Basil Hennessy

In July and August 1951 Basil Hennessy excavated the Bronze Age cemetery of Stephania at Myrtou, and at the end of that year shipped fifteen cases of finds to Australia and four to New Zealand^2,3. Born at Horsham, Victoria, in February 1925, he joined the navy at 17, entered the University of Sydney in 1947 and took honours in archaeology in 1950 under James Stewart¹. Winifred Lamb suggested a scholarship at the British School at Ankara, and he left Australia at the end of 1950³. In Cyprus Stewart sent him to the Nicosia dealer Petro Colocassides, and Hennessy collected gold coins there for Stewart but, afraid of frontier checks, left them with Eve Stewart's father instead of taking them out³.

The Stephania dig was the Ashmolean-Sydney expedition, paid for by the University of Sydney, which was to receive a proportion of the finds, and by the Australian Institute of Archaeology in Melbourne. Fourteen tombs were cleared, eleven with finds^2,3. Sydney received Tombs 3, 5, 9 and 10 and metal from Tomb 14, the Cyprus Museum kept Tombs 4, 7 and 12, and the Australian Institute took Tombs 6, 13 and 14; the University of Melbourne later acquired most of 13 and 14A². Hennessy was also given charge of the Skales tomb excavation at Kouklia in 1951⁴. He published Stephania in 1964⁵.

He never directed a dig in Cyprus again. He worked at Jericho, directed the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem from 1966 to 1970, and held the Edwin Cuthbert Hall chair at Sydney from 1973 to 1990^1,2. In 2010 he gave the Nicholson Museum the Karmi-Palealona material Stewart had excavated in 1961². He died at Goulburn on 27 October 2013¹.