The Diaspora of Cypriot Antiquities in Swansea

Ersin Hussein of Swansea University examines the small collections of Cypriot antiquities held in Swansea and the colonial networks through which they left the island. She opens with the geography and copper resources of Cyprus, notes that ancient literary accounts were largely written by outsiders, and argues for an object-focused approach to Cypriot history, showing Palaepaphos, Kourion, Amathus and Salamis.

The talk surveys two local institutions with holdings from the Bronze Age to the Roman period. Swansea Museum holds around 24 Cypriot or probably Cypriot objects, including pottery from tombs near Nicosia and Kyrenia, a green-tinged animal figurine and Roman stone loom weights. The Egypt Centre holds around 16 recorded Cypriot objects, including flasks, jugs, cosmetic jars, a marble head and terracotta figurines such as an 8th to 7th century BC figure of a man carrying a lamb (GR1), alongside uncatalogued alabaster vessels and 25,000 slides of Mediterranean sites.

Hussein traces how these objects reached Wales through late 19th and early 20th century collectors, including Colonel William Llewellyn Morgan and Sir Henry Wellcome's Sotheby's purchases from Sir Francis Wallace Grenfell, Sir Hermann Weber, Lawrence Cesnola and a Colonel Stott. She focuses on two terracotta animal figurines (GR3 and GR4) bought in 1919 from the collection of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola, who dug illegally at Paphos and Salamis, comparing him with his brother Luigi Palma di Cesnola of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Searching the Cyprus Gazette and family records for Colonel Stott of a 1920 Sotheby's sale, she rules out the family of Frances Louisa Stott and proposes the shipowner Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Stott (1863 to 1930), before closing with student workshops cataloguing alabaster vessels.