Robert Hamilton Lang

By his own account Lang came to Cyprus with "absolutely no antiquarian knowledge" and was inclined to think the study of old stones and coins a waste of time⁵. He was "thrown, however, much into intercourse" with Demetrius Pierides, "a very learned local antiquarian", and by degrees began to take an interest in his pastime; in 1878 he called Pierides his "coadjutor" and his "instructor" in all that concerned antiquities^3,5. In 1865 he went with the Vice-Consul Dominic Ellis Colnaghi to an ancient site near Pyla, where, Colnaghi told his family, "we have stumbled over a new city, with a temple", and Colnaghi wrote to Charles Newton that "the merit is not mine but Mr Lang's"²¹.

In Lang's book of 1878 the tomb digging began at Laksha Nicoli, a hill north of Dali with a well on its summit, where some peasants of Dali were passing in 1868 after a torrential rain; the villagers, who had lost most of their crops to locusts, went in great numbers to the "pottery-diggings"^3,21. Lang at once sent a man to superintend the digging and to obtain the finds at first hand, and nearly all the new finds came to Lang or to Mr. Ceccaldi^3,5. "Our houses became like earthenware shops," he wrote, with the pieces found counted by tens of thousands and the tombs opened by thousands³.

The diggers were led chiefly by two men: Hasen, a Turk of Dali who became attached to the American consulate, and old Hadgi Georghi, finder of the bronze "Tablet of Dali", who was "chiefly my man" and "had wonderful luck"^3,5. Lang paid his own gang two piastres a day each, about fourpence, promised gratuities according to the importance of their finds, and put Hadgi Georghi in charge⁵. Kiely concludes that Lang "was clearly operating in the Dhali area, and with commercial intent"²¹. In a letter to Newton in the summer of 1868 he said he had given two Phoenician heads "with some extremely interesting objects" to Péretié²¹.

The year in which the temple at Dali was found is disputed, 1868 or 1869: the earlier date comes from Lang's own report, the later from Kiely²¹. In the narrative he wrote with Poole, Lang dated to the spring of 1868 the moment when his Dali men "came upon (as it were) a mine of statues", several of colossal size, which convinced him that the place was the site of an ancient temple¹³⁸. His reminiscences of 1905 also give the spring of 1868 for the day Hadgi Georghi brought news that workmen had found a colossal statue, its long beard intact, in a field of his son Sotiri near Dali, but his book of 1878 puts the urgent summons to Dali "one day in 1869"^3,5. Kiely writes that the sources "make it abundantly clear" that the site was discovered in the spring of 1869, and that the main excavation ended in the summer or early autumn of that year after a break for the harvest²¹.

Lang recalled that he took on more workmen and dug for "fully two months" under a broiling sun, the happiest, "albeit hottest", months of his life, and that "not less than a thousand pieces" of stone statues and statuettes came out⁵. He resumed in the spring of 1869, by this account, at full wages, with the ostensible aim of clearing the ground⁵. The second season yielded few statues but several inscriptions, five of them in Phoenician, and two hoards of very ancient coins, found under the pavements of two rooms on the east side of the temple that he supposed were priests' apartments⁵. He found the bilingual on 30 July 1869 and announced it at once to Newton⁵. He told Newton of the two coin hoards as well, asking him for the utmost secrecy²¹.

Newton urged him in 1869 to go on excavating and keep the collection together "instead of parting with it piece-meal", promising to try to provide for it in his estimates, and wrote that it would be "far more valuable if kept together with clear notes of the provenance of the several objects"²¹. Kiely counts the sanctuary of Apollo-Reshef as the first shrine in Cyprus "to be explored and recorded under controlled circumstances and published reliably"²¹. Lang's report speaks of 1000 pieces; the inventory Poole made in 1869 listed 372 items²¹.

At the British Museum's request, Lang wrote, he let no one copy the bilingual; Paul Schröder, who came from Constantinople hoping to do so, could inspect the collection and list its inscriptions but not copy them^5,21. Count de Vogüé, then French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, wished to buy the inscription, but Lang, by his own account, refused him "even a glance at it"⁵. The only squeeze of the bilingual that he gave went to Dr Birch of the British Museum, who entrusted its study to George Smith⁵. Lang read a paper on the script to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 7 November 1871, and Smith followed him at the same meeting^5,21. The narrative of the temple, with Poole's observations, was read to the Royal Society of Literature on 15 November 1871, the date printed at its head, though Lang later remembered 7 November^5,138.

Shortly after Dali, Lang wrote, his men found another temple at Pyla, carefully uncovered "but with much inferior results"³. The year is disputed, 1868 or 1870: the Vienna museum's catalogue dates his find of a votive statue there to 1868, while Kiely places the work in the spring of 1870, citing Schröder's diary for 18 March 1870, which says Lang had found many statues at Pyla "a few weeks ago"^9,21.

A larger-than-life votive statue from Pyla went to Austria, and the accounts of how it left Cyprus differ^3,5,9. In 1905 Lang recalled that in June 1871 the Austrian frigate Habsburg, carrying the flag of Admiral Millosich, anchored off Larnaca for a few days; the admiral asked to buy the statue, and Lang "would have given it to him willingly", but the admiral insisted on paying⁵. His book of 1878 speaks of an Austrian captain who offered to remove the statue if Lang would sell it, for "a nominal price of a few pounds"³. The admiral reported to Vienna on 24 July 1871 that the figure had been meant for England, but that after "difficulties" with the owner, "a Mr. Lang", he could buy it for 120 florins, and that Lang had asked him not to disclose the price, at least in the Orient, because he would be embarrassed if others heard how cheaply he had sold it⁹. The admiral's obituary, quoted in the Vienna catalogue, puts the shipment in 1870, "notwithstanding the Turkish government's strictest rules against the export of such antiquities"⁹. Vienna bought the statue from the admiral on 12 January 1872, and its catalogue lists it as no. 76, a votive statue of a priest⁹.

Most of the Pyla finds, which his surviving letters to the British Museum never mention, were sold or given piecemeal to Cesnola, the Louvre, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and probably other institutions²¹. On leaving Cyprus he gave Cesnola, as he put it to Birch, "over 1500 fragments and pieces which I could do nothing with but which he doctored and made count", in exchange, Kiely writes, for a dozen smaller pieces²¹.

In 1870 five young men digging for terracottas in the sands above the salt lake at Larnaca found a hoard of gold staters of Philip of Macedonia and Alexander the Great, and Lang secured nearly all of it^3,5. He disposed of 500 of the common staters at Constantinople and parted with fifteen fine ones to the Duke of Sutherland³. A comparison made with Poole's help found 99 types that the British Museum lacked, and Lang sold them to the Museum at its own valuation^3,5. Kiely records £550 spent by the Museum on silver coins from the two Dali hoards, mainly large denominations from the first, in two batches²¹.

Newton hoped in 1869 that Lang could work without applying to the Porte for a firman, adding that "probably your local influence does instead of a firman"²¹. When the governor told him during the Dali digging that he ought to stop him for want of a firman, Lang, by his own account, answered "jokingly that he needed a firman to stop me, which he had not"³. Whether he ever held a permit is disputed^3,9. Lang wrote in 1878 that of all the consuls at Larnaca the British consul alone could not obtain a firman from Constantinople, being told that the Porte meant to form a museum, and in 1905 that pressing requests to the British Ambassador had brought him no permit to dig, "and far less" to export^3,5. Admiral Millosich wrote that both Lang and Cesnola "have been granted extensive permission for their excavations", but that Lang's had expired and had not been extended despite the English envoy's efforts⁹.

The shipment off the island, Lang wrote in 1878, "was somehow managed. Cela se fait, mais ne se dit pas" (it is done, but not spoken of)³. In 1905 he told how his dragoman, with an English steamer in the roadstead, had small heads of statuary piled on the quay as if for shipment⁵. He added that he could count on his fingers the people who knew how "Abudachni" (the father with the beard), as Hadgi Georghi called the colossus of Dali, had left Cyprus to become the central figure of the British Museum's Cyprian room⁵. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette of 12 December 1872 he wrote that he had worked under "want of authority", in constant fear of interference and confiscation, and had at last had "to charge my conscience with the crime of contraband" so that the objects should reach the national museum²¹. Maurice Pope called his career a "compendium of archaeological vice"; Kiely, for whom Pope is the only major detractor, finds that the judgement "lacks balance or any deeper understanding of 19th-century archaeological practices"²¹.

Shortly before he left Cyprus, in June 1872 by his 1905 account and in May by his book of 1878, he had a last dig at the temple of Dali, which Kiely describes, in Lang's own words, as made "in pretence of clearing away stone" after he had failed to get a firman, and found a colossal head of archaic type, which he gave to the British Museum^3,5,21.

Lang wrote that he desired two things for the Dali finds: that they should not be separated, and that they should find a home in the national museum⁵. The formal process began on 13 November 1869, when reports on his collection by Samuel Birch, Newton and William Vaux went to the Trustees with Lang's own valuation of £1600²¹. Newton called it "the most complete and the most important collection of Graeco-Phoenician antiquities which has ever been found", and told the Trustees that Karl Friederichs, sent by the Prussian government, had made Lang repeated offers, rejected only because Lang had given Newton first refusal²¹. The Trustees sent Poole to Cyprus; Kiely has him on the island from 2 to 22 December 1869^5,21. Poole valued the collection at some £1625 5s, more than Lang's own figure²¹.

After deferring the decision several times, the Trustees declined on 12 March 1870 to buy at the price asked; Lang offered to reduce it, but they would not make a lower offer²¹. All the same, in the course of 1871 he sent the most important parts of the collection to London, where Newton and Birch could study them in person^5,21. Newton and Birch proposed £800 in the Estimates for 1872-73, and on 11 January 1873 the Trustees approved a further £200 for the residue of the collection²¹.

The first group, registered as GR 1872,8-16, comprised 99 pieces; the second, GR 1873,3-20.1 to 347, held the remaining limestone and terracotta statuary and figurines from the shrine²¹. The British Museum records the upper part of a colossal limestone statue of a bearded man, a worshipper or possibly a priest, at least 2 m tall when complete, as bought from Lang¹⁴⁰. It also records that most of the Idalion limestone sculpture it acquired from him was bought in 1872 and 1873¹⁴⁰. Lang wrote in 1905 that he had kept the Dali finds together "at some pecuniary sacrifice"⁵.

The sources disagree on whether the Louvre's pieces were gifts or purchases^11,139. Annie Caubet wrote in 1993 that the Louvre owes to Lang the gift of several sculptures, offered in 1872, some of them representing the local Artemis (MNB 358, MNB 757); the Louvre's own records list MNB 316 and MNB 358 as purchases from him on 7 March and 4 July 1872, and MNB 757 as a gift of 4 June 1874^11,139. Glasgow received material early: he lent it to the City Industrial Museum, later the Kelvingrove Museum, in 1870 and gave it in 1903²¹. Items he excavated at "Idalium" reached the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter in 1882 through his Ottoman Bank associate Edward Gilbertson²¹.

Lang wrote that on leaving Cyprus in 1872 "my archaeological work was done", and that his labours since had been in "the prosaic fields of administration and finance"⁵. After managing the bank's agency in Egypt from 1872 to 1875 he was Director-General of the Régie des Tabacs in Romania until 1879, a body Kiely calls near-bankrupt^21,135. In 1876 he married Margaret, daughter of Walter MacLellan¹³⁵. His book Cyprus: its History, Present Resources, and Future Prospects appeared in 1878 under the name "R. Hamilton Lang, late H.M. Consul for the Island of Cyprus", and a French translation was published in Paris the following year^3,21,135.

Kiely has him based in Constantinople from 1879 to 1883 and writes that he became General Director of the Caisse de la Dette publique ottomane²¹. As Executive Commissioner for Cyprus at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 he and the assistant commissioners carried out in London the island's display, organised by a committee at Nicosia under Sir R. Biddulph, and that year he was made an Additional Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George^136,137. From 1887 to 1897 he was British member of the Council of Direction of the Egyptian Daira Sanieh¹³⁵. Kiely writes that in that period in Egypt he returned the Khedival Crown Estates to economic viability, for which he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, a knighthood Who Was Who dates to 1897^21,135. He was Director-General of the Imperial Ottoman Bank at Constantinople from 1897 to 1902, then sat on its London Committee, and retired to Dedham in Essex^21,135.

In Blackwood's Magazine for August 1902 he wrote that in Cyprus "honest administration has supplanted a corrupt régime"¹²⁴. In his reminiscences of 1905 he called the old stones and coins of Cyprus the happiest pastimes of his life, and wrote that "in their pursuit there was nothing sordid"⁵.

Many of the Cypriot things he had kept went to the British Museum between 1902 and 1913²¹. Among them, in 1903, were inscribed alabaster vessels that Cesnola claimed came from Golgoi and Kythroi²¹. A much larger number followed in 1912-13: the Department of Coins and Medals received the bulk of the second Dali hoard, and the gift included 15 items of Late Bronze Age gold jewellery from the tomb between Ayios Sozomenos and Laksha²¹. In a letter about his recent gift, written a few weeks before his death, he spoke of "our great National Collection, to which I owe such a great debt of gratitude"²¹. He died in Hampstead on 2 March 1913^21,135. At his funeral, according to The Times, the presiding clergyman, Dr Archibald Flemming, praised his "personal charm, unselfishness and warm humanity"²¹.