Robert Zahn

In 1910 the Cyprus Committee of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences put Robert Zahn, an assistant keeper at the Berlin Museums, in charge of an excavation at Rantidi near Palaepaphos that Max Ohnefalsch-Richter had set in motion. Ohnefalsch-Richter had heard that clandestine diggers had found Cypro-syllabic inscriptions there and on 10 May applied for a permit in the name of Koritzky. His letters to Berlin led the Academy to take up the project, and on 22 August 1910 Hatton Richards granted the permit to Zahn, acting for the Committee. Ohnefalsch-Richter was given no role in the permit^1,2.

Fieldwork ran from 30 August to 7 October 1910. The finds could not be exported, the inscriptions yielded little, and no report followed; Zahn's few photographs were published only in 1983^1,2. Ohnefalsch-Richter had visited the site just before the dig began, while Zahn was in the Troodos meeting the Governor, and Zahn protested in print in 1911^1,3. F. G. Maier states that Zahn investigated the site and the inscriptions but did not trial-excavate the sanctuary, contrary to Ohnefalsch-Richter's claim⁶.

Zahn had already dealt with Ohnefalsch-Richter in April 1908, when he received the manuscript of Tamassos und Idalion. After much editorial work he concluded that it could not be printed as submitted³. The last item in the Ohnefalsch-Richter file is a letter of 19 September 1932 from the director-general of the Berlin museums about the state of Zahn's work on it².