Kouklia: the British Kouklia Expedition (Liverpool and St Andrews)

The British Kouklia Expedition began with a bicycle tour in 1949, when Terence Bruce Mitford and John Henry (Harry) Iliffe heard of Archaic sculpture found in a mound outside Kouklia and decided to dig there¹. The mound stood on Marchello hill at Palaepaphos and was the expedition's main site from 1950 to 1955^2,3. Between 1951 and 1954 the expedition also excavated Late Cypriot cemeteries at Evreti, Asproyi and Kaminia⁴. Liverpool City Museum and the University of St Andrews were the sponsors^2,4. Mitford was mainly responsible for organisation and Iliffe for archaeological direction².

Permits and the trial season

The Director of Antiquities, A. H. S. Megaw, first agreed only to a permit for soundings in a wide area, which should not impair the sites as targets for other excavators. In 1951 a licence valid for a maximum of two years, and renewable, applied to plots specified by number, with first refusal of other sites in the larger area; Liverpool Museums and St Andrews paid^1,5.

The 1950 season ran for four weeks, in June and July, at two places, Site A and Site C². The stated aims were to establish the occupation chronology, study the topography, investigate the area of the Temple of Aphrodite and seek syllabic inscriptions in dated contexts². Site A was a mound of rubble and Archaic architectural and sculptural material over a substantial wall and tower; the excavation cleared no more than one-fifth of it². Mitford and Iliffe said its purpose was obscure, and listed siege-work among the possible uses². Site C, a confined sounding west of the sanctuary clearance of 1888, found Roman and earlier structures above a Late Bronze Age level with Mycenaean pottery, copper slag and jar handles bearing Cypro-Minoan signs^2,6.

Most of the 1950 finds were left for the present at the Inscription House at Kouklia or the Museum at Ktima; a few went to the Cyprus Museum, and a male statue and selected terracottas went on loan to Liverpool Museums².

The cemeteries

In 1952 George Roy Haslam Wright directed the excavation of the Late Bronze Age cemetery at Evreti, working from 1 to 22 July; Catling's account of that season counts ten productive tombs excavated and recorded⁴. The annual report records eight partly disturbed tombs, mainly with Late Cypriot III contents and evidence of earlier use in Mycenaean IIIA and IIIB⁷. Tomb 8 held two hemispherical silver bowls, a carved ivory mirror handle showing a man slaying a lion, a gold ring with a sealstone bearing two bulls and Cypro-Mycenaean signs, and six gold rings with cloisonné bezels⁷. Catling's final report says that Mitford, with the assistance of E. M. Hunter, completed the Evreti excavation in 1954⁴.

In 1951 Basil Hennessy excavated two tombs at Skales for the expedition, and Asproyi Tomb I was found by a sounding prompted by a dressed limestone block⁴. In 1953 Mitford, assisted by Hunter, moved from Evreti to Asproyi and then to Kaminia^4,8. Ten tombs were excavated in a cemetery that seems to have succeeded Evreti, and the report dates them to Late Cypriot III A and B⁸. At Kaminia the team found a complex of hurried burials of young people, mostly female, who bear witness, Mitford suggests, to a pestilence or the privations of some long siege⁸. A recess on the city side of the fosse beneath the siege mound held about thirty burials of the thirteenth to twelfth centuries BC⁸.

Catling writes that the Late Cypriot cemeteries seem to have been victims of development, not of systematic looting⁴. He interprets Late Cypriot burial at Palaepaphos as a two-stage process, with burial in individual earth-pit graves followed by transfer of the skeletal remains to nearby chamber tombs⁴.

The siege mound and the gate

The 1952 campaign exposed a tunnel under the wall into the fosse, with piers and a bronze cauldron⁷. In 1953 the team found a third tunnel cut by the defenders, another cauldron, more Archaic sculpture and syllabic inscriptions, and the second tower of a gateway, and the annual report now described the mound as the siege mound raised by the Persians against Paphos in 498 BC⁸. The same year P. L. Shinnie, on leave from the Sudan, dug a trial at Site F north of the temple from 3 to 27 July^1,8. Franz Georg Maier writes that the structures uncovered in 1953 were later ascertained to form part of the North Hall of the sanctuary¹.

No new excavation took place in 1954; Iliffe made supplementary investigations west of the mound, confirming a gate flanked by twin towers whose width had been reduced more than once⁹. In 1955 operations were restricted to the systematic dismantling of the mound. The annual report counted 190 syllabic inscriptions, which Mitford said had yielded the names of four kings of the sixth or possibly seventh century BC, and described a Greek bronze helmet with a running lion and a snake in its engraved decoration³. Maier writes that the EOKA crisis ended the expedition's work in 1955, when its main sites were far from fully excavated⁵.

Division of finds and publication

The division of the Late Bronze Age cemetery finds took place in 1955. Under the legislation then in force, the allocation to the expedition could be exported to museums of its choosing, and it went to Britain, except for Asproyi Tomb IV, which was allocated with its records to the Nicholson Museum at Sydney University⁴. Catling visited the divided material in Nicosia, Kouklia, St Andrews, Liverpool and Birmingham in 1966 and 1967⁴. He describes unsuccessful later efforts to recover an essential part of the excavation archive that had been taken to Australia⁴.

Catling attributes the long delay in the final reports to numerous vicissitudes⁴. His Kouklia: Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Tombs at Palaepaphos 1951–1954 appeared in 2020, after his death, with contributions from others including Briggs Buchanan on the cylinder seals⁴. Maier's Nordost-Tor und persische Belagerungsrampe in Alt-Paphos published the excavation record of the siege mound and gate in 2008 as volume 6 of Ausgrabungen in Alt-Paphos auf Cypern¹⁰.