Robert Hamilton Lang

Robert Hamilton Lang managed a bank in Larnaca and, with gangs of paid diggers, uncovered the sanctuary of Reshef-Apollo at Dali, and wrote an account of it that Reeve, quoting Kiely, calls the first Cypriot site report^7,12. He was born in 1836 at Glassford, Lanarkshire, the son of Gavin Lang, a Church of Scotland minister^6,21. He left school at 14 for a clerkship in Glasgow, attended classes at Glasgow University, and in 1856 went to Lebanon to work for William Riddell's company²¹. The firm sent him to Cyprus in 1861⁶.

Bank and consulate

In 1863 Lang became manager of the Imperial Ottoman Bank agency at Larnaca⁷. He also farmed there; Kiely records a 1000-acre farm²¹. From September 1861 he acted as British Vice-Consul on a number of occasions, and in 1861, acting for the appointed consul Horace White, he wrote to Charles Newton about a Phoenician inscription^7,21. A Foreign Office notice of 9 September 1871, printed in the London Gazette, appointed him Her Majesty's Consul for Cyprus, resident at Larnaca; the post was unpaid and ended in 1872^17,21.

Collecting at Larnaca

By his own account Lang thought antiquities a waste of time until 1864, when the family of the French consul Louis Dumesnil de Maricourt picked up terracotta statuettes near the Salt Lake⁶. Demetrios Pierides became what Lang called his "coadjutor" and "instructor"⁶. Lang bought across the island and paid diggers two piastres a day; he wrote that "our houses became like earthenware shops"⁶. He later defended the payments as a "godsend" to the peasants and put them at 2,000 to 3,000 pounds¹².

Dali and Pyla

In his narrative of the Dali dig, Lang wrote that his workmen found "a mine of statues", some of them colossal, in the spring of 1868. He concluded that they marked a temple and cleared a space about 130 feet square and 9 to 11 feet deep in nearly two months of August heat². Gaber dates his supervision to two months in each of 1868 and 1869¹⁰. Kiely places the discovery of the colossal statue and the first dig in spring 1869, with the architecture cleared that summer and autumn and a Phoenician-Cypriot bilingual inscription found on 30 July 1869²¹. Newton advised him on digging and recording and urged him to keep the material together^7,12. Reginald Stuart Poole of the British Museum inspected the collection at Larnaca in December 1869 and added observations to Lang's narrative, which was read to the Royal Society of Literature in 1871^2,12,13. Marangou quotes Lang that about a thousand statues and statuettes came from the temple⁶.

His men also found a temple at Pyla, near a farm he had there, which he uncovered carefully "but with much inferior results"³. Kiely dates the Pyla work to spring 1870²¹. A colossal bearded votive statue from Pyla went to Admiral Georg von Millosicz in 1871 on Lang's own dating, and is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, as I 341⁹. The admiral's obituary, quoted in the same catalogue, gives 1870 and tells the removal differently⁹.

Permits

Lang wrote that the British consul was the only one unable to obtain a firman, that the Porte "intended to form a museum", and that shipment "was somehow managed. Cela se fait, mais ne se dit pas"³. Stanley-Price writes that he spent eleven years collecting "without bothering with a firman"¹⁴. Hardy writes that he "extracted thousands of antiquities through unlicensed excavations"¹⁵. Kiely quotes a letter of August 1869 in which Lang saw "no difficulty whatsoever", and a December 1872 admission that he worked under "want of authority" and exported finds "under various pretences"²¹. No proceedings against him are recorded in these sources.

Where the finds went

The British Museum bought the Idalion material in 1872-73. Lang had asked 1,600 pounds; Poole valued the group at 1,625 pounds 5s in 1870, the Trustees declined, and after talks revived in 1871 the Museum paid 1,000 pounds, 800 pounds in 1872 and 200 pounds in January 1873^8,21. The Museum also bought coin hoards from him²¹. Eugène Piot bought material worth about 5,000 francs for the Louvre in 1869²¹. Lang lent a large group to Glasgow in 1870 and gave it in 1903, and Idalion pieces reached the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter in 1882 through Edward Gilbertson and J. C. Bowring^8,21. Before leaving Cyprus he gave Luigi Palma di Cesnola over 1,500 fragments "which I could do nothing with", and Kiely notes that inscribed alabaster vessels Cesnola attributed to Golgoi and Kythroi had been in Lang's possession²¹. Cesnola called Lang his chief rival; Lang spoke of "bonne camaraderie"⁶.

After Cyprus

Lang left Cyprus in 1872 for Egypt, then served the bank in Romania from 1875 to 1879, Constantinople from 1879 to 1883, Egypt from 1887 to 1897 and Constantinople from 1897 to 1902²¹. He married Margaret MacClellan in 1876²¹. He organised the Cyprus Court at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 and lent antiquities to it^8,12. His Cyprus appeared in 1878 and he published recollections of the digs in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1905^3,5. He died at Hampstead in 1913, and further gifts from the cemetery at Ayios Sozomenos reached the British Museum in 1903 and 1913²¹.