Mari: Department excavation of an Archaic tomb (1991)

In 1991 consolidation work on the old building housing the mayor's office at Mari uncovered Tomb 1, a rock-cut Cypro-Archaic I chamber tomb that had not been looted; Maria Hadjicosti of the Department of Antiquities excavated it, and she describes it as the first unlooted tomb excavated so far in the area of Mari¹. The chamber was trapezoidal with rounded corners, entered through a long stomion blocked by a large worked limestone slab; the entrance faced east and the dromos was not excavated¹. Benches were cut along three sides: the west bench held the grave gifts, the north bench a man, the south bench a woman and a child¹.

Sherry C. Fox analysed the skeletons: an adult male of at least 26 years with osteoarthritis, an adult female about 155.7 cm tall, and a child of 4 to 5 years who was identified among the woman's bones only at examination¹. The offerings included five large storage amphorae and, in a row on the west bench, twelve amphoriskoi, jugs and bowls; metal objects on the floor nearer the man were a bronze bowl (no. 21), an iron knife (no. 23), a fragmentary bronze fibula (no. 24) and an iron sword (no. 25)¹. The sword, found below the north bench near his left side, is 82.0 cm long without the pommel and leaf-bladed, with traces of a wood and leather scabbard and ivory hilt plates fixed with silver-covered bronze rivets; Hadjicosti assigns it to Snodgrass's Type III¹. The pottery is entirely Gjerstad Type IV, with one early Phoenician ware specimen, and Hadjicosti dated the tomb to the second half of the 7th century BC, not long after 650 BC¹.

Hadjicosti interprets the man as a warrior or high-ranking official, perhaps connected with the army, in a Vasilikos valley community presumably under the kingdom of Amathus, and notes that sword, knife, bronze bowl and fibula occur together only in this tomb¹. The excavation was reported in the Report of the Department of Antiquities in 1997 and discussed again by Hadjicosti in 2002^1,2.