Max Ohnefalsch-Richter's research on the built tombs of Idalion

Stephan G. Schmid of the Humboldt University of Berlin presents findings from the unpublished manuscript and archives of Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, focusing on monumental built chamber tombs at Idalion. Funded by Emperor Wilhelm II in 1893, Ohnefalsch-Richter was forced in 1908 to surrender his unfinished manuscript, Tamassos and Idalion, along with maps and photographs, to the Berlin Antiquarium. By integrating his hand-coloured 1888 map from The Owl with modern satellite imagery, Schmid's team has verified the high topographical precision of his records around Dali and Ayios Sozomenos.

Before turning to the built tombs, Schmid illustrates how the archive allows the reconstruction of dispersed tomb contexts from the 1894–1895 excavations in the East Necropolis, prior to their tripartite partage division. He traces objects from Tomb 33 to the Neues Museum in Berlin, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and the storerooms of the Cyprus Museum and the museum at Idalion.

Although published scholarship generally records only one or two built tombs at Idalion, Ohnefalsch-Richter's manuscript documents twelve further examples, mostly dismantled by nineteenth-century villagers for building stone and reported to him by former diggers such as his foreman Avraami Charalambou. Walking through the map's numbered points, Schmid details a destroyed pointed-roof tomb at Point 14 near the vaulted tomb later published by Vassos Karageorghis, four pointed-roof tombs and four non-pointed-roof tombs on two mounds at Point 21, and another pointed-roof tomb at Point 22.

Only the tomb at Point 19 was seen by Ohnefalsch-Richter himself, in October 1887. A missing plate from his planned publication, found by Schmid in the archives of Olivier Masson at the University of Cyprus, reveals a gabled built tomb with a sloping dromos, a central corridor, and two chambers opening on each side. At Point 9, near the chapel of Agios Georgios, workmen reported a tomb entrance flanked by two red-painted colossal relief figures with horns. Ohnefalsch-Richter purchased a 43.5 cm head fragment of one figure, which shows a horned Bes and was donated via Valentin Weisbach to the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, where it was lost in the Second World War; a surviving photograph in Berlin confirms its form.

Adding these twelve tombs to the corpus makes Idalion the largest concentration of built tombs on Cyprus. Against Ohnefalsch-Richter's Hellenistic dating for Point 19, Schmid cautiously places the group in the Cypro-Archaic period based on roofing typology, compares the Bes entrance to the Amathus colossus and sarcophagus as well as Anatolian monuments, and argues that Cypriot built tombs should be understood primarily as local monuments rather than direct Phoenician imports. In the discussion afterwards, Schmid addresses future archival publication plans, the date of the Bes sculpture, and two recently surfaced paintings by Ohnefalsch-Richter, including an unidentified Cypriot chapel scene in the CVAR (Severis Museum).