Tsambres and Aphendrika: du Plat Taylor's cemetery excavations

Two cemeteries near Rizokarpaso, Tsambres and Aphendrika, were excavated in 1937 and 1938, and their tomb groups now lie in museums in Oxford, Nicosia, Cambridge, London and Sydney. The Ashmolean Museum co-funded the work on the Cypro-Classical to Hellenistic necropoleis, which the Department of Antiquities sponsored.¹

In spring 1937, Powell reports, Eve Dray and Margaret (Kim) Collingridge excavated Hellenistic tombs at Aphendrika with twelve workmen.² A British mission, directed by Joan du Plat Taylor, worked at both cemeteries in 1938.^1,3

Tsambres was divided into an eastern section, Vrysi, and a western section, Tsiorka. Carstens reports 29 rock-cut chamber tombs there, the earliest from the beginning of the 5th century BC, with use continuing to the 2nd century BC. At Aphendrika, east of Tsambres, she reports 19 tombs, the earliest possibly from the very late 6th century BC and also in use until the 2nd century BC.³ Lund describes Tsambres Tomb 16 as a chamber tomb with eight burials, holding seven feeding bottles and two amphoriskoi, which the excavators dated from the second quarter of the 4th century BC to the beginning of the 3rd. He gives Aphendrika Tomb 46 as a chamber tomb with twelve burials, first used in the 4th century BC with the final burials probably well into the 3rd, and reports Tomb 41 as looted and dated by Dray and du Plat Taylor to the 4th century BC.⁴

The Ashmolean received a share of the tomb groups, which Kiely estimates at some 240 objects.¹ Other groups are held in the Cyprus Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Institute of Archaeology in London, and the Nicholson Museum in Sydney holds groups transferred from Cambridge in 1947.¹ The excavation report, by Dray and du Plat Taylor, appeared in 1951 in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus 1937–1939.⁵