Larnaca: Department Rescue Excavations of 2008–2009 (Liperti Street and Pampoula)

In autumn 2008 four chamber tombs came out of four adjacent plots at the corner of Daidalou Street and Liperti Street in Larnaca, and one of them, Tomb 128, held three stone sarcophagi of the Cypro-Classical period. The plots lie in an area once identified as the western necropolis of Kition¹. The work was directed by the Archaeological Officer Giorgos Georgiou for the Department of Antiquities².

It began as a rescue. According to Georgiou, a mechanical excavator collapsed part of a chamber tomb while two early 20th-century houses were being demolished for a five-storey apartment block; the contractor backfilled it with demolition debris, and a neighbour informed the Director of the Department. The tomb was relocated on the neighbour's information, which Georgiou says the excavation proved accurate¹. The four plots were excavated in the following months, and the tombs were entered in the Larnaka District Museum catalogue as Tombs 128 to 131^1,2.

Tomb 128 is a rock-cut chamber tomb, 9.40 m by 3.20 m, divided into an outer and an inner chamber by a wall with an opening. The three sarcophagi, named A, B and C in order of discovery, stood in the inner chamber¹. Sarcophagus C, of local gypsum stone, held an almost intact male skeleton, aged about 45 to 49, with a copper-alloy mirror and silver bracelets with gold calf-head terminals beneath the coffin. Georgiou dates it to about 450 BC¹. Sarcophagus B is an anthropoid coffin of imported white marble, which Georgiou counts as the tenth published anthropoid sarcophagus from Cyprus¹. Sarcophagus A is a temple-shaped marble sarcophagus with painted decoration, which Georgiou calls the only one of its type in Cyprus from a known archaeological context and dates to about 400 BC¹. He reads the three together as a gradual shift of the Phoenicians of Kition towards a Hellenising identity¹. Of Tomb 130, a built tomb, only the stepped dromos and a side chamber could be excavated, the main chamber lying under a neighbouring plot².

From 7 May to 19 June 2009 Georgiou opened six 5 x 5 m trenches in plot 178 at Pampoula, west of the Larnaka District Museum across Kimonos Street, covering about half the plot. All six showed architectural remains of various periods, and most had stratigraphy more than 3 m deep. The ceramics show use in the Early Cypro-Geometric, Cypro-Classical and Roman periods, with a few Late Bronze Age sherds³. Georgiou published the three sarcophagi in Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes 39 in 2009, and cites drawings, plans and inventory catalogues of the Tomb 128 finds there as forthcoming¹. Where the sarcophagi are now held is not recorded.