A Family Tomb at Kourion: Ayios Ermoyenis Tomb 8, 3rd c. BC to 4th c. AD

The cemetery of Ayios Ermoyenis lies on the lower slopes under the Kourion bluff, about a mile from the sea. Its tombs are cut into a soft calcareous sandstone, the chavara of Cypriot builders, and a conglomerate known locally as ammo-tsakillo. Since antiquity the slope has silted up by as much as six metres (McFadden 1946, p. 449).

In 1940 and 1941 the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s expedition to Kourion opened 95 pits there, and George McFadden published the results. Nine of them led to tombs with their burials and gifts; eleven had been dug or robbed before; seven held plain monolithic sarcophagi of the Roman period (p. 449). The largest, long rectangular tombs, Tombs 5, 6 and 8, were cut in the early or middle 3rd century BC, after small oval tombs for single burials in the 4th (p. 453), and were used for centuries. Tombs 1, 5 and 8 all received burials in the reign of Augustus (p. 459), and the roof of Tomb 1 fell some time after a coin of the emperor Probus (AD 276–282) had reached it (p. 454).

Tomb 8 (McFadden’s Pits 71, 73 and 77) is the only tomb of the cemetery published in full, with plans by Joseph Last, two find-plans, a register of 147 numbers and depths for most objects. Those depths are “levels”, measured down from the top of the stone lintel of the inner door. By our reckoning the floors of both chambers lie about 1.7 to 1.8 m below it, so an object at level 1.70 in the main chamber was lying on the floor, and one at 1.10 lay some 60 cm above it, on later debris or where water had left it. Most of what follows rests on those numbers.

McFadden argued that the cemetery was sold in lots. Each was a long narrow strip running down the slope, holding a monument on the ground above, the dromos (the sloping entrance passage) below it, and the chamber at the end (p. 456). At the head of Tomb 8’s dromos stood a small built monument, a moulded base with an upright slab on it, together 0.847 m high. McFadden read that as ten palms of a local foot of 0.3387 m, a unit he also found in the cemetery’s terrace walls (pp. 456–457). Its footprint in the model is ours.

From the monument the dromos ran down towards the west for about ten metres. The upper half, about 4.5 m long and 1.4 m wide, was an open cutting with a ramp for a floor. The lower half was a roofed corridor about 5.4 m long and 1.0 m wide inside, lined on both sides with ashlar, squared and dressed blocks, three courses of which show in the excavator’s drawing. On the north side the bedrock fell away below the floor, so the builders put up a wall of rough masonry and set the ashlar on top of it (p. 450). About twelve rock-cut steps, each about 20 cm high, led down inside the corridor to a paved landing in front of the first door. Over the landing the roof was of flat slabs; over the stair it was gabled, pairs of slabs leaning together and stepping down with the steps. A packing of earth and crushed sandstone went over the roof to keep out the winter washings (p. 450; measurements from fig. 2).

The roof saved labour. An open dromos had to be dug out before every burial and filled again afterwards (the first fill of Tomb 8’s upper dromos was mostly spoil from cutting the tomb), but the roofed part was left empty (p. 450). Two slabs under a plain lintel closed its upper end, and a family burying a relative had only to clear the upper cutting, move the slabs and walk down the stair.

Below the landing the plan opens in two rooms. The first doorway, about 0.76 m wide and 1.37 m high, has a stone frame with a lintel of two slabs meeting in a shallow gable, and was closed by a single stone slab against its outer face (p. 452). It leads into an antechamber laid across the line of the dromos, about 5.0 m long from south to north and 2.4 m deep, with the entrance off-centre so that the longer arm runs north. A second framed doorway, 0.68 m wide and about 1.56 m high, with its slab on the antechamber side, opens into the main chamber: a long room about 6.3 m long, 2.55 m wide at the door and 2.8 m at the back, its axis turned some 25° from the line of the dromos, to the north in our reading (figs. 2, 7, 10, 11). The floors lie 8 m below today’s ground (p. 454), about 5.5 m below the ground of the 3rd century BC as measured on the section (fig. 7).

Both roofs have fallen, so their height is unknown. McFadden describes the large tombs as having rounded corners and walls that “curve inward as they rise to form the roof” (p. 453). We draw the walls vertical to 1.5 m and curving in to a crown at 2.2 m: our reconstruction, high enough to clear the inner door’s frame.

One small find dates the building. A grey-buff burnished juglet (no. 14) was lying in the packing over the dromos roof, and it came from the same workshop as juglets and an unguentarium (nos. 70–72) left on the main-chamber floor by the first burials (p. 463). So the corridor was roofed while the tomb’s first family was using it. No tool marks are recorded; iron picks and chisels are our assumption. By our estimate, measured on the model, the cutting moved about 115 m³ of rock and soil, some 175 m³ once loosened, which is 120 to 230 worker-days with picks and baskets, and the masonry, roof slabs, frames and doors another 30 to 60: a team of 4 to 6 people for 4 to 12 weeks.

Of the tomb’s first family almost nothing is left in the room built for them. McFadden saw that the first burials had been laid in the “preferred places to right and left of the chamber doorways” of the main chamber and later removed (p. 463). What stayed behind was what the later clearers missed or left: two burnished juglets and an unguentarium from the workshop of the roof-packing juglet, a second unguentarium, probably two lagynoi (narrow-necked jugs with a single handle, a Hellenistic shape), and a plummet-shaped amphora a metre tall lying diagonally across the chamber. On the antechamber floor, under a piece of the broken inner door in our reading of the plan, lay a black-glazed lamp made in Athens in the first half of the 3rd century BC (no. 31). How many people were buried then is unknown; the model shows two, marked speculative.

The antechamber kept more. At its north end lay a skull with gold leaves on the crown and near the teeth (Burial 3). Round it lay three tall grey-buff unguentaria, slim flasks for scented oil, and most of the 57 pieces of gold myrtle leaf found in the antechamber, the remains of a funeral wreath (nos. 25–27, 41–42; p. 465). The leaves, of thin sheet gold, were probably once fixed to a frame of wire or some perishable material; in the model they lie as a scatter round the head. No other bone of Burial 3 was found, and McFadden allowed that the skull might belong to the headless body of Burial 2 at the other end of the room. The model treats the skull as a burial of its own, with the unfound body along the north wall; the other reading is a switch in the viewer.

Then part of the antechamber gave way. Conglomerate fell from the walls or roof into a heap at the south end, and the next burial, Burial 2, was laid on top of the heap, about 25 cm above the floor (p. 464). It was two adults side by side, parallel to the south wall, with their heads to the east and the door to their right. One skull was missing. With them were two plummet-shaped amphoras about a metre long, laid on their sides along the south wall, three lagynoi painted with red and, probably displaced, a jug with red bands on white (nos. 19–24, pp. 464–465). In one passage McFadden puts “a late burial” on the heap (p. 454); his detailed account (p. 464), which the model follows, makes it Burial 2.

After Burial 2 the tomb was shut. For at least a century, from about 200 BC to about 50 BC, nobody was buried in it (p. 464). The whole cemetery changed in that time. In the 3rd century BC it had been kept up, with ashlar terrace walls, a road, a stairway and a small hero shrine (Pit 64). From the 2nd century BC silt poured down the slope and was left to lie (pp. 455–459). Over the filled upper dromos of Tomb 8 the silt built up in fine laminated layers.

Late in the 1st century BC somebody laid a floor of crushed sandstone over that silt and built a rough wall straight across the line of the dromos (p. 460). Below them the roofed corridor stood empty, as it had been designed to, its closing slabs in place.

The Augustan family did not clear the old dromos. They dug two pits through the new floor, one on each side of the rough wall, straight down to the entrance of the roofed corridor, and the fill of those pits holds four lamps of the 1st century AD (pp. 459–460). They moved the two closing slabs. The lower one, which once rested on the third step, was found raised 17 cm on rough stones, reset by people who had taken it out and put it back (p. 452).

At the bottom of the stair the outer door came down. It was found lying flat on the paved landing, on top of a local jug (no. 1) of the second half of the 1st century BC, so it fell no earlier than that (p. 463). Whether it fell or was laid down cannot be told. Either way the reopeners used it. On the slab and in the gap between it and the bottom step McFadden found the set of things described at the start: the two strigils on their ring, the palette, tweezers, a lead pyxis (a small lidded box), three fusiform unguentaria, and two grey lamps with black glaze (nos. 2–12). He read them as one deposit, placed at one time at the entrance to the antechamber (p. 463).

A strigil is a curved bronze scraper. At the baths a Roman rubbed oil into the skin, exercised or sweated, and scraped oil, sweat and dirt off with the strigil, so a pair of strigils on a ring, an oil flask or three, and a box for a cosmetic or a salve are the kit of a man or woman who used the baths. These strigils are 23.8 cm long. No body lay near them, and whose they were is not recorded. They may have belonged to one of the Augustan dead and been left at the threshold when the body was carried in, or they may have been a gift to the tomb’s dead as a whole; the model leaves the question open.

The main chamber was then cleared. The Augustan family took out the bodies of the first period and most of what had been buried with them, and left the roof debris that had fallen in the meantime, spread and levelled, as a new floor (p. 463).

The first of the new burials, as McFadden reconstructs them, went into the north-east corner of the main chamber, to the right of the door: a group of at least two people, with six thin-walled deep bowls of a Roman kind decorated in barbotine (slip trailed on like icing; nos. 75–80), two moulded bowls of opaque honey-coloured glass (nos. 110–111), a pair of silver earrings, one with a striped glass bead and one with an onyx bead (nos. 117–118), and gold wreath leaves (p. 466). We call it, as he does, the central group, after the place where it was found. Burial 5, on the other side of the door, may be as early; it is described below.

When the next family burial came, the north-east corner was wanted again, and the central group was moved. Its bones were found in the middle of the chamber still in order, pelvis and legs lying together, and the two silver earrings still side by side by a skull. A body that had been dragged or shovelled would have come apart. McFadden concluded that the group had been lifted on the wooden bier it lay on and set down in the middle of the room (p. 466). Iron nails sticking in rotted wood (nos. 13, 138–139) are the only remains of biers in the tomb, and the model draws them at about 1.8 by 0.6 m, a size we take from analogy. One of the moved bodies now lies with its head to the west, away from the door, the opposite of every other burial in the tomb; perhaps the bier was turned round on the way.

Not everything moved with the bier. The bowls were broken and their pieces scattered. Bowl 77 was found in three places: its rim among the thigh bones of Burial 4, more sherds between a Burial 4 skull and the door, and its base in the antechamber. Bowl 78 had its rim by the right shoulder of another Burial 4 skeleton and the rest of it beside the skull of Burial 2, in the other room (p. 466). Two Rhodian wine amphoras of the 1st century BC or later (nos. 17–18; Virginia Grace’s dating) were thrown into the antechamber at the same time and landed on Burial 2, two centuries older than they were, and debris from the main chamber was shovelled over them (p. 465).

Burial 4 took the cleared corner in the first half of the 1st century AD. Three adults lay on their backs parallel to the north wall, heads towards the door, their skulls within half a metre of each other and their legs crowded together; the body of the third, C, had been pushed in among the other two. To the left of the first lay the lower legs of a fourth person, nothing more (pp. 465–466). The bones lay only 5 to 23 cm above the floor.

The things with them can be placed closely from the find-plan. Skull C still had a gold earring at each ear, gold wire threaded with three green glass beads and three gold beads (nos. 115–116); a silver spoon lay to the right of the skull, a lamp of the 1st century AD just to the east of it, and gold wreath leaves around it. Among C’s bones was a spindle whorl of dark glass, and two more whorls, of steatite and bone, lay in the group (nos. 145–147). By skull A was a single gold earring with a striped glass drop (no. 119). A coarse jug, a small white-slipped juglet, a red bowl, a second lamp and a mould-made bowl of pale green glass also lay with the group (nos. 50–51, 82, 92, 109; the glass bowl only probably).

Earrings and spindle whorls together suggest that C was a woman, but the bones were never examined for sex or age. McFadden leaves C unsexed, and so does the model.

Burial 5 lay on the other side of the door, along the south wall, and is the best-preserved body in the tomb: an adult on the back, head to the entrance, face turned towards the wall, about 1.6 m from head to foot and only 4 to 10 cm above the floor (p. 467). A Rhodian amphora lay across the chamber at the head. Three jugs, among them the largest jug in the tomb, 46 cm tall (no. 48), a small amphora, a casserole lid and a painted unguentarium had been set round the body, and McFadden dates the burial to the reign of Augustus. Some stray arm bones and ribs near its shoulder belonged to another person; they may be part of the moved central group.

Then water came into the tomb. Two layers ran across the main-chamber floor: first a washing of sand, then one of earth, left by water that ran into the tomb, most likely in a winter storm. Two of Burial 5’s jugs (nos. 46 and 48) and the small amphora were found resting on the washings, about 25 cm above where they had been put down. Being empty, they had floated as the chamber filled and settled where the water left them (p. 467). In the antechamber the sand washing appears only at the south end (p. 463).

The flood divides the main-chamber finds in two. Objects lying in the lower debris, in McFadden’s strata 4 and 5, went in before it; objects resting on the earth washing or higher went in after, unless, like Burial 5’s jugs, they had floated. That is how the model assigns the many gifts that cannot be tied to a named burial; the rule is ours, applied to his strata.

McFadden’s register runs to 147 numbers. Some numbers are a single pot; some are a lot of gold leaves or a string of beads. Counted piece by piece, with one iron fragment that was photographed but never numbered, they come to 382 objects, 217 of them gold myrtle leaves. Add the nine pieces of the fallen 4th-century sarcophagus group and the model holds 391.

Most of it gave the dead what the living needed: water pitchers by the bodies, amphoras of wine, unguentaria for scented oil, and lamps. Two eggs, one with its contents charred, and the bones of a chicken lay in the debris of the north side of the main chamber (nos. 141–143). Four small cooking pots show no sign of use (nos. 86–89). The personal things are fewer: five earrings, two bronze mirrors and the iron handles of a box, a silver spoon, a third strigil, a half alabastron of Egyptian alabaster, and a sea shell with punched holes.

Ten of the fourteen transport amphoras are Rhodian, the long-necked jars in which wine from Rhodes travelled round the eastern Mediterranean; three are stamped, two of them with the rose of Rhodes. Every one of the ten belongs to the Roman phase. The 3rd-century family had plummet-shaped amphoras of another kind. Eight Rhodian jars lay in the main chamber, most of them on their sides along the north wall and at the back, as if pushed aside to make room for new burials (nos. 56–63).

The other change is glass. No glass vessel is tied to the 3rd-century burials. In the Roman phase the tomb received 26 glass vessels, most of them thin, clear, blown bottles and bowls, and McFadden saw in them the material “which begins to replace pottery in burials during the first century A.D.” (p. 464). Glassblowing had been invented on the Levantine coast in the 1st century BC, and blown bottles soon took the place of clay unguentaria and juglets in many Cypriot graves. Tomb 17 at Amathus, excavated by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, held eleven blown bottles of the same kinds (Gjerstad et al. 1935). Against later Cypriot tombs, where glass vessels can run to many dozens, Tomb 8’s 26 is a moderate group.

John Lund, who used several Tomb 8 vessels as type examples in his study of the pottery of Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus, counts “eight burials dating from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD or later” (Lund 2015, p. 92). Counting bodies rather than burial events, we reach a minimum of 11 people: the child, the two adults of Burial 2, the four of Burial 4, at least two in the central group, Burial 5, and whoever was in the late sarcophagus. The first family’s dead, removed in the clearance, are not in that number.

The last burial was a child, laid in the antechamber at the south end, on top of the sand washing, 74 cm above the floor and so above the older dead of Burial 2 (p. 464). Of the body only part of the pelvis survived. The gifts survived better. Two water pitchers from the same workshop as one in the main chamber, three lamps (one with a rabbit in relief among leaves), four or five blown-glass bottles, three glass bowls and a small glass vessel that McFadden called a “baby feeder” lay round it (nos. 15–16, 28–30, 32–40). The name is his; nothing proves what the little vessel was for.

The lamps date the burial to the second half of the 1st century AD, and McFadden puts it “toward the close of the first century A.D.” (p. 464). After it the dromos pits were refilled and the roofed corridor was left to fill slowly with silt washing down over the stair.

Two lamps lying on the flood deposits in the main chamber (nos. 96–97) may be later still. If McFadden’s types, both marked with a question mark, are right, they belong to the end of the 1st century or the 2nd, and someone may have come down once more. The model shows a possible later visit, marked speculative; the switch treats the lamps as mistyped.

A reader who has seen the Roman tombs of Nea Paphos or Tamassos will look in Tomb 8 for loculi, the long narrow slots cut into a chamber wall, each taking one body and sealed with a slab or tiles. In the Hellenistic and Roman eastern Mediterranean they are the commonest way of fitting many burials into one chamber, and in Cyprus they appear in some chamber tombs from the 4th century BC. Tomb 8 has none. Its dead, from the first family to the child, lay on the floors, probably on wooden biers, and when the floor was full the family cleared it.

In a loculus tomb each body has its own sealed place. In a floor tomb the place is shared, and the earlier dead are moved: pushed aside, carried on their biers, or taken out. Tomb 8 shows the second system still in use in the 1st century AD, in a Hellenistic tomb inherited, bought or taken over by a Roman-period family. The plate below sets it beside a loculus tomb at the same scale.

Most of the contents can be placed from the excavation itself. Of the 156 entries in the model’s list of finds, 96 sit where McFadden’s two find-plans put them, 21 where his text puts them (“on the door stone”, “at the left ear”), and 39 by rule: objects he recorded only by stratum or by burial, which we place at the height of their stratum and beside the burial they belong to. Three counts are ours: the twelve beads of a string whose number he did not give (no. 121), nine unnumbered fragments of a gold-leaf lot (124a), and two ribbed vessels standing for the “Constantinian pottery” of the sarcophagus. The viewer’s “Where positions come from” view colours every object by its source, and each object’s card says it in words.

Of the 15 burial entries in the model, nine rest on bones McFadden found where they lay. The two people of the central group were found too, but where they had been moved to; their first place in the corner is ours. The two first-period bodies are speculative. The child is placed from the find-plan of its gifts, since only part of the pelvis was found, and the sarcophagus burial by rule, since its bones lay scattered in the debris.

The rock-cut plan rests on firmer evidence than the roofs. The plan, the dromos, the stair, the doorways and their frames are measured from McFadden’s figures, to within about 5 to 10 per cent. The ceilings, the size of the outer door, the monument’s footprint and the biers are reconstruction. The main chamber’s 25° turn is drawn towards the north. McFadden’s section and his antechamber plan seem to put the inner door on opposite sides of the dromos axis; with the text fixing north, they agree if the section is read as drawn mirror-wise, and the model reads it so.

Where readings differ, the model starts from the excavator’s and offers the others as switches: Burial 3, lamps 96–97, the place of the sarcophagus and the date of the collapse.

One more burial reached the tomb, by accident. High in the debris of the antechamber lay the remains of a sarcophagus burial of the 4th century AD: human bones including a skull, ribbed pottery of the age of Constantine, a lamp, four gold earrings, and a coin of Constantine II, struck between AD 337 and 340 (pp. 454–455). The sarcophagus had been set somewhere above the tomb, and when the roof gave way it fell through and emptied. Where it stood is not recorded. The model puts it in a cutting over the inner door; a place in the upper fill, or in a cutting to one side, are the alternatives, and the switch shows them. All three are speculative.

That coin is the only coin in Tomb 8. None of the 147 register numbers is a coin, and no coin was found with any of the burials of the 3rd century BC or the 1st century AD. The one that exists belongs to the late sarcophagus and was found loose in the antechamber debris.

Reconstructions of ancient burials often put a coin in the mouth of the dead. This “Charon’s obol” is the Greek practice of putting a small coin in or by the mouth of the dead as the ferryman’s fare across the river of the underworld. Greek writers knew the story (in Aristophanes’ Frogs of 405 BC the fare is two obols), and coins are found in some Greek and Roman graves, though they are missing from many others, Tomb 8 among them. Its families gave their dead lamps, water, wine, oil, food and gold wreaths, and no coin; the model shows none with any body.

The roofs of both chambers fell in. Sandstone mixed with conglomerate came down over the floors, and the sarcophagus went down with it (pp. 454, 464). The coin of Constantine II gives the earliest possible date, AD 337. McFadden blamed “very possibly the earthquake” that wrecked Kourion, which he placed in the second quarter of the 4th century (p. 455). David Soren later tied the city’s destruction to the earthquake of 21 July AD 365 (Soren and James 1988), a date since contested; the late 4th century, about 365 to 380, is the safer statement. The tomb cannot decide between them. The model dates its collapse to the 4th century AD after 337, possibly in an earthquake, and offers AD 365 as the alternative.

Inside, the fallen rock lay over the floated jugs of Burial 5, the scattered sherds of the central group’s bowls and the child’s glass. In the roofed corridor silt had been gathering since the child’s burial, and in our reconstruction about 40 cm of it now covered the landing, the outer door and the bath set on it. Over the tomb, winter rain filled the hollow left by the collapse with silt, and on top came the rubble of the Late Roman ground surface and the ploughsoil.

At some point two pits were dug down into the fallen roof of the main chamber. They went six metres down and stopped two metres short of the floor (p. 454), so everything lying on it stayed where it was until 1940. The diggers may have been Cesnola’s men, the British Museum’s team that worked at Kourion in 1895, or robbers; the tomb does not say which.