Jean Bérard

Jean Bérard went to Paphos to test a sentence in Strabo. Born in Paris on 26 May 1908, he was a historian of ancient Greece who held posts at Nancy and the Sorbonne⁷. From June 1950 he wrote to Porphyrios Dikaios, and on 27 November of that year he argued that New Paphos, not Palaepaphos, was the place to check whether Strabo was right that Agapenor founded Paphos, and so to date the Achaean colonisation of Cyprus¹.

Finding a way to dig

The Director of Antiquities, A. H. S. Megaw, replied in December 1950 that the Department could not itself work at Kato Paphos and that the British mission at Kouklia under Terence Bruce Mitford was planning work at Palaepaphos. On 30 January 1951 he added that soundings on a major site were not normally licensed unless they were preliminary to large-scale excavation, and suggested a surface survey first¹.

In a letter of 7 June 1951 Bérard told Megaw that he had lost his sight in 1941 and recovered only a little, and could not direct a dig alone. He was content to leave the Nea Paphos sounding to Mitford, with French money¹. In January 1952 the Commission des Fouilles, on his instigation, gave £200 for renewed soundings at New Paphos, to be carried out by Mitford's team¹.

Nea Paphos and Iskender

Bérard reached Cyprus in 1952 and joined the Kouklia Expedition's soundings at Nea Paphos from early June, with Jean Deshayes of the French School at Athens as his assistant. Megaw communicated the permission to excavate on 13 June¹. Alan John Bayard Wace, visiting, agreed that sherds suspected of being Mycenaean were Hellenistic, and the whole western part of the site, once tested, gave no pre-classical levels^1,2. With Deshayes and a guide called Pavlos, Bérard located the Skender Geometric tombs that had been seen when air-raid trenches were dug in the war; their contents were in the museum at Ktima^1,2.

On 14 October 1952 Megaw, after consulting Mitford, said he welcomed Bérard applying for a permit in his own name to excavate the cemetery. He was satisfied of the competence of Bérard working with Deshayes, and asked for a letter of recommendation from the Commission des Fouilles, tomb numbers and a budget, the landowners' written consent, and publication of the material from the air-raid trenches¹.

As director of the French Mission in Ktima, Bérard dug the Iskender cemetery in 1953, 1954 and 1955 with Deshayes, on whom he relied for the fieldwork^1,2. The 1953 season produced Cypro-Geometric tombs of the 11th to 8th centuries with large stepped dromoi and small chambers, one chamber holding eleven burials, along with Hellenistic tombs and two of the 4th century. Megaw's annual reports describe it as the earliest material then known from the Nea Paphos region⁴. Three more very large Geometric tombs, niche burials and small child graves followed in 1954, among them one with a terracotta horse⁵. The 1955 work fixed the limits of the cemetery and began the study of the finds⁶. J. H. Iliffe of the Kouklia Expedition visited the Ktima dig in June 1953, and the expedition's surveyor, B. C. S. Wilson, worked with Bérard and Deshayes in 1954 and 1955^2,4. Bérard published a preliminary account in Revue archéologique 43 (1954)⁵.

The finds

The French share of the Ktima finds was the last to reach a French museum before the law on division of finds was repealed. According to Suzanne Bérard, as reported by Annie Caubet, the crates sent to Paris were opened on the way and the vases partly crushed; members of the mission restored them in the Louvre stores³. Deshayes published the cemetery in 1963 as La Nécropole de Ktima. Mission Jean Bérard 1953-1955³.

Bérard died in a road accident at Beaune on 21 July 1957⁷. Franz Georg Maier calls his death untimely and says that, with the political situation, it ended the French mission's work at Paphos². His article on the Greek colonisation of Cyprus and the date of the Trojan War appeared in 2008 in Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes 38, together with Antoine Hermary's edition of his 1950 to 1953 letters^1,8.