearing old ex-votos from the sanctuary⁵.

What reached the Louvre

The 1862 objects entered the Louvre in 1863 without an entry register. Nieuwerkerke's report gave 220 objects, 48 of them given by Vogüé and 172 from the digs, but Hermary found cards running to no. 235 and 53 gifts by Vogüé⁸. Bonato notes that some heads held there seem to have been bought, not dug⁶. The 1865 sculpture, roughly 500 limestone pieces, is put at over half the Louvre's Cypriot collection¹⁰. Among the objects are a male head with bull mask from Ayios Photios, whose provenance is known from a Duthoit drawing (AM 2758), and the epitaph of Karyx from Golgoi, in Greek and syllabic, brought to Paris by Vogüé in 1862 (AM 3341)^8,11. Hermary showed that Vogüé's "complete statue of Anubis" was a dog's head wrongly joined to a draped body⁸.

Duthoit gathered the fragments he did not take so that Vogüé could view them if he returned to Cyprus⁶. Counts suggests that discarded pieces may have been reburied near the sanctuaries at Malloura and Ayios Photios, and that large caches of fragments in disturbed contexts met later by the Athienou Archaeological Project may be his discards³. Duthoit's results were left unpublished, and the exact place of his Malloura dig is lost³. Bonato says the official reports of both missions, if they existed, have disappeared⁴. His letters to Vogüé are in the Archives nationales in Paris, and his Cyprus drawings, about 250 by Bonato's count, are in the Musée de Picardie, Amiens⁶. Hermary says Malloura was entirely forgotten after Duthoit's excavations until the Athienou Archaeological Project rediscovered it in 1991^3,8. Hermary adds that the Ayios Photios zone, near the Green Line, has been inaccessible since the Turkish invasion of 1974¹².