George Papasavvas

Papasavvas took his first degree in prehistoric and classical archaeology at the University of Ioannina¹⁷. In 1989 he did fieldwork at the sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona, with the University of Ioannina and the Archaeological Society at Athens¹⁷. He did postgraduate studies in classical archaeology at the University of Würzburg¹⁷. The sources disagree on where he took his doctorate^17,18. The University of Cyprus gives a doctoral thesis at the University of Athens on ancient Cypriot and Cretan metalwork¹⁷. Hans-Günter Buchholz, writing in 1999, reports that "Georg Papasavvas" had just completed a dissertation at the University of Ioannina, supervised by Th. Papadopoulos¹⁸.

From 1992 he has been co-excavator at the sanctuary of Hermes and Aphrodite at Syme Viannou, responsible for publishing its metal finds, and from 1995 an area supervisor at Xombourgo on Tenos for the University of Athens¹⁷. From 1998 to 2000 he worked in the Greek Archaeological Service, in the Ephorate of Antiquities Dealers and Private Collections¹⁷.

He has taught classical archaeology at the University of Cyprus since 2000, as associate professor since 2005, and his post sits in the Archaeological Research Unit¹⁷. He was vice-chair of the Department of History and Archaeology from 2010 to 2013 and chair from 2013 to 2018, and acting director of the Archaeological Research Unit from September 2014 to May 2015¹⁷. With Stephan G. Schmid of the Humboldt University and Andreas Scholl of the Antikensammlung in Berlin, he supervises a doctoral thesis on a sanctuary excavated by Ohnefalsch-Richter¹⁹.

His corpus of the bronze stands of Cyprus and Crete, rod tripods and four-sided stands from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, was published in Nicosia by the A.G. Leventis Foundation in 2001²⁰. Metaxia Tsipopoulou reviewed it in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research in 2003²¹. A chapter in a 2022 volume reports his finding that of 65 such objects found in Cyprus and overseas, two thirds "were undoubtedly produced in Cypriot workshops"¹⁵. A chapter in the 2012 volume edited by J. Maran and P. W. Stockhammer says that he "demonstrated the Cypriot basis of the technology, typology and design of most four-sided bronze stands"²². John C. Franklin wrote in 2015 that his technical analysis "has proven" that these objects originated on Cyprus, were exported on purpose and inspired local imitations²³. Michal Artzy disagreed: in 2006 she wrote that the construction of the tripod rings in the Jatt hoard "stands in contradiction to the view lately expressed by Papasavvas"²⁴.

In a 2013 survey of Late Bronze Age Cypriot metalwork Papasavvas argued that the stands were more reasonably made earlier in the 13th century BC, and that there "seems to be no hard evidence" for their production beyond the second millennium BC²⁵. He wrote there that four-sided stands had no direct typological precursors and took their type from ivory-decorated furniture such as chairs and tables²⁵.

With Vasiliki Kassianidou he edited the proceedings of the conference in honour of James D. Muhly held in Nicosia on 10 and 11 October 2009, Eastern Mediterranean Metallurgy and Metalwork in the Second Millennium BC²⁶. In 2002 and 2003 he took part in the geophysical survey at Palaipaphos directed by Maria Iacovou, with Kassianidou and Apostolos Sarris¹⁷.

In "From Smiting to Smithing", in the 2011 volume for Muhly, Papasavvas argued that an older figurine of a warrior deity was transformed into the Ingot God of Enkomi¹⁴. He read the decision to modify a "most probably damaged" statuette as a sign that this was done at a time of crisis, and the poor casting-on work as a sign that no skilled craftsmen were then at hand¹⁴. Giorgos Papantoniou summarised the argument in 2013: the statuette was first made as a striding figure with a spear, a Levantine type²⁷. A chapter in a 2016 volume judged that the study gives "interesting insights" into the relationship between copper production and the political organisation of Cyprus²⁸.

With Alessandra Giumlia-Mair and Kassianidou he analysed seven miniature ingots from Cyprus by X-ray fluorescence in 2011¹⁴. A 2020 chapter credits that analysis with showing that the ingots held not even a trace of tin, against an earlier assumption that his own 2009 paper had repeated²⁹.

In 2014 he asked whether Cypriot kings used war as an image of power, and concluded that Cyprus "seems to have refrained not from war, but from its use as a visual mark of social power"³⁰. The paper appeared in the proceedings of a 2012 Nicosia symposium whose introduction names him among the University of Cyprus teachers connected with the meeting³¹.

Since 1974 Enkomi has lain in the north under Turkish occupation, and his 2017-2018 project on its metallurgy and metalwork, funded by the University of Cyprus, set out to give access to the history of a site that cannot be visited¹⁷. He coordinated MuseCo at the Archaeological Research Unit, with Anna Georgiadou as principal researcher and Maria Dikomitou-Eliadou as research collaborator, a study of unpublished pottery from tombs the Department of Antiquities dug before 1974 in the occupied north¹⁵.

In a 2014 paper on the Sanctuary of the Horned God, for which he thanks Jenny Webb for editorial work, he called the excavations of Porphyrios Dikaios at Enkomi between 1948 and 1958 "one of the most beneficial things to ever happen in Cypriot" archaeology, while questioning some of Dikaios's conclusions on the sanctuary³. He argued that the Sanctuary of the Ingot God stayed in use after the Horned God sanctuary was formally closed, so that the residents of the Ashlar Building had left the town while other groups stayed³. In 2022 he called Tomb 93 the wealthiest tomb excavated on the island by weight of gold, 1,430 g, and identified its pectoral as an Egyptian work of the 18th Dynasty³². "It seems as if" one or more of its occupants had a special connection with the Egyptian royal court, he wrote, and the collar is "probably the closest we can get" to a material sign of a ruling ideology on Late Bronze Age Cyprus³².

For Trench Warfare at Enkomi he worked through unpublished documents in the Collège de France in Paris and the Cyprus State Archive³³. The book sets the clash between Dikaios and Claude F. A. Schaeffer against the politics of Cyprus, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East after the Second World War, with the intervention of Peter Megaw, then director of the Department of Antiquities, in favour of Dikaios³³. Speaking to the Cyprus Mail, he said that during British rule the British "were trying to convince the Cypriots of the day that they were not Greeks"³³.

A. Bernard Knapp quotes his conclusion that Schaeffer's Enkomi publications "are seriously compromised by a lack of close stratigraphic observation", and calls the book a "revealing new study"³⁴. Knapp also points to Lagarce 1993 for an alternative view³⁴. Catherine Kearns, reviewing it in 2024, wrote that through careful archival work he had contributed "a fascinating story of archaeological knowledge-building" that shows how political its subjective sides can be³⁵. Kearns found the writing accessible and fit for graduate seminars, and wrote that he "does at times sacrifice a straightforward structure to prioritize the entertaining story", though the back-and-forth timeline does not distract from the main arguments³⁵. Giampaolo Graziadio wrote in 2025 that any investigation in depth of the history of the Enkomi excavations must refer to the book, and Schmid calls it an "important work"^20,36.