Percy Christian

When A. S. Murray left the British Museum's Enkomi excavation in the spring of 1896, the man who took it over was Percy Christian, a Limassol resident who had already worked for the Museum for three years^5,7. The younger brother of Charles Christian, he had been the Museum's agent since its first Turner Bequest campaign at Amathus in 1893, keeping the pay lists and transcribing the official notebook^1,2,8. At Enkomi he directed the digging recorded in the notebook as tombs 38 to 100 and wrote the entry for Tomb 66, until Arthur Hamilton Smith took over later that year^5,6,7. His letters to A. S. Murray describe the Enkomi gold¹.

In 1899 he ran the Kouklia and Klavdhia campaigns with F. B. Welch, who complained that he was unreliable. Kiely calls that unfair and notes that Christian paid the workmen from his own pocket until funds reached him from London⁸. His business interests lay in the west of the island, among them a mining concession near Polis, and he urged the Museum to employ him as its permanent buying agent⁸. He also sold antiquities on his own account: a jug offered at Christie's in 2001 carries the ink inscription "Cyprus, Bt. of Percy Christian 1897"¹¹. H. Rider Haggard, who stayed with him in 1900, describes a tumulus Christian had opened, and the gold and ivory casket from Enkomi¹⁰. Nikolaou puts Christian's death at c. 1950, Ulbrich and Kiely at c. 1953^3,7.