Nea Paphos: the French mission (Avignon) on Fabrika hill and the western rampart

A trench cleaned across the western rampart of Nea Paphos in 1997 exposed the curtain wall to its foundations, 3.5 m below the modern road surface, and Hellenistic pottery including Eastern Sigillata A lay in its courses. Louise Steel reports that Claire Balandier dated the wall from this pottery to the end of the third or the beginning of the second century BC¹. A rescue excavation on the same rampart is recorded for 1999².

From 2008 Balandier directed excavation on Fabrika hill for Avignon University, funded by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs^3,4. The first aim was to trace the ancient city wall in its north-eastern part, where its line was still unknown. In April and May 2008 the team traced a wall for more than 20 m, built with one face against the rock and dated by stratigraphy to the very end of the Hellenistic or the beginning of the Roman period. East of the hill, north of the theatre, they found a well-built ashlar wall reused as the foundation of a later building, with mainly Frankish pottery and a seal of Gerardus, Bishop of Bologna, perhaps of the 13th century⁴. Balandier and Morvillez interpreted the north-slope wall as a retaining wall, tentatively built at the end of Ptolemaic rule or soon after the transition to Roman control⁵. In 2009 the Department of Antiquities report describes a building cut into bedrock on the eastern slope, with a destruction layer and a vault, and dates it to the thirteenth century⁶. The third campaign of the second quadriennial programme, in 2016, examined foundations and rock-cut traces that Balandier interprets as a possible gate, tower and curtain wall at the north-east⁷. The report dates the first phase of a Roman building there to the early first century CE⁷.

In 2018 and 2019 Jolanta Młynarczyk of the University of Warsaw co-directed a French-Polish investigation of the temple ground plan and forecourt, with seven trenches opened near the temple platform³. Two skeletons in the forecourt, aligned east-west, are dated by Młynarczyk to the sixth, possibly seventh, century AD³. She concludes that the excavations have yielded no direct evidence that the temple site was specifically devoted to the cult of Aphrodite Paphia³. The results appeared in Studies in Ancient Art and Civilization 24 in 2020 and in Études et Travaux XXXIV in 2021^3,8.