Nea Paphos: Department excavations at the House of Orpheus and the city walls (Michaelides)

In 1984 the Department of Antiquities uncovered at Maloutena, in Kato Paphos, a mosaic of Orpheus playing a cithara among animals and birds, which the excavation report called the first signed mosaic found in Cyprus; the house, first known as the House of Herakles, was renamed after it¹. Demetrios Michaelides directed the work for the Department of Antiquities, and also cleared the Hellenistic rock-cut wall and ditch near the North-West Gate of Nea Paphos¹.

A Hercules mosaic had been located in 1942 by RAF air-raid-shelter digging, and K. Nicolaou traced it again without excavating the site systematically; the Department began systematic excavation in 1982^2,3. Michaelides, Archaeological Officer for the Paphos District in 1982–1987, worked one to two months a year, and he described the work as still in progress in 1991^2,4.

The first campaign, from 27 September to 15 October 1982, cleared the Herakles and Nemean lion mosaic and excavated a small area to the east. Five rooms were more or less completely dug, all with floors of beaten earth and sand belonging to the last phase; the walls showed two construction phases, the earlier Hellenistic. The report has the excavated part abandoned about the middle of the 2nd century AD, probably after an earthquake⁵. In 1983 the excavators finished rooms partly cleared the year before and extended the dig south and west. A room of about 4.20 x 4.80 m south of the Herakles mosaic room had a sounding that revealed a well-preserved mosaic of animals and birds, and stratified material was not later than the mid 2nd century AD⁶.

The Orpheus mosaic

The third campaign, in 1984, extended the dug area south to about 466 m² and found painted plaster, hard beaten-earth floors and six Hellenistic coins in the fill of an earlier wall. The main discovery was the Orpheus mosaic, in a room of 4.25 x 5.10 m¹. A Greek inscription above Orpheus names Pinnius Restitutus. The 1984 notice took it to name the musivarius, whereas Michaelides in 1991 reads it as probably naming the house owner who paid for the mosaic^1,2. The 1984 notice counts nine wild beasts, a snake and six birds; Michaelides counts eight mammals, one reptile and six birds^1,2. He describes the panel as the largest single non-composite figural representation known on the island, with only one other Orpheus mosaic in Cyprus, from Salamis and now destroyed².

The largest mosaic room, about 7 x 6.5 m, has two figural panels in a geometric field: Hercules about to seize the Nemean lion, and a standing Amazon beside her horse. Michaelides reads the layout as a triclinium^2,5. In the south-west a mosaic of pale grey-green tesserae, its patterns made only by the setting of the tesserae, was badly damaged by modern ploughing; Michaelides states that it has no parallel in Cyprus and few elsewhere^2,7. Lamps found with scraped-off wall plaster in a pit beneath its bedding give the end of the 1st century AD as a terminus ante for the fresco².

The city wall

In 1984 the Department cleared the rock-cut city wall and ditch for about 150 m south of the North-West Gate, mostly by machine, with the wall and towers cleaned by hand¹. The wall stood up to about 7.15 m high, with two towers cut in rock and faced with blocks, one square and one probably polygonal, and a rock-cut bridge led to the gate¹. The ditch was filled with debris, probably thrown in after wall and ditch went out of use (the report asks whether in the Arab invasions), with finds from the Hellenistic period to late antiquity and practically nothing later than the 7th century AD¹. A bronze arrowhead was lodged in the wall face above the polygonal tower, and a hoard of 18 bronze coins of Augustus (?) lay in a niche cut in the wall¹.

In 1986 the ditch north of the gate was cleared, giving about 240 m of wall and ditch in all, and three Hellenistic pit tombs were opened and found empty. Three large trenches east of the gate, dug in November, found a rock-cut chamber and a large rock-cut passage, 1.20 m wide and 5 m high where explored, crossed by a small rock-cut bridge carrying two channels with clay pipes⁷.

The house and its phases

By about 1991 an area of roughly 32 x 42 m had been exposed. Two public roads form the east and north limits, the west limit is undefined, and later rebuilding to the south altered the plan. A rectangular atrium with a partly preserved peristyle lies near the single east entrance, with smaller rooms west of it and a small bath complex with a hypocaust in the north-east corner². Michaelides reports an earlier early-Roman house under the Orpheus mosaic and, below it, a mid-Hellenistic structure with earthen floors; at 1.55 m below the mosaic floor lay quarried bedrock with fill containing late 4th-century BC sherds, contemporary with the foundation of Nea Paphos². He dates the mosaics and the rest of the house to the late 2nd or early 3rd century AD, as the last of a series of structures on the site^2,3. In 1988 he judged the plan not yet intelligible, with about 600 m² excavated³.

In 1986 the work concentrated on the east and south sides. The atrium found in 1984 was fully cleared, and trenches on the street facade were meant to relate the house to the Villa of Theseus. South of the atrium lay a storeroom with eight large pithoi in place, a stone stair, and a deposit with pottery, lamps and a hoard of 76 Roman coins. Finds included a gem with a satyr, a gold pendant and a boat-shaped multiple lamp⁷. In 1987 five pithoi of the last phase were emptied and consolidated in place from the inside with gauze and glue, and soil from them was kept for analysis, their contents still unknown. A well 1.30 m deep, filled with small wall-painting fragments and lamps, was the most notable discovery of that year, and rooms with waterproof floors and hypocaust tiles in the north-east corner suggested baths nearby⁴.

The boat-shaped lamp (PHH 380), 37.7 cm long, with relief decoration of Egyptian deities including Serapis and Harpokrates, is exhibited in the Paphos District Museum, and a terracotta of a reclining female figure on a kline (PHH 54), found in 1987, is stored there^8,9. Michaelides described the house in a chapter of 1991 and, with Daszewski, in the Guide to the Paphos Mosaics of 1988^2,3.