Kourion: British Museum Turner Bequest excavations

In 1895 the British Museum opened 118 tombs at Kourion, running from the Late Bronze Age to Roman times, and found a marble base with a bilingual Greek and Cypriot dedication to Demeter and Kore^1,2. The campaign ran from 24 January to 11 April under H. B. Walters, for the Museum's Turner Bequest excavations, assisted by the Museum's local agents John W. Williamson and Percy Christian^1,3. Walters also explored At Meydan⁴.

The work concentrated on opening tombs and recovering their contents^1,5. Five cemeteries are reported⁵. Site D, east of Episkopi, was the Late Bronze Age cemetery, with imported Mycenaean pottery and local White Slip and Base Ring wares, and later scholarship identifies it as the only one of the five to yield Late Cypriot material^2,5. Walters read the necropolis as support for Strabo's account of an Argive foundation, and from the earliest tombs on the Acropolis he proposed that the city moved there toward the end of the sixth century BC². Steel argues that this reading reflects a Hellenic interpretive tendency, and that the recording and retrieval were inadequate by modern standards⁵. At the temple site (Site C), in a valley north of the Acropolis, a rubbish heap held numerous terracotta figures; the base's inscription records a dedication by Ellovoikos².

At the cemetery of Ayios Ermoyenis (Site B), Walters opened the large three-chamber Tomb 73 on 5 March 1895¹. Bailey and Hockey reconstruct it from his notebook Notes at Curium, the 1900 publication and surviving objects, and report that the notebook has no plan of the tomb and that no on-site photographs seem to survive; they place the tomb's use from very late in the seventh century to the end of the fourth century BC¹. Tomb 80 at the same site gave a silver mastos cup with a Cypriot syllabic inscription, BM GR 1896,2–1.337⁶.

Steel reports that the British Museum kept the bulk of the finds from its Turner Bequest excavations in Cyprus, and that one third of the material worth keeping went to the Government of Cyprus and is now in the Cyprus Museum⁵. A short report by Walters on Kourion is in the 1899 Cyprus Museum catalogue²; the fuller account is "Excavations at Curium" in Excavations in Cyprus (1900), pp. 57–86¹.