Yeroskipou-Asprogia: Department rescue of Late Bronze Age tombs

A gold diadem still in place on a skull, decorated in repoussé with a bull and a lion, came from a Late Bronze Age tomb at Asprogia (also printed Asproyi), north of Yeroskipou, in 1964.¹ A long trench dug for water-supply works had exposed a cemetery not previously known, and the Department of Antiquities excavated three chamber tombs under the supervision of Kyriakos Nicolaou.^1,2

Karageorghis describes one tomb as nearly intact: a shallow elliptical dromos descended abruptly to a vaulted chamber, two benches flanked the dromos entrance, and two skeletons lay on the benches, each with a spearhead. The other two tombs shared a dromos and had been pillaged.¹ The intact tomb also held late Mycenaean IIIB bowls and dishes, stone mortars and pestles, hemispherical bronze bowls and a bronze mirror.¹ The pillaged tombs yielded gold earrings, ivory lids and a hematite cylinder seal decorated with human figures and animals, and their pottery matched that of the first tomb.¹

Karageorghis dates the intact tomb to Late Cypriot IIIA from its pottery and reports nothing later in the cemetery.¹ Maier and Karageorghis date the local shallow conical bowls that imitate Mycenaean ware to the very end of the 13th century BC.³ Nicolaou reports that surface finds indicate a settlement of the same period, with the cemetery lying within it.² Maier and Karageorghis describe the tomb form, an elliptical dromos with a vaulted chamber, as peculiar to this region.³

The finds were deposited at the Paphos District Museum under inventory no. 1696, which Maier and Karageorghis give for the diadem, 24.2 cm long and 3.7 cm wide.^1,3