Kition: Ohnefalsch-Richter's Excavations for the British Museum

In 1879 part of the Bamboula mound at Kition was demolished to fill in the stagnant harbour basin, a marshy area associated with ill-health including malaria; the soil of the mound served as fill^1,2. The Cyprus Museum catalogue records necropolis excavations at Kition by Max Ohnefalsch-Richter for Sir Charles Newton of the British Museum in 1879–1882². H. M. Sinclair, a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, supervised the work and submitted a report and sketch plan¹. The demolition exposed foundation walls and yielded a small sanctuary group with terracotta and stone figures and two Phoenician inscriptions^1,2.

Kiely and Fourrier write that up to half of the original mound was destroyed, and that the surviving reports and plans are schematic and hard to reconcile with each other¹. They judge the assemblage heterogeneous in date and function rather than a single deposit, and suggest that Newton's description, "found in a pile of rubbish", fits the group better than Ohnefalsch-Richter's proposed sanctuary context¹. No excavation protocols survive for Ohnefalsch-Richter's sites, according to Buchholz³.

A group of Bamboula finds reached the British Museum in 1880, presented in the name of Earl Granville¹. Kiely and Fourrier catalogue 26 surviving objects, among them terracotta figurines, a terracotta bull protome, limestone sculpture, a miniature stone bathtub and gypsum objects, dated from Late Cypriot III to Roman times¹. Two gypsum plaques with Phoenician inscriptions, inv. 1880/7–10/43 and 1880/7–10/44, are read in the 2012 study as accounts of expenditure and wages; their archaeological context is unknown¹. In 1881 Ohnefalsch-Richter excavated the Artemis Paralia sanctuary near the east shore of the Salt Lake at Larnaca-Salines, found ransacked, with late inscriptions and many terracottas, and cleared the megalithic chamber at Phaneromeni for Claude Delaval Cobham, Commissioner of Larnaka². A Hellenistic marble Artemis found in 1880 in the Saparilla garden in New Larnaka is recorded as now in the Vienna Hof-Museum².