Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774 to 1856) made the first recorded visit to the tomb known as the Spilaion tis Regainas, near Kouklia, the village on the site of ancient Palaipaphos^1,9. He was then the young secretary of Commodore Sir Sidney Smith, whose ship Tigre anchored at Katopaphos on 10 August 1802 to load oxen, and he used the stop to ride out to the ruins¹. His book Topographische Ansichten (Vienna, 1811) suggests a long stay, but his memoirs, published long after his death, show only two days at Kouklia¹. Maier and Karageorghis in 1984 and the Vienna museum catalogue give the year as 1800, while Maier in 2001 ties the visit to the Tigre's call in 1802^1,3,6.

On the site he made the first sketch plan of the sanctuary, noting temenos blocks, statue bases and mosaics, and suggested that holes in the temenos blocks had served for oracles¹. At the Spilaion tis Regainas he crawled in through the small opening at the top of the filled entrance passage. The marble door-block with an inscription he called Phoenician lay in the antechamber, and the side chambers held only dust and worms, the tomb having been emptied already; he copied the inscription and published it¹. Maier and Karageorghis describe a syllabic epitaph of King Timocharis, priest of Aphrodite, copied at the same locality³.

On a third day, according to his memoirs as Maier quotes them, Smith lent him the ship's boat and a crew with picks. They dug out a well-preserved piece of mosaic floor, which a fellow officer named Bromley hacked at and largely smashed, and next morning took aboard a piece of panelling, two inscribed stones and two large pieces of mosaic¹. Smith gave the larger stone away; the smaller, of red marble, is in Vienna¹. The Kunsthistorisches Museum also holds a limestone honorary inscription for Ptolemy Eupator (III 7), catalogued as acquired from Hammer-Purgstall in 1803⁶. He died in Vienna on 23 November 1856⁹.