Excavations at the sanctuary of the female deity on the eastern acropolis of Idalion

Stephan G. Schmid of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin presents the results of excavations conducted since 2018 on the eastern acropolis of Idalion (Mouti tou Arvili), a joint project with the University of Cyprus. Identifying the site as the sanctuary of the great Cypriot female goddess, later worshipped as Aphrodite, Schmid shows how modern fieldwork can recover stratigraphic and architectural context from a hill repeatedly dug and looted since the nineteenth century.

The lecture first untangles nineteenth-century toponymy. Schmid demonstrates from maps by Louis de Mas Latrie and reports by Georges Colonna-Ceccaldi that the name Ambeleri, today restricted to the western acropolis, was also applied to the upper eastern hill. Consequently, several life-size female terracotta statues in the Louvre attributed to Ambeleri actually came from this eastern sanctuary. Re-opening the 1894 trenches of Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and locating the 1974 test trenches of the American expedition, the team found pockets of intact stratigraphy beneath up to three metres of debris.

Outside the temenos wall, the excavators uncovered two distinct zones for setting up votives directly on the bedrock, separated by material much as at Arsos. In one sector, six or seven pairs of large terracotta feet wearing sandals and toe rings remained in situ, facing east, alongside fragments of over-life-size faces from the Cypro-Archaic period. In the adjacent sector, around ten square cuttings in the bedrock held the plinths of life-size archaic limestone statues comparable in scale and type to a statue in the Rietberg Museum in Zurich.

Inside the sanctuary buildings, Schmid traces major reorganisations. Around 500 BC, archaic statues were broken up to lay a new floor in a fill containing arrowheads. In the fourth century BC, a 4.4-metre-wide fortification wall incorporating spolia such as Cypriot capitals was built around the upper hill, blocking the view of the sanctuary from outside. Dedication nevertheless continued through the Cypro-Classical and Hellenistic periods, evidenced by limestone female heads, a base inscribed in alphabetic Greek by a mother named Nikous, a rare male head interpreted as Apollo following a shift from archaic Herakles-Melqart figures, and mixed deposits of archaic and Hellenistic sculpture sealed inside the rooms, including the feet and key-bearing arm of a life-size terracotta priestess.