Falkland Warren

In August 1885 Falkland George Edgeworth Warren applied for a permit to excavate at Paraskevi, Pera and Acanthou. The application reached the Chief Clerk, W. H. Bennett, who sent it to the Chief Secretary, who was Warren himself. Warren referred it to the Honorary Secretary of the Cyprus Museum Committee, who was also Bennett; Bennett approved it, Warren gave the permission, and the High Commissioner countersigned⁴.

Chief Secretary and licence-holder

Warren was born in 1834 and entered the Royal Artillery in 1852. He served in India in 1857 and 1858, on the North-West Frontier in 1863 and in the Bhutan campaign of 1864 and 1865, and reached colonel in 1881³. He came to Cyprus in the summer of 1878 as Assistant Commissioner at Larnaca, became Commissioner at Limassol that October, and on 1 August 1879 was made Chief Secretary to the government under Robert Biddulph and later Henry Bulwer¹.

His collecting began at Limassol, where he swapped newspapers for tomb pots with Annie Brassey and arranged for her to pay for digs at Kourion⁵. In his report for 1879-80 Charles Newton thanked Warren, Claude Delaval Cobham and Herbert Kitchener for antiquities given to the British Museum, and noted a small trial excavation Warren had made at Amathus³.

Hans-Günter Buchholz judged that Warren never learned anything of field archaeology but knew how to find experienced local workmen. In 1883 he appears at Kourion as a licensed excavator who hired someone to direct the work for pay, the German Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, who was always short of money³. That year Ohnefalsch-Richter opened tombs at Kourion for Warren, Samuel Brown and others¹. In the autumn of 1885 he dug the necropolis of Politiko-Alakati for Warren, which produced a Bichrome IV krater with myth and hunting scenes, now in the British Museum³. Relatives and contemporaries said that Warren lived on a grand scale and was constantly short of money³.

The Warren house stood near the Paphos Gate in Nicosia. W. H. Mallock stayed there and put the family into In an Enchanted Island with Warren as "Colonel Falkland", and at dessert, he wrote, a basket of prehistoric pottery was brought in³. In March 1889 thieves broke into the house and took coins, seals, scarabs and gold earrings³.

Frangissa and the lawsuit

Ohnefalsch-Richter found the sanctuary of Frangissa, near Pera, on 4 October 1885. Given writes that he reported it to Charles Watkins, a banker at Larnaca who also employed him, and not to Warren, and that Watkins applied for a permit⁴. Masson says he wrote to both men and that only Warren could answer¹. On 15 October Warren visited the dig at Pera and Ohnefalsch-Richter let the site slip. According to the judge's later summing-up, Warren regarded it as inside his own permit and, after a stormy interview, ordered Ohnefalsch-Richter to dig for him there⁴. Digging ran from 17 October to 2 November and produced two bilingual inscriptions in Phoenician and Cypriot syllabic Greek (ICS 215 and 216), with limestone and terracotta statues^1,4.

On 17 November Warren, as Chief Secretary, informed Watkins that his application was refused⁴. On 25 November, Given writes, Warren and the Assistant to the Chief Secretary, George Smith, called on Ohnefalsch-Richter, who afterwards wrote a declaration that Warren had a prior right; on 2 December Mrs Warren "advised" him to make a contract with the landowner in Warren's name, ante-dated to 4 October. Warren denied any knowledge of his wife's involvement⁴.

Watkins sued in December 1885 for a third of the finds on the strength of the landowner's rights, and a further third in damages for trespass⁴. His advocate, Ulick Burke, cited Article 17 of the Ottoman Antiquities Law of 1874, which forbade officials to excavate as private persons⁴. Warren was defended by William Collyer, the Queen's Advocate, and the judge was Charles Walpole of the Larnaca District Court⁴. Warren won and Watkins paid costs; the appeal was dismissed on 21 January 1886^1,4. Walpole said that Ohnefalsch-Richter had been "playing fast and loose with both Plaintiff and Defendant"⁴. Given reads the outcome as the colonial establishment protecting itself, since Collyer was Warren's subordinate and Walpole was junior to both men⁴.

The credit went to Warren. The two bilinguals were shown at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 as his property, and a notice in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology said that he had discovered them⁴. Edward Carletti photographed the finds in Warren's courtyard under the caption "Excavations at Tamassos (Cyprus) by Colonel Warren R.A. in 1885"¹. Ohnefalsch-Richter wrote to Arthur Evans that his honour "suffered by a partial judgement", and in March 1887 complained to Bulwer that Warren was working to have him removed as honorary curator of the Cyprus Museum³.

From Bloomsbury to British Columbia

Under the rules of the day the Frangissa finds were divided in three: the Museum's share, the excavator's or backer's, which meant Warren, and the landowner's, which Warren probably bought out¹. The bulkiest pieces, among them the terracotta colossus, went to the Cyprus Museum^1,4. Warren went on retired pay in June 1889¹⁵ and left Cyprus on 13 July 1890 on three months' leave, from which he did not return³. After some time in London he left England for Canada in 1892^1,3.

Part of his collection stayed at the British Museum. Buchholz writes that the bilinguals never left its Western Asiatic department and that limestone sculptures, terracottas and a Geometric vase, long on loan, were bought in 1910, after his death³. Ulbrich and Kiely date the purchase of several of his bilinguals to 1892, through Rollin and Feuardent⁹.

In Canada Warren worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the family, a wife, three sons and three daughters, lived in modest circumstances in British Columbia. The community of Falkland there is named after him^3,20. In 1900 Theodore Marburg of Baltimore, a relative, bought 122 Cypriot pieces from him and gave them to Johns Hopkins University, among them 49 gold ornaments, 20 engraved stones, seals and gems, some 40 scarabs, and 13 cylinder seals, six with cuneiform inscriptions^1,3. Masson reports that the Marburg collection seems to have been stolen from the university around 1950¹. Warren died in 1908, probably at Vancouver¹.

The Frangissa material had gone with him. On 6 February 1894 he wrote to the Minister of Public Works from Grande Prairie, asking that the "Collection of Antiquities from an excavation of a Temple of Apollo made by me near Tamassus" be touched only by a competent restorer³. The National Art Gallery in Ottawa reported his gift of coins, pottery and antiquities in April 1895. The Frangissa pieces, over 350 in number, were passed in 1958 to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and registered there as 958.61^2,3. Buchholz traced them there in 1979 by matching a damaged jug in the store to one in Carletti's photograph of 1885³.