George Gordon Hake

George Gordon Hake dug at Salamis, Gastria and Kourion in 1882 for a museum that asked for decorative objects, not records. He was an official in the Chief Secretary's office with no training in archaeology², and the son of the poet Thomas Gordon Hake¹. Lieutenant Herbert Kitchener suggested the excavations, and the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A, rather than the British Museum, took them up. Its instruction was to collect "from the aesthetic and decorative and not from the archaeological point of view", so tomb groups were split up and findspot records are minimal². Kiely writes that Hake seems to have done most of the fieldwork, concentrated between the monastery of St Barnabas and Enkomi village, where he explored about 45 tombs, with Kitchener present for part of the time³. He began in January 1882¹. He worked at Gastria in March and at Kourion in the following months¹. His surviving reports show some understanding of recording, but the manuscript report on Salamis gives no tomb groups^2,4.

Max Ohnefalsch-Richter wrote that Hake discovered the Graeco-Phoenician necropolis at Kourion, rich in glass, in 1882⁵, and, according to Marangou, used the finds against Cesnola's account of the Curium treasure⁶. In 1886 Hake sat on the committee, with R. H. Lang and Falkland Warren, that prepared the Cyprus display for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London⁷.

The South Kensington Museum gave many finds to regional museums. Charles Newton declined the lot for the British Museum, and nearly all that the V&A kept passed to the British Museum in the early 1980s^1,2. Hake's dates of birth and death are not recorded.