Ayia Paraskevi, Nicosia: Ohnefalsch-Richter's excavation of the Bronze Age necropolis

The Cyprus Museum's Bronze Age collection, numbered 1 to 899 in its 1899 catalogue, comes mostly from one cemetery, the very large Bronze Age necropolis at Ayia Paraskevi, a mile south-west of Nicosia¹. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter opened tombs there in 1884 and 1885, eleven for the Cyprus Museum and eighty-one for various residents of Nicosia¹. The catalogue's figures add up to 92 tombs; Kiely and Merrillees print the 81 with a sic, and Schmid writes of nearly a hundred^2,3.

The 1884 and 1885 tombs

The dates differ between authorities. The catalogue gives 1884–5 and Schmid 1884 and 1885, while Myres, writing in 1897, speaks of excavations in 1883–4 and Pezzi of 1883–1885, adding that Ohnefalsch-Richter continued at the site until 1888^1,3,4,5. Schmid, drawing on Ohnefalsch-Richter's own writing, notes that state prisoners were supplied as labourers for the 1884 work³. In 1885 he dug for the Cyprus Museum and for private individuals, and Goring takes this to be his last work for the British Government⁶.

Among the private persons for whom tombs were opened, Schmid names Col. Falkland Warren; Masson thinks Warren may have commissioned the work with others^3,7. Ferdinand Dümmler watched the 1885 excavations¹. Between 26 June and 11 July 1885 he applied for a permit of his own to dig at Ag. Paraskevi, with Ohnefalsch-Richter as overseer, and then gave it up⁸. On 14 July 1885 Samuel Brown applied to dig on private land at A. Paraskevi under Richter's superintendence, and the application was approved on 17 July².

What the tombs held

The tomb groups were recorded in photographs, some with a ground plan, and reproduced in Ohnefalsch-Richter's Kypros (plate CLXXI); the catalogue says that only a few specimens from the cylinder tomb could later be identified from the original photographs¹. The group labelled Agia Paraskevi, 1884, 1 is the tomb of a gold-mounted Babylonian cylinder, Cyprus Museum 4501, a haematite cylinder with a cuneiform inscription that Bezold published in 1885¹. The labelling is not settled: the entry for the cylinder and Myres in 1897 call the tomb 1885, 1^1,4. A second group, 1884, 4, held incised red ware and black slip ware¹.

Kenna reports from a Tomb 14 of 1884 two cylinders, an Old Babylonian one assigned to the later half of the 18th century BC and one of Syro-Egyptian character, together with a Middle Minoan three-sided prism. The Babylonian cylinder carries added Cypriot engraving, which Kenna thinks marks a near-initial date for the hybrid Cypriot cylinder style⁹. Keswani describes Tomb 1, 1884 as holding ceramics of probable LC I date, stone and terracotta whorls, a whetstone and several copper-based artefacts of types she calls characteristic of earlier EC-MC assemblages¹⁰. Karageorghis says Ohnefalsch-Richter explored a number of Late Bronze Age tombs here, citing Kypros plates CLXXI-CLXXIII¹¹. Schmid says that the differing make-up of the tomb groups, with Mycenaean or Mycenaean-influenced vessels in some, helped Ohnefalsch-Richter refine his chronology of the Cypriot Bronze Age³.

Where the finds went

Apart from the Cyprus Museum and the Nicosia residents, 57 objects, mostly duplicate Bronze Age vases from the excavations, were acquired in 1884 by the Anthropological-Ethnographic Department of the Vienna Natural History Museum¹². Pezzi says Ohnefalsch-Richter exported some finds from Ayia Paraskevi to Germany, many now lost, apart from a few vases such as the piriform jars in Berlin and Bonn; whether these came from the 1884–85 digs is not recorded⁵. Col. Falkland Warren presented thirty-four vases from the necropolis to the British Museum in 1888; Kiely and Merrillees say the gift may have originated in the 1885 excavations, while Walters does not link it to Ohnefalsch-Richter^2,13.

Pezzi observes that only a small part of the finds from the nineteenth-century excavations at the necropolis was published⁵. Schmid states that the area is now completely built over by modern Nicosia³.