Hala Sultan Tekke: New discoveries in the Late Cypriot city and cemetery

Peter Fischer and Teresa Bürge report on the 2017 and 2018 seasons of the New Swedish Cyprus Expedition at Hala Sultan Tekke, following the publication of their volume on City Quarters 1 and 2. Using a ten-sensor magnetometer array, the team surveyed 23 hectares in five days, estimating the Late Bronze Age settlement covered 25 to 50 hectares, bounded by what may be a city wall. Fischer outlines the stratigraphy of City Quarter 1, where three occupation layers span Late Cypriot IIC in the late 13th century BC through Late Cypriot IIIA in the early 12th century BC, when the city was destroyed around 1150 BC.

City Quarter 1 produced nearly 800 kilograms of slag, furnace fragments, and tuyeres from urban copper metallurgy, alongside pictorial kraters, a violin-bow fibula with an Italian parallel, and an ivory dagger pommel. In the newly opened City Quarter 4, excavation exposed a Late Cypriot IIIA bathroom built with ashlar masonry, a sloping floor, water inlet, and drain, bordered by a storage corridor of broken pithoi and concentrations of murex shells. Because modern ploughing cuts 25 centimetres into the upper strata, the team fenced the quarter with the farmer's agreement.

Bürge examines Area A, an unbuilt suburban zone 600 metres east of City Quarter 1. Magnetic anomalies there included 22 wells, 15 offering pits, and several tombs. One group of pits, sealed with ochre and dating back to Late Cypriot IB, held complete vessels, figurines, loom weights, notched scapulae, and a wooden spindle with an ivory whorl. A second group of figure-of-eight pits contained broken tableware, over 30 percent of it Mycenaean pottery including a chariot krater painted with a woman in Minoan dress, interpreted as remains of ritual feasts commemorating the dead. Rich chamber tombs of Late Cypriot I to IIC (Tombs X, LL, and RR) yielded Base Ring ware, White Slip ware, a Late Minoan II–IIIA piriform jar, haematite balance weights based on a 9.4-gram unit, carved ivory plates, and another chariot krater. By contrast, two reused 12th-century BC wells (Tombs A and Z9) contained skeletons, including a woman with an artificially deformed cranium and three infants, thrown in without grave goods.

Fischer concludes with the city's economy: copper and bronze working, purple dye production in lime-plastered rooftop basins, agricultural storage at nearby Dromolaxia-Trypes, imports of dried Nile perch and tilapia, and lead isotope evidence suggesting Cypriot copper reached Scandinavia around 1600–1500 BC. The discussion afterwards considers the ancient shoreline of the Larnaca Salt Lake, population estimates of around 10,000, and ongoing DNA analysis of the bodies in the wells.