Ancient CyprusAncient Cyprus

Traveller / antiquarian · Critic / journalist

William Hepworth Dixon

1821–1879 · United Kingdom

Writer. Lived at Ormidia.

Life and work

  1. c. 1863
    First visited Cyprus, 'fifteen years previously' to 1878.

    CyprusStanley-Price 2018

  2. 30 September 1878
    Landed at Larnaca on the ship from Alexandria (night of 29-30 September 1878) with Lieutenants Hippisley and H. H. Kitchener, and Esme Scott-Stevenson, while writing a book on Cyprus; invited by his friend Alessandro Palma di Cesnola to stay at the Cesnola country house at Ormidia.

    LarnacaStanley-Price 2018

  3. October 1878
    At Ormidia when Lieutenant Spencer came to seal a room of antiquities after Enkomi; said to have 'interfered with Lieutenant Spencer by words generally'. A broken collar-bone kept him from accompanying Cesnola to Commissioner White's house on 6 October; he apparently asked a fellow passenger to go instead.

    OrmidiaStanley-Price 2018

  4. October 1878
    His hand 'can be discerned' (Stanley-Price) in the legal phrasing of Cesnola's complaint to the US consul in Beirut; Wolseley held that Dixon, whom he called a 'pompous ass' and a 'busybody', persuaded Cesnola to break his promise to bring in the antiquities and complain to Beirut instead. Stanley-Price's reading is an inference, Wolseley's a contemporary opinion.

    Stanley-Price 2018

  5. 1879
    Published British Cyprus (London, Chapman & Hall), which calls Cesnola 'the most successful explorer of modern times' and an Italian dealer, Matie, 'the most successful dealer of modern times' (p. 127, quoted by Sevketoglu).

    LondonStanley-Price 2018Şevketoğlu 1998

Connections

2 people

Colleagues & contacts

Sources

  1. 1.Nicholas Stanley-Price (2018). “Illicit excavation: the trial of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola in Cyprus in 1878”. The Antiquaries Journal 98, 297-317.
  2. 2.W. Hepworth Dixon (1879). British Cyprus. London, Chapman & Hall.
  3. 3.Müge Hüseyin Şevketoğlu (1998). “Archaeological Field Survey of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Settlement Sites in Kyrenia District, North Cyprus: Systematic Surface Collection and the Interpretation of Artefact Scatters”. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.
  4. 4.Veronica Tatton-Brown (ed.) (2001). Cyprus in the 19th Century AD: Fact, Fancy and Fiction. Oxford, Oxbow.