Henry Rider Haggard

Henry Rider Haggard, the novelist, left Cyprus in April 1887 with an export permit for about twenty pots, a bronze bowl and twenty pieces of glass, valued at five pounds. He had arrived on 14 March as a guest of the High Commissioner, Henry Bulwer, and the permit is dated 4 April¹. His notebook records the collection of Samuel Brown seen on 22 March, and cryptic entries for Falkland Warren on 16 and 18 March¹. Brown gave him a collection of Cypriot pottery and entrusted him with a silver ring with an engraved scaraboid, said to come from a tomb at Kourion. Haggard, short of money, sold the ring in England for ten guineas to the dealer William Talbot Ready, who passed it to the British Museum in 1889 for twenty guineas¹. He bought the bronze bowl, which held a coin hoard, from its finder in a village near Kyrenia; T. Kiely and R. S. Merrillees suggest Lambousa as the source¹.

In 1887 he gave the British Museum an amulet and a gem, neither with a Cypriot provenance, and handed the Cyprus Museum a cannon ball¹. In his own account of 1901 he says he pocketed the lower parts of two statues at Kourion as letter-weights, and that the British Museum kept one or two other objects he had found and gave him plaster casts². On a second visit in 1900 he found the Nicosia museum in disorder and called Cesnola's excavations "omnivorous"⁴.

In 1920 he gave two Greek vases and a Roman glass bowl to Norwich Castle Museum, and his widow gave his antiquities, mostly Egyptian, in 1925. Liverpool Museums bought Norwich's non-British material in 1956, including fourteen Cypriot vases, one of them a White Painted III amphora recorded as Haggard's¹. The family knows of no Cypriot pieces still in its hands¹.