Jean-Baptiste Cayla

Jean-Baptiste Cayla spent 1994 to 1996 in Cyprus as a coopérant of the French government, on a project to gather the alphabetic Greek inscriptions of Old Paphos, a subject that L. Dubois and Olivier Masson had proposed to him for a D.E.A. dissertation¹. His frequent stays at Kouklia brought him into contact with the chief guardian of the site and its museum, Onesiphoros Loukaides. In 1996 Masson asked him to visit Xylinos, on the north-east edge of Kouklia, where new material had recently come up: the contents of tomb 131, a syllabic epitaph from tomb 133 published in 1995, and an Aeolic capital¹. He also reported that the records of the 1952-53 tombs of Terence Mitford and Iliffe are in the National Museums of Scotland, and that finds from one tomb went to provincial museums, five of them in Scotland and none at Liverpool¹.

His note on Xylinos appeared in 1996 in the Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes Chypriotes, volume 26¹. A paper on Bassidius Lauricius and a restored burnt monument at Paphos followed in volume 27 (1997, pp. 71-77)². He then wrote on the epithets of Apollo and on Kinyras, in 2000, 2001 and 2005^3,4,5, and on commercial links and marriage alliances between Cypriots and Roman traders in 2006⁶. His study of the divine names of Crete and Cyprus appeared in 2016⁸.

His book Les inscriptions de Paphos (Lyon, 2018) treats the city under the Ptolemies and in the Roman period, and is cited in the research history of Nea Paphos^9,10.