Idalion: the Department of Antiquities excavations at Ambelleri

The Department of Antiquities excavations at Ambelleri in Idalion yielded more than 700 Phoenician inscriptions and about 30 Greek syllabic documents, according to Amadasi Guzzo and Zamora López, who date the texts between the second half of the fifth and the end of the fourth century BC¹. They came from a Classical administrative complex on the north and west lower terraces, dug under Maria Hadjicosti from 1991^1,2.

The 1991 to 1995 seasons

The Department of Antiquities opened an area of about 225 square metres on the north lower sloping terrace in 1991, about ten metres east of the American excavation, mostly to a depth of about two metres². The initial research asked whether the city walls and monumental buildings on the West Terrace extended along the eastern and northern lower slopes of Ambelleri². The work identified three Classical-period phases, including rooms and a courtyard, which the excavators at first read as part of a working area².

In 1992 four parallel adjoining rooms, Rooms 1 to 4, were exposed around Courtyard A². Room 2 held six large pithoi set into a raised floor, and Room 4 a further row of four broken pithoi in situ; the rooms also yielded figurines, loomweights, iron slag and coins². Room 1 had a fragmentary column capital, two terracotta figurines and a coin of Pumiathon of Kition, and Room 2 two coins of Pumiathon, one of Alexander the Great and two Phoenician ostraka near the last pithos². The report interpreted the complex as part of the administrative centre of Idalion under Phoenician rule in the fifth and fourth centuries BC².

In 1993 the team investigated the northern slope for the city wall and the ground between Courtyard A and the American excavation for the west wing, exposing part of the wall and Rooms 6 to 8². A contemporary press notice reproduced by Sznycer reports four weeks of work from 16 May to 10 June 1994 on the north perimeter wall and the west part of the administrative building, with a pavement about 1.5 metres below the rooms' floors and a wall of at least three architectural phases³. In 1995 the west wing gave Room 10, interpreted as a workshop, and three successive floors in Room 8². A trial excavation that year on the lower north-east terrace, supervised by G. Georgiou and Th. Theodoulou, found a Late Bronze Age site 70 m east of the Classical buildings⁴.

The archive

The rooms of the complex yielded Phoenician and Cypro-syllabic ostraka and inscribed gypsum plaques. Of 25 ostraka found in 1992, 21 came from Room 1². In Rooms 6 to 8, 31 inscribed objects included 27 local gypsum plaques; 26 of them bore Phoenician ink inscriptions and one carried Cypro-syllabic text, and Costas Xenophontos identified the stone². Nineteen further Phoenician inscriptions were recovered in 1995². Olivier Masson and Sznycer studied the inscriptions².

Hadjicosti dated the last use of the four north-wing rooms to after 333 BC and probably before the Ptolemaic occupation of Cyprus². Her 1997 summary has the kingdom of Idalion ceasing to exist around the middle of the fifth century and the Acropolis abandoned at the end of the fourth century BC⁴. The report for 1992 noted that the excavated rooms showed no evidence of violent destruction and may have been abandoned gradually². Pamela Gaber reports that the Department's excavations found a Phoenician administrative complex immediately above the destroyed Cypriot monumental architecture, founded around 450 BCE⁵. Sznycer describes the excavations as having brought to light the economic archives of the Idalion administration, whose study should help clarify the economic system of the Phoenician city³.

Walls, towers and Late Cypriot workshops

A 15-metre exposed section of the city wall was 2.5 metres wide and, in Hadjicosti's report, dated to the end of the Archaic or beginning of the Classical period². The 1997 to 1999 programme concentrated on uncovering and restoring the earlier fortifications beneath and around the administrative building⁶. Steel summarises a tower with three phases and traces of burning assigned to a Cypro-Archaic II destruction horizon, with metallurgical debris; a limestone drain was found in 1998 and an oil press in 2000⁶. Hadjicosti reports that slag, crucible fragments with metal remains and stone vessel fragments identify Room 10 and Courtyard A as metalworking areas⁴.

On the lower slopes about 70 metres north-east of the administrative building, Steel reports Late Cypriot workshops with a dressed masonry wall and pottery of the twelfth to eleventh centuries BC, and an imported Mycenaean figurine head⁶. The 1995 trial excavation there found three architectural phases, walls, ovens and pithos-shaped pits, indicating industrial installations, with pottery of Late Cypriot IIIA, IIIB and Cypro-Geometric I and a few Late Cypriot IIC pieces⁴.

A Department press release republished online describes the twentieth season, in 2010, with about 2,000 square metres investigated on the Ampileri foothills, two building complexes flanking a large interior tower, and a triple olive press⁷. The excavations under Hadjicosti continued through 2012, and by the time of the 2016 report the excavated area on the north and west terraces had reached 5,225 square metres¹.

Finds and publication

Finds of the Department's excavations from 1991 to 1995 were numbered in an Inventory Book with the prefix ID A, for Idalion-Ampileri⁴. Hadjicosti's report on the 1991 to 1995 seasons appeared in Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes 24 (1995), and her overview of the kingdom of Idalion in Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 308 (1997)^2,4. M. G. Amadasi Guzzo has studied the Phoenician inscriptions from 2011, and J. A. Zamora López joined in 2012¹. Sznycer remarks that the finds were officially largely unpublished³. Most of the Idalion inscriptions are reported to be held in the storerooms of the Museum of Nicosia¹.