Idalion, Goshi and Pyla: Robert Hamilton Lang's excavations (sanctuary of Apollo)

Digging at Idalion in 1869 produced a Phoenician and Cypriot syllabic bilingual inscription, found on 30 July, that enabled the decipherment of the Cypriot syllabary^1,2. It came from a walled sanctuary that Robert Hamilton Lang, manager of the Imperial Ottoman Bank agency at Larnaca, had organised and paid gangs of workmen to uncover in 1868 and 1869^1,3.

Finding the temenos

Workmen found its upper half in a field belonging to the son of Hadgi Georgi, and Lang increased his workmen and dug for fully two months⁴. Lang places this in spring 1868; Tatton-Brown gives summer 1868^4,5. Hadji Georgi Styllis was put in charge of Lang's excavating teams and brought him the news of the statue; Hasan, a Turk from Dali, led the other team⁴. Lang later bought the adjacent field⁴.

Lang writes in his 1878 report that the statue's size and weight convinced him it stood where it had been set up, on a temple site, and that he resolved to uncover the whole site because no Cypriot temple had been explored systematically⁶. He had no firman. He records that the British Embassy could not obtain one because the Porte intended to form a museum, and that he told the governor that a firman was needed to stop him^3,4.

The workmen dug selected areas and followed the lines of walls as they met them^4,6. Ulbrich infers some recording in the field from the detail of Lang's text, published eleven years after the dig⁶. Lang took part in digging again at the beginning of summer 1869⁵.

The sanctuary and its sculpture

The temenos lay on the lower slope of the eastern hill (Mouti tou Arvili), east of the road from Dali to Lymbia^5,6. Connelly describes a walled enclosure 13 metres square with small buildings, steps up to an open court, three rows of statue bases along the north wall with broken statues around them, and two stone troughs of statuette heads². Lang himself gives a dug area of about 130 feet square, 9 to 11 feet deep¹. Around a podium he took to be an altar he recorded a layer of ash and animal bones, and his report carries what Ulbrich calls the first topographical plan of a Cypriot sanctuary⁶.

Lang reports not less than a thousand statues and statuettes, ranging in his view over six centuries or more⁴. Pryce published 165 votive sculptures reportedly from the dig and classed 45 as archaic, 64 as classical and 42 as Hellenistic². Gaber and Morden give 142 in the British Museum¹. Besides the bilingual, the dig yielded two coin hoards². The Phoenician texts name Reshef Mikal and the Greek texts Apollo Amyklos¹, identifications that Gaber and Morden place in the fifth century BC¹. They suggest the sanctuary is better called the Adonis Temenos; Tatton-Brown is disinclined to believe it was dedicated to Adonis^1,5.

Tatton-Brown dates the earliest sculptures to the end of the 7th or early 6th century BC and reads a Roman lamp of AD 40–100 as showing that the sanctuary lasted into the Roman period; Gaber and Morden date the earliest gifts to about 600 BC^1,5.

The collection and the report

Lang says he shipped his statues out of Larnaca by an unofficial route⁴. Reginald Stuart Poole, the British Museum's envoy, reported on the collection in Lang's house at Larnaca; his manuscript report is dated 9 February 1870 and submitted 12 March 1870^4,6. The Trustees' minutes of 13 July 1872 are listed as completing the purchase by the British Museum, after earlier minutes from 1869 to 1871 had considered reports on it^6,7. The British Museum holds the upper part of a colossal statue dated about 500–480 BC, catalogued as GR 1872.8–16.39⁵. Lang also bought antiquities found by others, and several objects from his collections were distributed to other museums under provenances other than Dali or Pyla⁶.

Lang's Narrative of Excavations in a Temple at Dali (Idalium) in Cyprus, with Poole's observations, was read in 1871 and printed in 1878⁸. Ulbrich judges Lang the first of many amateur archaeologists to excavate a Cypriot temenos systematically and to publish a report of its kind, though still motivated mainly by antiquarian interests⁶.

Terracing of the slope destroyed every trace of Lang's trenches before Ohnefalsch-Richter visited Idalion. The University of Arizona Expedition used Lang's plan and description to re-identify and uncover part of the sanctuary, and found that Lang had cleared down to bedrock^1,6.