Ernest Arthur Gardner

The Cyprus Exploration Fund needed a director for its 1888 excavation, and the account of that season says the problem was solved by joining the whole undertaking to the British School at Athens "under its Director, Mr. E. A. Gardner", with everyone taking part as students of the School². Ernest Arthur Gardner was born at Clapton on 16 March 1862 and died at Maidenhead on 27 November 1939¹.

He arrived in Cyprus with Dr Francis Henry Hill Guillemard about a month before the end of December 1887. They toured the west coast from Kyrenia to Amathus, and named Lapithos, Polis tes Chrysochou and Kouklia as the three most impressive sites. At Polis he raised terms of an agreement with John William Williamson².

Kouklia, 1888

An Ottoman rule against working more than one site at a time kept the Fund out of Polis in 1888, so it dug the Temple of Aphrodite at Kouklia, the old Paphos, with a trial at Leontari Vouno near Nicosia. M. R. James dug at Leontari Vouno after Falkland Warren, the Chief Secretary, drew Gardner's attention to it². The Kouklia work lasted about three months under Gardner as director, with David George Hogarth, James and, later, the architect R. Elsey Smith. The workforce reached about 230, women and children among them^2,4.

In May Gardner went to Nicosia, a fortnight before 23 May, to settle with the Government how the site would be kept safe and how the finds would be divided under the Ottoman Law. The narrative calls the division very favourable to the Fund. The Government declined to take over the site, which was left under an unpaid local overseer². Among the finds the narrative names an Eros head and an inscribed tablet "now in the British Museum"².

Gardner shared the authorship of "Excavations in Cyprus, 1887-88" in the Journal of Hellenic Studies with Hogarth, James and Elsey Smith¹⁰. Maier and Karageorghis note that on pages 204-5 it criticises Luigi Palma di Cesnola for exaggerated claims about his own excavations at Kouklia⁵.

Opposed accounts

Max Ohnefalsch-Richter put a proposal to dig Idalion to Gardner in January 1888⁸. Schmid observes that for Palaepaphos we depend only on the opposed statements of Gardner and Ohnefalsch-Richter⁸.

Polis, 1889

For the Fund's second season at Polis tes Chrysochou, Hogarth concluded the agreement with Williamson that Gardner had first raised. The committee again asked Gardner, as Director of the School, to undertake the dig. In the later narrative J. A. R. Munro credits the excavations to "Mr. E. A. Gardner, Mr. Tubbs, and myself"³. H. Arnold Tubbs is the third name in that credit. Hogarth, in Devia Cypria, records that Gardner had copied one inscribed stone at Polis before him⁶.

In 1899 the compilers of the Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum, John Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter, thanked him for suggestions and corrections in detail⁷.