Tamassos: the Department's excavation at the Royal Tombs, 1997

Six limestone statues, a pair of sphinxes and two pairs of lions with traces of red and blue paint, came to light in 1997 at the Royal Tombs of Tamassos. Technicians of the Department of Antiquities found them during maintenance and restoration work at one of the royal tombs¹. The excavator's later account says the find began on a cold, rainy morning in January 1997, when the foreman of the maintenance crew, Orthodoxos Liasides, telephoned her about statues in a trench dug to insulate the tombs against damp; she told him to stop work². Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou then directed two weeks of systematic excavation, which Herscher reports produced no further finds to help explain the purpose of the sculptures¹.

The statues lay in a group about a metre below the surface beside a tomb wall; they are of Cypriot limestone, life-size or larger, and Steel adds black paint to the red and blue^1,3. Steel reports that they were not found in situ but gathered together as if dumped, and floats the idea that Ohnefalsch-Richter removed and buried them during his earlier excavation of the tombs³. The findspot is given differently elsewhere. Buchholz, Matthaus and Walcher place it between Tombs 5 and 12, while the exhibition catalogue puts the pit with all six sculptures next to Tomb 2^4,5.

Steel dates the statues to the 6th century BC, and the catalogue dates the sphinxes to Cypro-Archaic II, about 550–500 BC^3,5. Buchholz, Matthaus and Walcher judge from the roughly worked backs that the statues probably flanked a dromos or its entrance, or perhaps stood atop a tumulus, and leave the question open⁴. Steel reports that the excavator argues they stood in pairs at the entrances to the monumental royal tombs³. The catalogue holds that the six served as guardian figures of a funerary monument and were carved by one artist⁵. The two sphinxes are in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia, as 1997/VII-15/3 (86 cm, facing right) and 1997/VII-15/6 (82 cm, facing left); where the four lions are held is not recorded⁵.