Nea Paphos: the Tombs of the Kings excavation (Hadjisavvas)

At the Tombs of the Kings, Hadjisavvas counts five monumental hypogea with peristyle atria and one tumulus among the principal results of the Department of Antiquities excavations, some of them partly restored¹. Sophocles Hadjisavvas directed the work for the Department of Antiquities in the northern necropolis of Nea Paphos, the Tombs of the Kings². He gives the span as 1977 to 1990 and 14 seasons¹; the annual notices document campaigns through the eleventh, in 1987³.

Hadjisavvas places the start of systematic work in the Department's programme of excavation in the free part of Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974, with special emphasis on Paphos. He describes two objectives: a public one, to add monuments for cultural tourism, and his own scientific one, to investigate a site that for centuries was at the mercy of treasure hunters¹. The first season targeted the area between the two principal peristyle tombs and a space north of the ensemble². Hadjisavvas reports a 5 x 5 m grid in the available area south and west of Tomb 3, and tombs numbered by year and order of discovery¹.

The first campaigns, 1977 to 1981

In 1977 the excavators cleaned 20 tombs, most of them pillaged, and identified tomb groups divided by walls as family burial concessions. They recorded six child burials, one in a Roman amphora, part of a Roman house and a drainage system; finds included silver animal-headed earrings and a gold earring representing Eros². In 1978 they excavated a Hellenistic tomb in the south-east sector with a stepped dromos, atrium and burial chamber, later modified in Roman times, and in the north-west sector a complex with a 12-pillared peristyle atrium, 14.8 m square and covering 390 m². It was reused from Hellenistic times into the medieval period, including as the location of a pottery kiln⁴.

The campaign of 1979 completed a large tomb, exposing its atrium, three loculi and a well 5.50 m deep; the burials had been disturbed and only two Roman lamps and pottery were recovered. A second, multi-chamber tomb was begun, with an atrium 16 m long and up to 12 m wide, chambers and a 13-step dromos⁵. In 1980 the excavators completed a complex whose open court surrounded a central rock block instead of a peristyle atrium. Of 18 burials, three Hellenistic ones were intact, and finds included painted architectural fragments, ivory toilet objects and glass. The excavators proposed destruction by earthquake without establishing a date⁶. The fifth campaign, in 1981, completed the complex begun in 1979, identifying dividing walls and a second stepped dromos. The report proposed that built parts collapsed in the first century AD, probably after the earthquakes of AD 79, and recorded a sealed lead vessel containing burnt offerings and seeds⁷.

Symons, summarising the work to 1985, writes that blocking walls of the 1st century AD cut the 1979 complex in half and required a second entry stair, and that four small tombs were inserted south of it. In one, a horse skeleton with horseshoes later than the 5th century AD covered a disturbed Hellenistic burial, which Symons presumes was the burial of medieval squatters⁸.

Tomb 8 and the debate over the mausolea

Hadjisavvas describes Tomb 8 (Tomb 1979/1) as a rock cube surrounded by four open wings, with a well, shaft graves, bone depositories and a Doric-fronted principal loculus found empty. Three intact Hellenistic shaft graves lay on the floors of the West and North Wings, protected by fallen pediment fragments, and the east half was reused for many Roman burials. He proposes collapse in earthquakes of the 1st century BC or AD. Coins of Cleopatra VII lay in the debris of the West Wing, and two falcons (earlier publications call them eagles) flanked the empty loculus; Hadjisavvas does not exclude a cenotaph intended for a member of the Ptolemaic family¹.

Mavrojannis (2016) proposed that Tomb 8 was the mausoleum of Ptolemy Eupator, reading an inscription on an epistyle. Hadjisavvas rejects this: he says the painted epistyle shows torches and shields, and that a grave sealed under the West Wing floor with Rhodian amphorae of 131 and 132 BC gives a terminus post quem for the pediment, excluding a burial of 152 BC. He also disputes the reading of Tombs 1 and 8 as mausolea by Michaelides and Guimier-Sorbets, arguing that Tomb 1 was an underground tomb with a stepped dromos used for at least 7 burials¹. He says the resemblance of the peristyle tombs to monuments at Mustapha Pasha in Alexandria was suggested from the very beginning of the excavation, and he disputes Mavrojannis's attribution of the idea to Michaelides and Guimier-Sorbets¹. Guimier-Sorbets and Michaelides suggest that at least some tombs may have belonged to well-to-do Cypriots who tried to emulate the style and trends of Alexandria⁹.

The 20 m dromos and the tumulus, 1982 to 1987

In 1982 the sixth campaign finished a well, finding water at 12 m below the rock surface, and found the rock-cut Hellenistic Tomb 1982/1, with a stepped dromos, atrium, chamber, loculi and bone deposits; finds included lamps, glass unguentaria and an ivory pyxis lid¹⁰. The seventh campaign, in 1983, excavated a tomb with a 20 m stepped dromos, reported as the longest excavated in Cyprus, leading to a peristyle court and a barrel-vaulted burial chamber, with painted plaster imitating marble. The report dates its use to the early Hellenistic period and notes later Roman use of part of the dromos. The excavators also located and began work on the largest surviving tumulus in the necropolis¹¹. In 1984 they completed the large tomb and continued at the tumulus, where two funerary enclosures and seven pit tombs, three of them cenotaphs, were investigated¹². Hadjisavvas dates the tumulus's first use to the third century BC, citing a painted lagynos, stamped Rhodian amphora handles and a coin of Ptolemy II Philadelphus¹. In Symons's survey of 1981–85 it was partly excavated, covering three tomb complexes and almost 30 single burials⁸.

The tenth campaign, in 1986, worked about 300 m² of the northern necropolis. It found a Hellenistic chamber tomb with six loculi, lamps, pottery and two imported alabaster bottles, and began a second large complex with a four-step dromos, atrium and several chambers; conservation was also undertaken on tombs excavated in the early twentieth century¹³. In 1987 the eleventh campaign completed a Hellenistic complex entered by a three-step dromos, with a rectangular atrium, apsidal podium, plastered rock pillars and two burial chambers. Debris from pyres included bird bones, eggs, pottery, a glass ring, gold myrtle leaves, coins and a terracotta lamp³.

The Department's conservators reinforced the eastern parapet of Tomb 8 in 1992 with stone from the site¹. Hadjisavvas states that a final publication of the site was still pending in 2017, and Lawall and Lund in 2013 describe the 734 stamped amphora handles from the excavation as not yet published^1,14.