Anja Ulbrich

Anja Ulbrich published in 2011 the Ashmolean Museum's earliest provenanced group of Cypriot sculpture, previously unpublished: thirteen limestone heads and a statuette body from Dali, ancient Idalion⁶.

Her doctoral thesis, "Kypris", was accepted at Heidelberg in 2004 and published at Münster in 2008 as Kypris. Heiligtümer und Kulte weiblicher Gottheiten auf Zypern in der kyproarchaischen und -klassischen Epoche (Königszeit), a study of sanctuaries and cults of female deities in Archaic and Classical Cyprus^2,4. Her earlier chapter in Cyprus in the 19th Century AD (2001) turned to the history of the subject, surveying how Cypriot sanctuaries were found and explored in the nineteenth century. She counted at least 77 sanctuary sites discovered, explored and exploited by 1900, rarely by scientific excavation, and she discussed de Luynes's purchase of the Idalion bronze tablet in 1850 and the French campaigns of 1862 and 1865³. In 2010 she contributed a chapter on images of the Cypriot Aphrodite in her sanctuaries in the age of the city-kingdoms to Brill's Companion to Aphrodite⁵.

The Christy heads from Dali

The 2011 paper appeared in the Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes⁶. It also sets out how Cypriot antiquities reached Oxford. The Ashmolean's first Cypriot accessions were 29 pieces of gold jewellery, numbered AN 1873.141-168, while the British Museum already held about 1,500 Cypriot objects. Henry Christy had given 87 sculptures to the British Museum in 1852, and had acquired the Dali pieces on a Levantine tour in 1850-51. In 1874 his Trustees, who included Augustus Wollaston Franks, gave about 425 objects to the Ashmolean, among them the 13 heads and the body from Dali⁶.

Ulbrich proposed that the Dali sculptures came from one of the two main urban Aphrodite sanctuaries at Idalion, either on the east acropolis or in the west acropolis and palace area⁶.

At the Ashmolean

In 2012 she and Thomas Kiely published "Britain and the Archaeology of Cyprus. I. The long 19th century" in the same journal, and Kiely later wrote a second part^1,7. In a 2017 article Kiely describes her post: the Leventis Foundation supports a full-time curator of the Ashmolean's Cypriot collection, who researches and publishes it and runs outreach programmes with Cypriot communities across the United Kingdom¹. She also wrote on the votive sculpture of the sanctuary at Maroni-Vournes, in a 2015 paper titled "The Great Goddess at Maroni-Vournes"⁸.