Georges (Georgos) N. Lanitis

Georges Lanitis sold the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris the fragments of two bronze bowls bearing the dedication to Baal of Lebanon. Hermary gives him as a wine merchant and collector of Limassol, 1827 to 1897¹. Matthäus, who calls him Georgos N. Lanitis, writes that the Cabinet des Médailles acquired the fragments through Georges Colonna-Ceccaldi at the suggestion of Charles Clermont-Ganneau. They reached Paris at the end of 1876, Ernest Renan studied them at the Cabinet, and the purchase was completed in late summer 1877 for 900 francs².

Lanitis described the find twice. First he said he had bought the pieces from a scrap-metal dealer in Limassol and knew nothing of their origin. When Clermont-Ganneau asked again for his 1880 publication, he said a farmer had found them in 1872 on Mouti Sinoas, north-east of Limassol, together with two bronze oxen, coins and a bronze hand. Matthäus finds that combination impossible, notes that surveys of the hill found no cult place, and considers the Limassol and Amathus region the likelier source². Marangou separately says the Bibliothèque nationale bought eight bronze objects with syllabic signs from Lanitis, who had them from an ironmonger; she gives no date³.

Hermary links Lanitis to Amathus. A Cyprus Museum catalogue of 1899 says that gold plaques in Berlin and London belonged to the Lanitis collection, and Hermary concludes that this was certainly Georges Lanitis, and that he very probably sent about a hundred objects without provenance to the Paris sale of 15 and 16 June 1891, listed as "Envoi de Chypre"¹. He was also, in Hermary's reading, the "person" whose antiquities Max Ohnefalsch-Richter telegraphed about from Limassol; the British Museum bought four gold laminae from the pieces sent¹.