Palaepaphos-Skales: the Department's emergency excavation

In Tomb 49 at Skales, the Department of Antiquities found three bronze obeloi, and one of them carries five signs read as the Greek genitive name Opheltau or Opheltas^1,2. Vassos Karageorghis, Director of the Department of Antiquities, directed the excavation at Skales, a cemetery about 1200 m south-east of the village of Kouklia, in 1979 and 1980^3,4.

Levelling and rescue

Agricultural levelling in January 1979 exposed tombs numbered T. 42–57. The local Custodian, George Ioannou, removed their contents to Kouklia Museum, and no record, plans or photographs of the objects in place were made; the account of what they held rests on his recollection³. The ceilings of almost all the tombs collapsed under the weight of the bulldozer, which accounts for the fragmentary condition of the objects found in the chambers³.

Systematic excavation began at the start of April 1979 and lasted three months³. The Department excavated the whole affected area to rescue tombs from destruction, since deep-ploughing machinery was due to work there after the levelling, and the operation, begun as an emergency, grew into a major one³. The foreman was Andreas Georghiou, and the technicians were supplemented by labourers, most of them refugees living in Kouklia village³. The season produced about 35 deep rock-cut tombs, dating from early Cypro-Geometric I to the Hellenistic period⁵. Karageorghis reported about 4,000 objects from this one season, an average of a hundred per tomb⁶. A second campaign in 1980 dug twelve tombs, eleven chamber tombs and one child's pit grave, from the 11th century BCE to the Hellenistic period; the report records the first cremation burials found at Palaepaphos⁴.

The Cypro-Geometric tombs

Most of the chamber tombs face north-east to south-west, with the dromos on the south-west, following the slope³. Karageorghis holds that the earliest use of the necropolis is not attested before the middle of the 11th century BCE³.

Tomb 49 had a short rectangular dromos 315 cm long and a floor 440 cm below ground³. It held bronze bowls, a bronze tripod, a bronze spearhead, a large limestone bathtub, the three obeloi, and two reasonably complete male skeletons and part of a third, with most of the vases piled on the right of the chamber^2,3. Only the Custodian saw the contents in place³. Karageorghis takes the large Tomb 49 group to span the whole of Cypro-Geometric I³. He calls the Opheltas obelos evidence for the earliest use of Greek on Cyprus, in the 11th century BCE, and links it to Mycenaean colonists and the Arcadian dialect of the mythical founder Agapenor³. The other two obeloi bear signs of the Cypriot syllabic tradition that cannot be read the same way². Masson defends the high date against Powell's doubts, which rested on an unpublished oral remark by I. Nicolaou¹.

Tomb 89 was a rich tomb of the 11th century with a cremation, and a floor more than 4 m below the present surface⁴. It held two massive gold pins, a faience seal with hieroglyphs and a stone scarab 7 cm across with the cartouche of Amenhotep III, which the report calls the largest found on Cyprus^3,4. Tomb 83 is the only other Cypro-Geometric I tomb with a cremation, the ashes of both in amphorae³.

The later tombs held Black-on-Red and Bichrome Red wares, terracotta figurines including a goddess with uplifted arms from T. 62:50 and a horse and rider from T. 52:2, and a Phoenician inscription on T. 69:66³. Twelve Canaanite amphorae and other eastern imports came from the tombs, and Karageorghis presents Skales as showing Palaepaphos as a wealthy trading centre in Cypro-Geometric I-II³. Twenty individuals from nine tombs were studied as a skeletal series, reported as surprisingly uniform³. Karageorghis writes that none of the tombs had been looted in recent times, and ascribes this to their depth and the collapse of their ceilings³.

Finds and publication

The finds went to the Cyprus Museum, where thousands of vases and hundreds of metal objects were cleaned and mended in its workshops and those of the district museums³. Franz Georg Maier accepted the final volume, Palaepaphos-Skales: An Iron Age Cemetery in Cyprus, for the series Ausgrabungen in Alt-Paphos, where it appeared in 1983 as volume 3³. The Gerda Henkel Foundation paid for the drawings, made by Elias Markou³. When the volume was written, Skales was covered by fields and sparsely dotted carob trees, and Karageorghis wrote that the cemetery no doubt extends beyond the area the Department excavated³.