Terence Bruce Mitford

In the summer of 1949 Terence Bruce Mitford was on a bicycle tour of Cyprus with J. H. Iliffe when they heard that villagers had found Archaic sculpture in a mound outside Kouklia. They decided to dig there¹⁰. The expedition that followed ran from 1950 to 1955, and Mitford went on to publish many of the island's inscriptions.

Mitford was born at Yokohama on 11 May 1905 and educated at Dulwich College and Jesus College, Oxford^8,9. He spent his academic life at the University of St Andrews, apart from what Maier calls his "daring war time exploits"¹⁰. By 1971 he was Reader in Classical Archaeology there and a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute¹. He died on 8 November 1978^8,9.

Kouklia

Mitford and Iliffe obtained a licence and persuaded the Liverpool Museums and St Andrews to pay for the dig^10,11. A. H. S. Megaw first granted only a permit for soundings in a wide area; in 1951 the licence became one valid for two years, with first refusal on other sites¹⁰. Kiely gives the aims as the topography of the site, the sanctuary of Aphrodite and datable syllabic inscriptions, together with replacing losses suffered by the Liverpool museum in the war. The finds were divided among Liverpool, Birmingham, Sydney and St Andrews, whose share later passed to the National Museum of Scotland¹⁴.

The first season, in 1950, put trial trenches west of the 1888 excavation and a cutting into the siege mound on Marcello hill¹⁸. G. R. H. Wright dug Evreti tombs III to XI in 1952. Mitford, with Ethel M. Hunter, dug Evreti tombs XII to XIV and the Kaminia and Asproyi cemeteries, mainly in 1953¹⁶. In 1958 he invited H. W. Catling to publish all the tombs; the volume appeared in 2020¹⁶. Maier described Mitford as "direct, commanding, sometimes incisive, often laconic" and Iliffe as kind and vague¹⁰. In Powell's account of the Stewarts, Jim Stewart deplored Mitford's excavation standards, while Basil Hennessy thought both directors "very careful"¹⁷.

Nea Paphos

In 1951 Jean Bérard proposed that Mitford's team carry out his sounding at Nea Paphos with French money. Mitford first declined in January, then on 11 June 1951 planned a limited sounding near Saranda Kolones¹³. The team dug 28 trial pits that year and more in 1952 with Bérard and Deshayes. Bérard, nearly blind since 1941, left the direction to Mitford and asked only for French financial participation¹³. Megaw advised throughout¹³.

Inscriptions

Mitford copied, squeezed and photographed inscriptions at Kourion on visits in 1936, 1949, 1954 and 1958, and added them to the unpublished material of the Kourion Expedition, which he published for the University Museum, Pennsylvania, as The Inscriptions of Kourion (1971)¹. G. H. McFadden gave access, and G. Roger Edwards issued the invitation; the work was finished at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton¹. The catalogue records who found and held the stones. The foreman Christos Grigoriou told him where the Mersinouthkia jug was found, and in June 1949 Mitford himself found a late Roman cippus built into a wall at Mandra tou Markou and left it in place¹.

On the "Treasure of Kourion" described by Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Mitford doubted Cesnola's account. He suggested the objects might come from a royal cemetery at Kourion "but possibly at Old Paphos", and wrote that Cesnola was at some pains to give the treasure a good home¹.

His other Cypriot work included the Hellenistic dedications on pottery from the Kafizin nymphaeum, which he published as The Nymphaeum of Kafizin in 1980⁴. In 1954 he secured funds for the last Kafizin campaign, run by the Department of Antiquities²¹. In 1955 he examined the Rantidi inscriptions from the dig of 1910²². In 1949 the British Museum asked him to identify the Bulwer tablet in Cypriot syllabic script¹⁵. With Olivier Masson he produced the syllabic inscriptions of Rantidi (1983) and of Kouklia-Paphos (1986)⁵. With I. K. Nicolaou he published the Greek and Latin inscriptions from Salamis in 1974⁶. Masson was charged with the remaining volumes after Mitford's death²⁴.