The Mines and the Hoard of Mathiatis: New Data

Vasiliki Kassianidou of the University of Cyprus presents new archival and archaeological evidence on the mines and the Late Bronze Age hoard of Mathiatis. The paper is given in Greek.

The talk opens with the modern mining history of Mathiatis, where the Cyprus Mines Corporation (CMC) began exploiting gold and copper deposits in 1935 at two locations: Laona (North Mathiatis) and Strongylos (South Mathiatis). During works in the 1930s, traces of ancient copper extraction came to light. Combining plans from the State Archives, photographs from the Department of Antiquities, and a 1937 publication by CMC director James Latimer Bruce, Kassianidou shows that ancient galleries, timber supports, wooden tools recorded in 1951 by Hector Catling, and a fourth-century AD coin of Constantine II belong to South Mathiatis. Later excavations there by Georgios Georgiou and Sophocles Hadjisavvas uncovered a smelting furnace and an Archaic to Roman sanctuary later buried under Late Roman or Early Byzantine slag heaps.

The second part of the lecture examines the Mathiatis hoard, discovered in 1936 during mining at North Mathiatis. Divided under the Antiquities Law that came into force in 1936, the find was split between the Cyprus Museum, CMC owner Harvey Mudd, Bruce, W. Bevan, and the CMC collection at Skouriotissa (transferred to the Department of Antiquities in 1976). Notes discovered on the backs of archival photographs allow Kassianidou to reconstruct the exact division of the oxhide ingot fragments, demonstrating that the hoard contained the largest quantity of raw copper of any Cypriot Late Bronze Age hoard.

Archival negatives and letters also resolve a longstanding error in the scholarship. In his 1964 study, Catling confused the Mathiatis export photographs with photographs of a Larnaca private collection bought by Bruce for Mudd from Georgios Pavlides, adding some thirty-nine unrelated objects to the hoard while dismissing authentic pieces as post-Bronze Age. Restoring the true contents from Bruce's second photograph, Kassianidou highlights an unfinished ploughshare, a bronze mould for a pruning hook, fragments of a portable hearth or table of the type known from Enkomi (identified by George Papasavvas), and a cast bronze human ear with earring holes and a large dowel. Previously dismissed by Catling as later, the ear matches the right-angled ears of Late Cypriot figurines and provides rare evidence for a life-size composite statue made in Late Bronze Age Cyprus.