Thomas Kiely

Thomas Kiely is the British Museum curator who has reconstructed, from the museum's own papers, how its Cypriot collection was assembled. He holds the post of Cyprus curator in the Department of Greece and Rome, which Veronica Tatton-Brown occupied for more than thirty years before him². The A.G. Leventis Foundation's report for 1999 to 2008 names him as the A.G. Leventis Cyprus Curator and describes his gallery talks and the Cyprus Digitization Project, which aimed to build a searchable online database of the whole Cypriot collection¹⁵. His date of birth, training and earlier career are not recorded in the published sources.

In 2009 he edited Ancient Cyprus in the British Museum: Essays in Honour of Veronica Tatton-Brown, British Museum Research Publication 180^1,2. He also edited the museum's Ancient Cyprus Online Research Catalogue, 2009 to 2011, and wrote its guide to Kourion⁸. Polina Nikolaou in 2017 and the editors of the Salamis volume have thanked him for access to the museum's archive^10,13.

Newton, Bamboula and Samuel Brown

His articles in the Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes Chypriotes follow individual collectors and diggers through the museum's records. In 2010 he described how Charles Newton formed the museum's first Cypriot collections through Demetrios Pierides, the consuls Colnaghi and de Maricourt, the purchase of Robert Hamilton Lang's finds from Idalion, and the attempt to buy the collection of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, which failed. The article prints Newton's report of 1879 as an appendix³.

In 2012 he and Sabine Fourrier catalogued the finds presented to the museum in 1880 from the demolition of the Bamboula mound at Larnaca in 1879. The work was supervised by Lieutenant Hugh Sinclair, and Kiely reckons that up to half of the mound was destroyed⁴. Claude Delaval Cobham acted as an informal agent for Newton and Alexander Murray in the matter⁴.

In 2012 he wrote with Robert Merrillees on Samuel Brown, the Government Engineer, and his acquaintances. The article follows Brown's application to excavate of 14 July 1885 and the dispersal of his Cypriot antiquities, which went in part to the Queensland Museum through his brother John Jones Brown and in part as gifts to H. Rider Haggard⁵. In the same year, with Anja Ulbrich, he wrote "Britain and the Archaeology of Cyprus I: The long 19th century"⁶. He wrote the sequel alone, covering 1914 to the present, in 2017⁸.

Kouklia and Salamis

In 2015 he reexamined the Cyprus Exploration Fund's excavations at Kouklia in 1888 and 1889 and the museum's own season there in 1899, using unpublished papers from the museum and the Cyprus State Archive. The museum holds little more than a hundred pieces from Palaepaphos, about half of them early Iron Age sherds donated by the Department of Antiquities. The Fund gave shares of its finds to the Ashmolean and the Fitzwilliam in return for funding⁷.

His chapter in the 2019 volume Salamis of Cyprus deals with the bull's-head capital found by the Cyprus Exploration Fund in 1890. Working from photographs in the Greece and Rome archive and a previously unpublished account, he describes its removal in 1891 on HMS Melita from Famagusta to London⁹. In 2018 he contributed a study of the traces of Max Ohnefalsch-Richter in the British Museum to a Berlin volume on Ohnefalsch-Richter¹¹.