Kition: Luigi Palma di Cesnola's Excavations

Luigi Palma di Cesnola began investigating ancient Citium in 1866, on a low hill west of Marina or Skala at Kition¹. Di Paolo reports that he described a large cemetery, which he said he had explored intensively (about 3,000 tombs), and possibly a temple from which terracotta figurines came¹. At the Salines, on the northern shore of the salt lake, excavations are reported from summer 1866 to summer 1867². Maillard reports that eyewitness accounts describe real excavation trenches, though few details of the work survive, and that, by his British predecessor's account, Cesnola took no fewer than 1,000 objects, 500 of which that predecessor judged to be in good condition². She reports his claim to have found wall foundations and plaster fresco fragments on the mound, and questions whether this repeats discoveries already reported by Georges Colonna-Ceccaldi². Two marble pedestals with inscriptions that Cesnola read as dedications to Demeter Paralia are recorded under Metropolitan Museum inventory numbers 74.51.2432 and 74.51.2440; Maillard says that reading is false². She argues that the exact location of the deposits is uncertain, and that in 2014 she found terracottas of the same type as the nineteenth-century finds along up to 31 metres beside the lake path, which she interprets as coming from the same cult deposits².

At Batsalos, a small mound beside the Salt Lake opposite Hala Sultan Tekke, Cesnola excavated in 1869 according to Bombardieri and Cannavò, and in 1869 or 1870 according to Yon^3,4. Bombardieri and Cannavò identify a fragmentary marble bowl lug with a Phoenician inscription as his find from there, and date the inscription on palaeographic grounds to the Classical period, particularly the first decades of the fourth century BCE⁴. They argue that Cesnola included it in his first donation to the Royal Academy of Medicine in Turin at the beginning of 1870; it is now in the University Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology in Turin⁴. Yon reports that no remains were visible at Batsalos when she wrote³, and Maillard reports that the area identified with the Salines finds is now covered by military-base structures².