Study Day on Book 23 of the Iliad: Cremation Burials and Homeric Heirlooms in Cyprus

This second part of a Greek-language study day on Book 23 of the Iliad pairs a dramatic reading and archaeological commentary by Vassos Karageorghis with two papers by Efstathios Raptou and George Papasavvas comparing Homeric epic with finds from Cyprus and the Aegean.

The recording opens with a recitation in Modern Greek translation of the chariot race at the funeral games of Patroclus. Vassos Karageorghis comments on two objects named in the passage: the bronze corselet Achilles awards to Eumelus and the herald's sceptre placed in Menelaus's hand. He compares the corselet with the one Cinyras gave Agamemnon, an 8th-century BC bronze warrior figurine from Tomb 79 at Salamis, and terracotta warrior figurines excavated in 1891 at Toumba near Salamis. For the sceptre, he discusses five or six 11th to 10th-century BC cylindrical bronze objects from tombs at Palaepaphos, Amathus, and Lefkandi, citing Nota Kourou's view that these were emblems of authority over sanctuaries or the copper trade, distinct from the royal sceptre of Kourion.

Efstathios Raptou (the Department of Antiquities) examines cremation in Homer and in Cyprus. After outlining the funerals of Patroclus, Hector, and Achilles and the spread of cremation from the end of the Late Bronze Age, he surveys Cypriot cremations from the 11th century BC to the Cypro-Archaic period. Beginning with Tombs 40 and 19 at Kaloriziki and Bamboula near Episkopi, he focuses on Palaepaphos, where recent excavations at Skales, Plakes, and Eliomylia have raised known cremations to around twenty. He presents Cypro-Geometric chamber tombs, small rock-cut niches such as Tomb 188 with a bronze helmet and sceptre, urns under stone cairns, and a newly identified Geometric cremation at Marion preserving mineralised linen cloth studied by Diana Wood Conroy. He also covers 9th-century and Archaic cauldron cremations at Salamis and Palaepaphos, bronze phialai inside urns, empty bronze amphorae in inhumation graves, Tomb 277 combining cremation in a louterion with an inhumed warrior and two sceptres, iron obeloi, and horse burials. Raptou argues that cremation arrived with Achaean populations rather than by diffusion alone.

George Papasavvas addresses the biographies of people and objects through Homeric heirlooms (keimelia). Starting from the phiale Achilles gives Nestor and the c. 1000 BC Toumba burial at Lefkandi, where cremated bones wrapped in purple cloth lay inside a 13th or 12th-century BC Cypriot bronze amphoroid krater, he traces how keimelia functioned as vehicles of memory and aristocratic status, citing Agamemnon's sceptre, the Sidonian silver krater, and Meriones's boar's-tusk helmet. Turning to 11th and early 10th-century BC graves, he compares Cypriot bronze kraters from Kaloriziki Tomb 40, Palaepaphos-Skales, Lefkandi, and Pantanassa in Crete, alongside a Mycenaean boar's-tusk helmet buried with a Cypriot four-sided stand at Knossos.

In the closing discussion, Karageorghis asks why cremated bones were wrapped in double fat, and Papasavvas discusses the Kourion sceptre from Kaloriziki Tomb 40, looted before George McFadden located the tomb fifty years later.