Georgia Bonny Bazemore

Georgia Bonny Bazemore, who published as G. B. Bazemore, directed the University of Indianapolis Rantidi Forest Excavations at Lingrin tou Dhigeni, a hilltop sanctuary of a male deity about 6 km from Nea Paphos. She also published its syllabic inscriptions^1,7.

In 1998 she completed an unpublished University of Chicago dissertation, entitled The Role of Script in Ancient Society⁹. The following year she and Pamela Gaber published "Two Enigmatic Inscriptions from Idalion" in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus. One of the two was a non-Greek Cypro-syllabic text found among houses of the Lower City in Hellenistic levels⁸.

The Rantidi Forest sanctuary

The Rantidi sanctuary was active through the first millennium BC and was linked to the Paphian cult¹. It had been dug briefly in 1910, and Bazemore, citing Terence Mitford and Olivier Masson (1983), described that earlier work as five buildings, rock-cut tombs, more than 2,000 terracotta fragments and about 150 syllabic inscriptions¹. The University of Indianapolis project, whose published reports span 1996 to 2007, returned to the hilltop^3,7. By 2000 it had completed three seasons of excavation and survey. Its most productive trench was SW 104, a looted rock-cut chamber¹.

In Near Eastern Archaeology in 2000 she published a fragmentary terracotta figurine, 41 cm high, with an incised vulva. It lay out of context in the topsoil at the mouth of the SW 104 chamber. She called it unparalleled in Cyprus and discussed it in the setting of Paphian cult¹.

The inscriptions

Her 2002 chapter, "The Display and Viewing of the Syllabic Inscriptions of Rantidi Sanctuary", ran to pp. 155-212 of Joanna S. Smith's edited volume Script and Seal Use on Cyprus in the Bronze and Iron Ages^7,9. Two reports followed in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus: the preliminary report on the excavations for 1996 to 2007, and in 2010 the first part of the syllabic inscriptions from Lingrin tou Dhigeni⁷.