Tamassos: Results of the City Excavation

Florian Schimpf of the University of Cyprus presents a morphological and stratigraphic study of the city excavations conducted at Tamassos in the 1970s by Hans-Günter Buchholz and the German Archaeological Institute. Shortly before his death in 2011, Buchholz entrusted the written records, photographs and plans to Hartmut Matthäus and Matthias Recke; the archive has since been digitized, allowing Schimpf to prepare the unpublished intra-urban remains for final publication.

The lecture opens with the geographical and historical setting of Tamassos in the Mesaoria plain near modern Politiko and Pera, alongside the Pedieos River and near the Troodos copper deposits. Listed on the prism of Esarhaddon, the kingdom left no coins or known fifth-century BC kings, suggesting it lost its autonomy in the Cypro-Classical period before being sold to Kition and later given during Alexander's campaign to Pnytagoras of Salamis. Schimpf briefly reviews Max Ohnefalsch-Richter's 19th-century excavations at the rural sanctuary of Apollo at Frangissa, the Pedieos riverbed shrine that yielded the Chatsworth Head, and the royal tombs of Tamassos.

The core of the talk analyzes the intra-urban sanctuary of the Cypriot goddess, located south of the royal tombs and city wall. Built primarily with river stone foundations supporting straw-tempered mudbrick superstructures, the temple precinct features a courtyard with a plaster floor, a cubic limestone altar, and an edifice with an orthostatic pedestal of dressed ashlar masonry that Schimpf compares to Temple 1 at Kition. Votive deposits containing bowls, saucer lamps, ceramic sherds incised with an alpha, a temple boy, and Astarte plaques identify the cult. Using the architectural typologies of Gjerstad and Wright, Schimpf classifies the complex as a broad-room temple set at the margin of two courts, comparable to the sanctuary of Athena at Vouni.

Stratigraphic analysis reveals three main building phases spanning the Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical periods, from the 7th to the late 4th century BC. The earliest phase includes an oblong river-stone building and a stratum with copper slag and casting waste, indicating that metalworking and ritual activity coexisted in the 7th century BC. The second phase, transitional between Cypro-Archaic II and Cypro-Classical I, saw the construction of the main altar and temple compound. In the third phase, dating to the late 4th century BC, the precinct was raised with the orthostatic socle, and a large multi-roomed building with Corinthian-style roof tiles and shell-wall ashlar masonry was constructed to the west.