Hala Sultan Tekke: Department rescue of two tombs (1968)

In January 1968 the Department of Antiquities excavated two Late Bronze Age tombs in Area A of Hala Sultan Tekke, about 50 m west of the mosque, under the direction of V. Karageorghis. Heavy rain had carried away about half of the burial chambers and exposed parts of the contents in section. The annual report says the tombs had been partly plundered before the Antiquities Service could intervene.¹

Tomb 1 and Tomb 2, as the report's figure captions label them, were circular shafts cut into soft clayey rock, without dromoi, narrowing upwards and opening at ground level through a circular stomion. Both had been used for multiple burials. The human skeletons were not intact and appeared to have been piled to one side before the last interment, as Karageorghis noted, and the report lists animal bones including horse remains, which he proposed had been sacrificed in honour of the deceased.¹ Grave goods included Mycenaean pottery (a lentoid flask and kraters decorated with chariots, an octopus, birds and bulls in Rude Style), pottery identified as Late Minoan III, cylinder seals, faience pendants and vessels, ivory fragments, beads of faience, gold and carnelian, and a gold diadem. The report dates pottery to the beginning of Mycenaean IIIC:1 and to Late Minoan III, and names the Early Mycenaean IIIC:1 bowls and the bull-decorated krater fragments as important for dating. It gives no absolute date.¹ Fischer and Bürge identify the work as the excavation of two partly preserved rich tombs and distinguish them from later investigations in Area A.²

A reconnaissance west of the tombs recorded substantial copper slag on cultivated ground, concentrated over about 100 square metres; traces of structures nearby were suggested as possible copper-smelting workshops. At the harbour on the Salt Lake the report records four stone anchors, two bearing Cypro-Minoan signs.¹ Karageorghis published the tombs in 1976, in Hala Sultan Tekke 1. Excavations 1897–1971, pp. 70–89.³