Samuel Brown

Samuel Brown built Cyprus's roads, piers and jetties for the British administration, and sponsored excavations at Soli, Kourion and Nicosia while sitting on the council of the island's museum¹. He was born on 8 March 1836 at Highworth, Wiltshire, the son of a maltster and farmer¹. The obituary printed by the Institution of Civil Engineers says he was taken to Jamaica at twelve and was placed in 1851 in the Birkenhead office of James Abernethy, whose son's biography of Abernethy calls him an old pupil and assistant^1,10. He worked on Swansea harbour, the Turin-Savona railway and dredging at King's Lynn, and in 1870 went to Alexandria as second in command of the harbour works for Greenfield and Co.¹.

Engineer to the island

At Garnet Wolseley's request Brown surveyed Cyprus in the winter of 1878-9, and the Colonial Office appointed him Government Engineer in June 1880¹. His work covered roads, piers, harbour lights, the Pedias canal and the locust campaigns¹. He read a paper, Three Months in Cyprus, to the British Association at Sheffield on 25 August 1879, with a section on antiquities that included the colossal vase at Amathus, and published The Locust War in Cyprus in 1886¹. He is not known to have published anything on his own excavations or collection¹.

In 1885 he married Zoe Melita Joly, born at Smyrna in 1861, whose father Stephen Joly was British Vice-Consul there; the couple had no children, and she died on 20 January 1889^1,9. Her brother, Ernest Thomas Charles Joly, an Imperial Ottoman Bank accountant in Nicosia, collected antiquities himself¹. Francis Henry Hill Guillemard recorded in his diary in May 1887 that he had met Brown and his wife at Kyrenia, and made fun of Brown's speech and of her Smyrna origin; Kiely and Merrillees read the entry as a sign of the social prejudice Brown met¹.

Sponsoring the diggers

Brown was a member of the Cyprus Museum Council from its first meeting on 15 June 1882 until December 1888^1,5. Kiely and Merrillees think he was probably Keeper after Hugh Sinclair left in early 1886, and he held the post when Henry Bulwer appointed H. C. Nicolle to take over in October 1888; the handover was authorised on 10 December¹. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter credited him with first drawing attention to the plateau of Leondari Vouno¹.

Under the Ottoman law of 1874, which gave the excavator a third of the finds, Brown applied in September and October 1883 to dig at Soli, and Salomon Reinach lists a Brown among the private clients of Ohnefalsch-Richter's Soli work that year¹. At the Ayios Ermoyenis cemetery at Kourion, John Linton Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter say the latter dug for Brown in 1883-4, and a letter in the Cyprus State Archives describes Sinclair dividing the finds; no excavation record survives¹. In July 1885 Brown applied to dig on private land at Ayia Paraskevi near Nicosia, and the Cyprus Museum's catalogue records that Ohnefalsch-Richter opened eleven tombs there for the museum and eighty-one for residents¹. Kiely and Merrillees note that an official may have found permits easier to obtain, and cite a complaint in the local press from the Warren v. Watkins dispute, but say there is no direct evidence that Brown used his position¹.

His Kourion share included a silver ring with a carnelian scaraboid engraved with Athena, dated about 400 BC, from a tomb east of the acropolis gate. Alexander Conze published it in 1884, and Ohnefalsch-Richter wrote in 1886 that it was in the possession of the engineer S. Brown^1,6. In March 1887 Brown offered the ring to Rider Haggard at any price. Haggard sold it for ten guineas to the dealer W. T. Ready, who passed it to the British Museum in 1889 for twenty guineas^1,2. Kiely and Merrillees could not identify the ring among the museum's holdings today¹.

Giving it away

In January 1886 his brother John Jones Brown, a schoolteacher at Bald Hills in Queensland, gave the Queensland Museum about 74 Cypriot items, said to come from Soli and Curium through Samuel and ranging from the Early Bronze Age to the late Roman period¹. In 1887 he gave Haggard a collection of Cypriot pottery and exported two vases to him¹. On 8 June 1889 A. K. Bovill sought permission to export 13 cases of Brown's antiquities, including 145 glass objects and Egyptian material from Alexandria, valued at 50 pounds; their destination is not recorded¹.

Berlin and Hong Kong

In early 1889 the Royal Museums in Berlin engaged Brown as their agent for a permit to excavate at Idalion. He had left Cyprus in February for Hong Kong before he could act, and the permit was withdrawn^1,3. Lord Knutsford appointed him Surveyor-General of Hong Kong; he arrived in July 1889 and wrote the report on the great storm¹. Brown died of cholera on 10 October 1891 on board the Ancona, returning to Hong Kong from Japan. He left no will, and his estate of over 5,000 pounds was administered in 1892 by his brother William Henry Brown¹.