Idalion: Ohnefalsch-Richter's excavations for the British Museum, 1883

In 1883 Max Ohnefalsch-Richter excavated at Idalion for Sir Charles Newton of the British Museum. The catalogue of the Cyprus Museum records the necropolis as excavated that year, with burials of all periods from the Late Bronze Age onward, and notes tombs in the Paradisi valley. It adds that the Aphrodite Kourotrophos sanctuary west of the town had been found ransacked.¹

Horacek dates Ohnefalsch-Richter's first excavation on the eastern acropolis to 1883, in area no. 7, where he reported stone sculptures and terracotta figurines, all of them female. He identified the sanctuary with Aphrodite-Astarte; no inscription confirms the deity's name, and Horacek calls it a sanctuary of a female deity.²

Ohnefalsch-Richter reportedly said that the area no. 7 finds were acquired by the British Museum. Horacek states that they probably never reached it.^2,3 His original documentation for the eastern acropolis, with find lists, photographs, drawings and plans, is held in the archive of the Antikensammlung in Berlin.³