Ormonde Maddock Dalton

Ormonde Maddock Dalton published both Byzantine silver treasures found near Lambousa on the north coast of Cyprus, the first in 1900 and the second in 1906. He was born at Cardiff on 3 January 1866 and died in Somerset on 2 February 1945⁸.

The first treasure was found about 1897 near the monastery of Acheiropoietos. Part of it was acquired in Cyprus by the duc de Dino, offered to the British Museum, inspected by Charles Hercules Read in July 1898 and bought for £500⁵. Dalton, then an Assistant in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities, read his paper on it to the Society of Antiquaries on 15 March 1900. It gave a vague findspot and regretted that no record of the excavation existed¹. Robert Merrillees notes that Dalton's 1901 catalogue of Early Christian antiquities repeats it^3,5.

The second treasure was found in the early summer of 1902 at Karavas, a date Dalton gives. Andreas Stylianou and Judith Dobell Stylianou, cited by Leader, and Metcalf give February 1902^2,7,11. In Dalton's account the finders hid it to avoid the Government's one-third share and negotiated with dealers in Paris. Ernest McDonald, Acting Commissioner of Kyrenia, had police search houses. The larger part reached Paris, and a price was still unsettled in the winter of 1905. The finders sued the Government for illegal detention, won, and lost on appeal; the seized part stayed in Cyprus for the Nicosia museum². Dalton read this paper on 30 March 1905, and Marie-Christine Hellmann cites it for the story behind the Cypriot law prohibiting export⁶. He had visited Cyprus in the autumn of 1904 and written a report that was not published⁵.

J. Pierpont Morgan bought the Paris part in 1906⁵. Dalton published it in the Burlington Magazine in March 1907 and again in Byzantine Art and Archaeology in 1911^6,7. Leader records that the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds six of the David plates, given by Morgan's heirs⁷.