George Cyril Griffith Williams

In 1953 a sitting judge of the Supreme Court of Cyprus excavated two looted Middle Cypriot tombs at Dhenia. The Journal of Hellenic Studies report on that year's work records that "Mr. Justice Griffith-Williams undertook the excavation of two of the large looted tombs in the north part of the cemetery", with the sponsorship of the Department of Antiquities and the assistance of George Roy Haslam Wright⁶.

George Cyril Griffith Williams, the form of his name in official records, was born in 1893. The Colonial Office Lists give his schooling as Bromsgrove School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, his inns as the Middle Temple, and his military service as 1914 to 1919³. In January 1935 the London Gazette announced his appointment as Chief Justice and Police Magistrate of Saint Vincent¹. The Gazette of 10 May 1938 announced his appointment as Puisne Judge of the Supreme Court of Cyprus². The Colonial Office Lists show him on the Cyprus bench from 1940 to 1955³.

The Dhenia tombs

The two large looted tombs that Griffith-Williams excavated, in the north part of the Kafkalla cemetery, were Middle Cypriot and held large quantities of White Painted pottery that could be restored. In the southern part of the cemetery a small, intact Early Cypriot II tomb group was also excavated. Material confiscated from the looted southern area was taken to the Cyprus Museum⁶.

A notice in The Classical Review in 1964 gives the same account of the tombs, saying that two Middle Cypriot tombs at Dhenia were "excavated as a rescue operation in 1953 by G. C. Griffith-Williams and G. R. H. Wright"⁷. The tombs were published by Paul Åström and Wright in Opuscula Atheniensia IV, in an article of 1962 or 1963⁸.

A collection in the literature

Two published references point to objects he owned. Åström's volume on the Late Cypriot Bronze Age cites a terracotta wall-bracket in "Griffith Williams' Coll., Myrtou"⁹. The reference does not say that he dug at Myrtou. John Boardman's Greek Gems and Finger Rings lists an engraved seal of the Lyre-Player Group as "Oxford, Griffith-Williams Coll."¹⁰. How either object came to him, and where they went afterwards, is not recorded in these references.

Hector Catling thanked "Judge Griffith-Williams", along with Charles Burney and Pat Clarke, in the acknowledgements to his volume on the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age tombs at Kouklia; the passage concerns the study and publication of the material, and the help given is not specified¹¹.