Scholar

Ruth E. Leader

fl. 1998–2000

Scholar, active 1998–2000.

Life and work

September 2000
Published 'The David Plates Revisited: Transforming the Secular in Early Byzantium' (Art Bulletin 82.3, pp. 407-427), reinterpreting the nine David Plates of the Second Cyprus Treasure (found 1902 at Lambousa) as secular luxury silver; recounts the find history: found by Karavas villagers quarrying; Cypriot authorities confiscated three David Plates, two cross-monogram plates and some jewellery (now Nicosia); the rest was smuggled out, sold to a Paris dealer, bought mostly by J. Pierpont Morgan and given by his heirs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (six David Plates).
LambousaLeader 2000, p. 407 and nn. 5-8
September 2000
In n. 7 she records that Andreas and Judith Stylianou traced a descendant of one of the finders, 'the son of one of the finders', who said the jewellery was found in a pot hidden beneath a floor and the plates walled up in a niche, on subsequent workdays in February 1902; she calls this 'probably the most reliable account of the hoard's discovery' and notes that no archaeologist investigated the findspot. She also notes two cross-monogram plates (Dodd 33 with Phocas stamps, 54 with early Heraclian stamps) and that the Stylianous add Dodd 37-39.
LambousaLeader 2000, p. 407 and nn. 6-7

2 people

David Plates (nine silver plates, Second Cyprus Treasure)
From Lambousa, 1902Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (six David Plates); Museum of Antiquities, Nicosia (three David Plates)Leader 2000, p. 407 and n. 8