Salamis: the Cyprus Exploration Fund excavation

In 1890 a trench at Toumpa, on the edge of Salamis, produced a find of painted terracotta figures, which Munro dated with some confidence between 650 and 550 BC¹. Thomas Kiely describes the campaign that found them as the first large-scale attempt to excavate the urban centre of Salamis².

The directors and the Fund

The Cyprus Exploration Fund was the sponsor, and the field directors were H. Arnold Tubbs and John Arthur Ruskin Munro¹. Tubbs wrote the Excavations and Inscriptions sections of the report and Munro the Finds; Munro also took photographs used in it¹. Warwick Wroth examined and reported on the coins¹. A. H. Young, Commissioner of Famagusta, inspected the proposed sites and fixed their boundaries¹. Gregorios Antoniou, called Gregori in the report, was foreman, and Tubbs says he urged the excavation of the limestone-drums site¹.

The Committee of the Fund had early entertained the idea of excavating Salamis. The authors thought the sum at command ludicrously small for the undertaking and called the season's work preliminary to larger operations¹.

The first sod was cut at Site A on 16 January 1890, and the last days, 26 May to 4 June, went to the division of finds, plans, packing and shipment¹. Workers were hired nominally by the day but virtually by the week, and from 150 to 180 were employed for most of the season; 1024 days of full work were recorded¹. The diary gives a workforce of 26 to 117 men and 23 to 70 women¹. When work in the main areas was exhausted, the available workers were put on trial excavations of other parts of the ancient city, which the report gives as the reason for the comparatively large number of trials¹. Kiely adds that the season sampled a very large part of the ancient city².

The town sites

At Site A, where granite columns lay on the surface, the excavators cut intersecting north-south and east-west trenches and tested points with probing shafts¹. They found disturbed deposits, a cement floor and cistern, water channels and walls, with finds from late Roman material to black-glazed and Cypriot pottery, and judged the material too scanty for any general conclusion¹.

Site B, the sand site, produced a large colonnaded enclosure with earlier limestone building remains beneath the later construction. Tubbs dates the older building perhaps to the fourth century BC¹. He called the adjoining complex a temenos of Zeus, while stating that the temple itself was probably still hidden under the sand and that the name rested on an inscription and the character of the buildings¹. Stella Skaltsa states that the complex Munro and Tubbs named the Marble Forum and identified as the Temenos of Zeus was wrongly identified, and that it was securely recognised as a bath-gymnasium only in the 1950s, when the Department of Antiquities excavated it (the Department's excavations)³.

At Site C the excavators found a hillock temple at the southern end of the Agora, where thick walls formed a double rectangle of stoa and cella walls, and numerous inscribed statue bases, Ptolemaic and early imperial among them. Tubbs considered the architectural date of the Agora unresolved and allowed for more than one rebuilding¹. At Loutrón, Tubbs rejected a bath interpretation as a poor fit for the internal arrangement and proposed a castellum for cooling and filtering the town's water supply¹.

Site D, the Daimonostasion and cistern, yielded pits and wells, mixed pottery and terracottas, and deposits of whelk shells. No building could be securely identified as the source, and Tubbs suggested the material might be refuse from a nearby temple¹. At Site E, Campanopetra, the report describes shafts and probings that produced early Cypriot pottery, black-glazed ware and red-figure fragments and did not establish a building plan¹. Marguerite Yon notes that Munro and Tubbs made no excavation at the Campanopetra block but a surface collection that yielded Archaic and Classical pottery³. At Site F, two upright limestone drums proved to be in place on a wall, near a marble portrait head, steps and mosaic fragments¹.

Toumpa and the tombs

At Toumpa (Site G), a trench pushed back down the slope as finds appeared, with supplementary shafts on the crest and other slopes, produced the painted terracotta figures¹. The ground was private property and was restored to its former level so that it could be tilled¹. At Toumpa tou Michaili trial work found numerous inscribed fragments in one plot, and about fifteen tombs opened in an adjoining plot were all empty¹.

Munro described Tombs 1, 2 and 3 near the large tumulus as collapsed and probably robbed before discovery; they held broken common pottery, a small lecythoid vase of the Toumpa type and crude terracotta fragments¹. Tomb 4, a Roman sepulchre, had three terracotta sarcophagi. Two had been opened by Encomites; the third held a bone pin and a pair of small gold earrings¹. In the fields of Panagis Hadji Tophi, Munro wrote, the tombs were earlier than the others opened, well preserved and systematically robbed¹.

Where the finds went

Cook records that the material excavated in 1890 by Tubbs and Munro was presented to the British Museum by the Fund⁴. The large marble bull's-head capital was first allocated to the Fund in the division of finds; Munro asked the committee to allocate it to the British Museum because the Fund, nearly broke by June 1890, could not afford to move it to the coast². It is British Museum GR 1891,8–6.1, shipped from Famagusta on HMS Melita in early February 1891 and reaching Sheerness on 28 March². A conical steatite seal from Toumpa, bearing characters Munro considered possibly Cypriote, is reported as now in the British Museum¹. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, lists pieces given by the Fund, among them a limestone seated scribe from Toumba tou Michali (GR.24.1890) and a helmeted statuette (GR.3.1891)⁵. Inscribed fragments stayed in a temporary museum at Salamis, in Forester's House, and Kiely adds that numerous finds were left at Salamis in 1890^1,2.

The report appeared in 1891 in the Journal of Hellenic Studies as "Excavations in Cyprus, 1890: Third Season's Work: Salamis"¹. Yon describes it as an indispensable basis for the French mission of the 1960s in its preliminary phase³.