Salamis: Dikaios's excavation of Tomb 1

Tomb 1 at Salamis was a built tomb whose dromos held the impressions of a heavy wagon and the skeletons of three of the horses that drew it. Porphyrios Dikaios directed the excavation for the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, which the annual reports place in 1956 for the tomb and 1957 for the dromos^1,2. Karageorghis's 1969 account instead says the Department undertook the tomb excavation in 1957³. According to Karageorghis, Dikaios sent Symeon Klonaris to excavate the tomb⁴.

The tomb had a V-shaped dromos widening to 9.5 m at the façade, which had a recessed portico divided by two piers. The plastered chamber had corbelled side walls and a roof of long stone slabs, which had collapsed. A bronze cauldron in a floor pit held cremated remains, with gold and crystal beads, an ivory comb, Greek Geometric bowls, and local White Painted and Bichrome III-IV pottery¹. In 1957 the dromos yielded impressions from the shafts, yoke and wheel of the wagon, the skeletons of three of the horses that drew it, their iron bits and four pairs of bronze blinkers². Megaw distinguishes the earlier cremation and horse remains from a later burial and wagon, which he dates to the seventh century².

Karageorghis describes two burials, an earlier cremation in a cauldron, dated to the middle of the eighth century BC, and a disturbed later inhumation, dated to the end of the early seventh century BC, with horse remains and chariot traces associated with both³. He says that the discovery of Tomb 1 showed later excavators what to look for in the dromoi of other built tombs in the necropolis³. Dikaios published the tomb as "A 'Royal' Tomb at Salamis, Cyprus" in Archäologischer Anzeiger in 1963⁵.