Lapithos-Vrysi tou Barba, Tomb 313: A Middle Cypriot Chamber Tomb with Four Chambers

The cemetery of Lapithos lies at a place called Vrysi tou Barba, about 1.2 km west of the modern village, on a plain that slopes gently to the sea and floods in winter. The ground is a white marly limestone with a thin skin of earth over it, “called ‘chavara’ by the natives”, in the expedition’s words (SCE I: 33). It is soft enough to cut with hand tools and hardens once exposed to air, which made it a good rock for tombs. Families buried their dead here from Early Cypriot II to the end of the Middle Cypriot period, and excavators came back to it for more than half a century: Myres and Buxton in 1913, Markides in 1917, the Swedes in 1927, the University of Pennsylvania in 1931 and the Department of Antiquities in 1968. Between them they dug 139 tombs at Vrysi tou Barba, and 163 at Lapithos in all. The settlement that buried its dead there has never been excavated (Webb 2016: 57).

Very little of that work reached print in full. Of the 163 tombs, Jennifer Webb counts only the Swedish expedition’s and one chamber of one Pennsylvania tomb as formally published, some 15 per cent of the whole (Webb 2016: 57). Among them, Tomb 313 is the one that can be rebuilt with the most confidence. Sjöqvist’s report gives a table of every chamber and passage with its measurements, a plan of the whole complex with the finds marked, five sections through the chambers, a plan of Chamber B with every numbered object in place, and drawings of two necklaces as they lay (SCE I: 85–99, Figs. 38 and 43).

It is also the tomb that stands out in the cemetery’s metal. Lapithos has produced 913 objects of copper and bronze from its Early and Middle Cypriot tombs, against 367 from the cemetery at Vounous, and metal makes up a quarter (25.6%) of all the goods in its Middle Cypriot I–II burials (Webb 2016: 59–60). Priscilla Keswani, comparing the Middle Cypriot chambers of Lapithos, found copper in 22 of 23 of them and the most in Chamber A of Tomb 313, and she found that the amount of copper in a chamber rose with the number of people buried in it (Keswani 2004: 85).

Everything in the tomb opens off one shaft, the dromos. It is 2.66 m long and 1.73 m wide, sunk 1.44 m into the rock with straight sides and a flat floor, “large and bucket-shaped” to Sjöqvist; its southern end is straight and its northern end rounded (SCE I: 86). From the straight end a tunnel, the stomion, runs 0.85 m to the main chamber. It widens and slopes as it goes, and it is only 0.42 m high, so that anyone carrying a body or a jar into Chamber A went in on hands and knees. The sections show the floor of Chamber A lying about 0.60 m below the floor of the shaft.

Chamber A is 3.90 m from the door to the back wall and 6.79 m across, with a floor of about 20.4 m² (Keswani 2005: 356). Its roof is a low vault, 1.34 m high at most, so the room was too low to stand up in. Opposite the door the cutters left a square block of rock standing from floor to ceiling against the back wall. Round the other walls they cut six niches, three on each side of the axis, raised about 0.35 m above the floor. Each niche is deepest against its back wall and has a low lip of rock along its front, “a low partition next the chamber” (SCE I: 86), so that a body laid in it lay in a shallow tray.

Sjöqvist saw the column and the niches as engineering. A wide flat roof in soft rock tends to fall; a pillar in the middle of the back wall and a ring of recesses round the edge leave rock where the load runs and take it out where it does not, “preventing the spacious chamber from falling in” and giving the most room “without disregarding the demands of constructive stability”. He called Chamber A “the ideal result of a gradual development” of the Lapithos tomb (SCE I: 86). The roof bore him out. When it finally gave way, only a heap 0.30 m high fell in the middle of the room, where the span was widest, and the niches stayed clear (SCE I: 87).

Three smaller chambers open off the shaft. Chamber B, off its long west side, is an oval 3.50 by 4.05 m and 1.17 m high, with two raised niches set irregularly in its walls; its passage is 0.28 m long, 0.86 m wide and 0.55 m high. At the rounded north end of the shaft two short passages lead into Chamber C, a little round room 1.10 by 1.07 m and 0.75 m high, and Chamber D, an oblong 2.11 by 2.64 m and 0.96 m high with one semicircular niche raised above its floor. There was no fifth chamber on the east side, Sjöqvist noted, “as the ground declines too rapidly to the East” (SCE I: 86). At its longest the complex measures 10.60 m (SCE I: 86).

A tomb like this is cut from the top down. The diggers stripped the earth, sank the shaft to its full depth, then tunnelled sideways and hollowed each chamber from the inside, passing the broken rock back through the crawl-way and up out of the shaft. The crown of Chamber A lies only about 0.70 m under the old surface, so a thin skin of rock and soil was all that roofed the room.

The report does not say how the tomb was cut, and it describes tool marks only once, at the hole between Chambers C and D. The tools are therefore a matter of comparison. In the early second millennium BC the candidates are picks and chisels of copper, flat axes like the six axes and the chisel buried in this tomb, and picks of stone or antler, all of which would bite into chavara. The model shows the faces scored with short parallel pick strokes, a detail taken from other rock-cut tombs.

The volume of rock is our estimate, measured on the model, which is built to the published measurements: about 6.4 m³ for the shaft, 33 m³ for Chamber A and another 3.5 m³ for its six niches, 10.1 m³ for Chamber B, 5.4 m³ for D and 0.7 m³ for C. That makes some 59 m³ of solid rock, which loosens to about 77 m³ once broken, and at half a cubic metre to a cubic metre a day for one worker kneeling in a low chamber and passing baskets back through a tunnel, something like 60 to 120 days of work. Chamber A alone accounts for 35 to 65 of them, one to three weeks for a team of three or four; with the shaft, the crawl-way, the niches and the cupboard, the first campaign comes to about 43 m³ and 45 to 85 worker-days. The chambers were probably cut one after another as they were needed, so the labour was spread over generations.

Two small features belong to the doorway. Above the passage into Chamber A someone cut “a small sack-shaped cupboard with circular opening” into the face of the shaft (SCE I: 87). Nothing was recorded inside it. The plan also draws dark masses in the mouths of the chambers: the blocking. Sjöqvist gives no description for Tomb 313, but in Tomb 301 of the same cemetery the doors were “thin slabs of local limestone kept in position by smaller stones wedged round the sides” (SCE I: 35), and the model closes Tomb 313 the same way.

The report gives the tomb 26 skeletons (SCE I: 89), the figure Keswani also uses (Keswani 2004: 60). Its chamber-by-chamber account describes 24 of them: 15 in Chamber A, six in B, one in C and two in D. The text speaks only of the bodies “well enough preserved to be studied”, so the other two are probably among the poorer remains, perhaps in Chamber D, where the model places them as a small heap of bones and a group of skulls, drawn faint. No ages or sexes were published, except for two babies, so the model and the drawings show every body as the same plain skeleton, adult or baby, in the posture and place the report gives it.

In Chamber A, Sjöqvist numbered the dead from left to right. Nos. 1 to 6 lay one to each niche, on their sides with their knees drawn up and their faces towards the centre of the room; No. 4, whose niche had room for it, sat with its back against the end wall of its niche. Below niches 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 lay five more, Nos. 7 to 11. Nos. 7, 8 and 9 were seated against the chamber wall, No. 11 lay on its side, and No. 10 was too damaged to say. No. 12, a baby, lay close to No. 11. In the open middle of the floor three more, Nos. 13 to 15, were “probably” seated (SCE I: 87).

The positions came with an order. Sjöqvist recorded which bones lay over which: No. 1 was older than No. 7, No. 2 than No. 8, No. 3 than No. 9, No. 4 than No. 10, No. 6 than Nos. 11 and 12; Nos. 7 and 8 were older than No. 13, Nos. 3 and 9 than No. 14, and Nos. 10, 11 and 12 than No. 15. Each person seated against the wall sat below the person already lying in the niche above, and the three in the middle came last. He grouped them accordingly: group 1 in the niches, group 2 along the walls, group 3 in the centre.

Chamber B held six: two lying on their sides with knees drawn up in its niches, and four on the floor, three of them seated round the walls and the fourth “entirely turned to dust”. Chamber C held one baby. In Chamber D one body lay in the niche and one on the floor, “laid out” on its side, placed “apparently more or less simultaneously” (SCE I: 87–89).

The seated burials say something about the state of the bodies. A skeleton cannot be sat up against a wall; a body can only be set in that position while its joints are still held together by soft tissue. As the flesh decayed the seated dead slumped, and what the excavators found were their bones collapsed where each had sat, which is how the model and the drawings show them. So at least the seated dead of Chambers A and B went in while still fleshed, whether they were buried soon after death or moved before they had fully decayed. That is our reading, and it bears on the argument about Chamber A told below.

Sjöqvist’s catalogue runs to 118 numbers for Chamber A, 106 for Chamber B and 46 for Chambers C and D together, but a number can cover more than one thing: “pin ×5” under one entry is five pins, and two halves of a broken spindle whorl found apart and given two numbers are one whorl. Counted as physical objects, with each necklace counted once, the tomb held 286: 133 in Chamber A, 107 in B and 46 in C and D (SCE I: 90–97; our count). The count of copper and bronze, 134, matches Keswani’s figure for the tomb exactly (Keswani 2004: 60, 85).

The table hides how the things were spread among the dead. In Chamber A, Sjöqvist assigned every object to one of his three groups by where it lay, so each group has its own pots, tools and weapons, but we cannot tell from the report which object sat beside which person. In Chamber B every number is on the plan. In C and D the report says which gifts went with the niche burial, the floor burial and the baby. The model draws 539 beads and 818 objects and pieces in all, each one placed in the chamber and, where the evidence allows, beside its burial.

A few kinds of thing are missing. There is no gold, and nothing of stone but whetstones, a flint chip and the blocking slabs. What the dead of Tomb 313 took with them was overwhelmingly pots and metal, in roughly equal numbers.

Eighty of the 134 metal objects came from Chamber A. Laid out by kind, the tomb’s metal is a set of personal equipment repeated many times over: 55 pins and needles, fifteen knives, fourteen razors, twelve pairs of tweezers, six flat axes, four awls, a chisel with its horn handle, finger rings and spiral rings, two small leaf-shaped pendants, one of them from a necklace, flat wire spirals that Sjöqvist took for hair ornaments, and eighteen blades with a hooked tang. The “scrapers” of the 1934 report are the thin blades later writers call razors, though what they were used for is not certain.

The report calls all of it bronze. Analyses published since show a mixture (Coleman et al. 1996, appendix). The long blades are copper with a little arsenic: A.11 is 99.0% copper and 0.9% arsenic, A.74 97% copper and 1.4% arsenic. But a knife, A.17, has 13% tin, and two pins, A.53 and one of the five pins numbered A.72, have 14.2% and 15.5%. Tin had to come from far outside Cyprus. In this tomb the analysed tin bronzes are two dress pins and a knife, while the analysed blades are copper with arsenic. The model colours the knife A.17 and the pin A.53 a little yellower than the rest; the five pins numbered A.72 are drawn alike, in copper.

In Chamber A Sjöqvist called seven of the long blades swords, from 51.2 to 66.2 cm long, and three shorter ones daggers. They have a hooked tang, a strip of metal bent over at the end, which was bound into a wooden shaft; two from Chamber D still show traces of the binding. Webb treats all such blades as spearheads, the only specialised weapons of Early and Middle Bronze Age Cyprus. She measured 210 from Lapithos: they run from 9.3 to 66.2 cm, three quarters of them between 20 and 40 cm, and the longest is A.11 from this tomb (Webb 2022: 372–373). Chamber A holds seven of the eight blades in the tomb over 50 cm long.

Whether blades that long were ever used is disputed. Keswani, following Graham Philip, takes the biggest as display pieces too large to haft and wield, made to be seen and buried (Keswani 2004: 85; Philip 1991). Webb finds wear from use on Lapithos spearheads and reads most of the adult men buried with them as men who carried weapons in life (Webb 2022: 373–375). The two views give different pictures of Chamber A: a lineage marking its standing with oversized metal, or a household of armed men. The printed plan of Chamber A marks the blades, but too small for their numbers to be read, so the model places them as Webb found them where the evidence survives at Lapithos, “alongside the upper torso with the point toward the skull” (Webb 2022: 373).

Of the 109 vessels, 89 are Red Polished, the island’s standard pottery of the Early and Middle Bronze Age: a red slip burnished to a shine, often with incised patterns filled with white. Sjöqvist divided them into Red Polished II (39) and III (50). Eight more are Black Polished, one is Black Slip, one Plain White, and ten are White Painted II, a pale, smooth ware with dark lines painted on it (SCE I: 90–97; our count).

The shapes repeat in every chamber: round-bodied jugs with cutaway or beaked spouts, deep and shallow bowls, small amphorae, cooking pots, bottles. The largest jugs and amphorae stand over half a metre high. In Chamber A an amphora with knobbed handles (A.86) is 58.5 cm tall and a jug with a cut-away spout (A.112) 59.5 cm, and there are big storage jugs of 51 to 55 cm in Chambers A, B and D. A vessel that size would not fit under a niche roof with a body, so the model stands it on the floor in front of the niche its burial group occupies. A few shapes are rarer: a bird-shaped askos (B.28), a jug with a strainer in its mouth (A.47), an amphora half blackened in the kiln (B.16), and a little bowl that had broken off the shoulder of a larger jug (B.36).

The ten White Painted vessels date the tomb. White Painted II appears in three chambers. In Chamber A there is an askos and an amphora with the niche burials, a jug among those along the walls, and a spouted jug and a strainer jug among the central burials. In Chamber B three jugs, two of them beaked, went with the niche burials and a handled bowl lay on the floor; Chamber D had an amphora. Sjöqvist dated the tomb by the Red Polished, which he placed in the latest Early Cypriot phase, with the last burials in Chamber B on the line between Early and Middle Cypriot (SCE I: 98–99). Paul Åström then defined the start of the Middle Cypriot period by the appearance of White Painted II, and on that definition the whole tomb belongs to Middle Cypriot I (Åström 1957; 1972; Keswani 2005: 356). Åström renumbered Chamber A’s finds by Sjöqvist’s groups, so that a jug from the centre of the room appears in later literature as “313A III.47”. In calendar years, Middle Cypriot I is roughly 2000–1850 BC; the exact figures depend on the scheme.

Chamber B is the only chamber in which every object can be put back where it lay, because Sjöqvist drew its floor with each catalogue number in place (SCE I: Fig. 43:2). The oldest burials there are the two in the niches. Their gifts lay on the floor beneath them: three White Painted II jugs, two of them beaked and one 31 cm tall, a Black Slip jug 30.3 cm high, Red Polished jugs, razors, tweezers, a knife, an awl, a dagger 34.1 cm long, a broken axe and a silver ring. The four later burials on the floor brought the rest.

Two necklaces were found in place and drawn as they lay (SCE I: Fig. 38:8–9). B.32 has 71 beads of faience, a glazed paste, in five sizes arranged in four graded runs, with three spiral clasps of copper; a little copper leaf, B.33, hung from it. B.78 has 64 white beads and what Sjöqvist called “a great amount” of tiny red cylindrical beads, arranged in four rows that spread into a fan across the front. The model gives B.78 300 small red beads; that number is ours.

Near the middle of the chamber lay a cult vessel 22.5 cm high: four bowls joined in a square, with a flat handle rising from them, pierced with three holes and topped by three miniature vases (B.37+61). It was found in two pieces, one on the floor and one at a level Sjöqvist recorded as −47. A little way off lay B.40, a Red Polished plank figure 29.5 cm long, one of the flat board-shaped figures of the period. This one holds a cradle-board with a baby in it on its left arm, and it wears a necklace drawn in graded runs like B.32 and B.78. Three more plank figures were found in Chamber B, one only 4.8 cm long, and nine spindle whorls, more than in any other chamber.

The plan gives depths as well as positions, from −15 to −67, with no datum stated. Sjöqvist put the scatter down to water, which came in through the door in winter and moved the lighter things (SCE I: 87). The model sets every object on the floor or on its niche sill, and keeps the published level in each object’s note. The positions are read from the printed plan to about ±0.15 m.

Chamber D’s first burial lay in its raised niche with six gifts: a Red Polished bowl black inside, two jugs, one of them 51.2 cm high, a razor, tweezers and a dagger 30.7 cm long with traces of the binding still on its tang. The second, on the floor, had far more: 19 pots, three spearheads (one 52.5 cm long, again with traces of binding), a knife, a razor, pins, spiral rings, a flat axe with traces of its wooden handle, two spindle whorls, and a lump of iron (SCE I: 87, 90–97).

The iron has never been analysed. It could be a piece of iron ore, haematite or limonite of the kind ground for red and yellow pigment, or a fragment of meteoritic iron; nothing suggests smelted iron, which belongs to Cyprus several centuries later. A similar lump came from Chamber A of Tomb 322 in the same cemetery. The model shows it as a dull red-brown lump and labels it iron or iron ore.

Chamber C, the smallest room in the tomb, held a baby with seven pots: a spouted jug, two other jugs (one 36 cm tall), and four bowls, one of them set inside another (C–D 35 in 36). Chamber A has a second nest of bowls, a Black Polished bowl inside a Red Polished one (A.43 in A.44), among the burials along the wall, the group that includes Chamber A’s baby, No. 12.

Someone later cut a hole through the east wall of Chamber C into the niche of Chamber D. Sjöqvist was certain it was intended: “the traces of the cutter’s tools show that this connection was purposely established” (SCE I: 86). Why the two chambers were joined is not recorded. The baby in C is later than the niche burial in D (SCE I: 87–89), and the hole opens straight into that niche.

Every burial meant reopening the tomb. The shaft was filled to the surface after each use, so each new funeral began with digging it out again, about 6.4 m³ of rubble, 2 to 3 days’ digging for one person on our estimate, lifting the slab from the chamber door, and crawling in. Sjöqvist found the fill of the shaft full of sherds, thinning out towards the bottom, and concluded that it had been “emptied and filled many times”. The broken pottery was what had been cleared out of the chambers to make room for new dead (SCE I: 87). The pots found on the chamber floors are those left in place after the last clearance.

The model’s timeline runs through 17 events, from the cutting of Chamber A to the excavation. Its order follows the report: the dated pottery puts Chamber A’s niche group and Chambers C and D early; “the latest burials seem to have taken place in Chamber B” (SCE I: 98), so Chamber B is placed after Chamber A’s first group. Where the report gives no order, as between cutting A and cutting D, the order is ours.

Chamber A can be read in two ways. Sjöqvist saw three successive groups laid down over generations, the niche dead first, then the people seated beneath them, then the three in the centre, and he dated group 3 as late by its Red Polished II shapes (SCE I: 87, 98). Keswani points out that all the bones and goods lay on the same floor, with no layer of earth or debris between the groups, and reads the three groups as places in one arrangement, with no sequence implied: the chamber laid out in “one, or at most two, extremely ostentatious mortuary events”, with earlier dead taken up and reburied together (Keswani 2004: 60; 2005: 356). She sets it beside two other carefully spaced collective burials in the north of the island, Ayios Iakovos Tomb 6 with fifteen people and Korovia-Paleoskoutella Tomb 7 with fourteen (Keswani 2004: 65).

The seated dead weigh against a reburial of dry bones, since only a body still held together could be sat against a wall, and the superposition Sjöqvist recorded, each seated burial below an older niche burial, is a sequence. Neither point rules out a staged reburial of recently dead people. The model follows the excavator by default and offers Keswani’s reading as a switch, which merges the three Chamber A burials into a single event placed after the niche burials of Chamber B.

The measurements of the shaft, passages and chambers, the shapes of the rooms, the column, the niches and their lips, the cupboard, the cut hole, the positions of the falls and the burial postures are all from the excavation report. The heights between them are read from Sjöqvist’s sections: the niche sills about 0.35 m above the floor of Chamber A, the step down from the shaft about 0.60 m. The tomb’s orientation is read from the plan and the text, which puts Chamber B on the west side of the shaft; the north arrow on the printed plan is too small to read.

The objects are placed with three levels of confidence, and the “Where positions come from” view of the 3D model colours each one accordingly. Chamber B is placed from the published find plan. In Chambers A, C and D the report gives the burial or group each object belongs to, but not its exact spot, so the model places them by the practice of the cemetery: blades along the upper body with the point to the head, and knives, razors and tweezers near the head or hands (Webb 2022: 373). The rows of pots in front of each body are our arrangement. The two nests of bowls are recorded; the arrangement round them is ours. The two undescribed individuals in Chamber D are inferred, and the bead counts of necklace A.116 (100) and of B.78’s small red beads (300) are our numbers, where the report says only that the beads were many.

The blocking slabs follow Tomb 301; the tools and the pick marks follow other rock-cut tombs; the spoil and the working days are our estimate. The bones were never published in detail, so the dead are shown as plain skeletons in the postures the report describes, the seated ones collapsed where they sat, as they were found. Where the experts disagree, about the spearheads and about Chamber A, the report gives both sides and the model shows both.

After the last of the four floor burials in Chamber B the doors were blocked and the shaft filled for the final time. Nothing in the report suggests that anyone came back. No looting was recorded and no later burials.

The plain flooded in winter, and water found its way through the blocking of Chamber B and spread across its floor, lifting and shifting the lighter objects and leaving a skin of silt; the two pieces of the cult vessel were found at different levels. Then the roofs began to fail. In Chamber A a heap of rock 0.30 m high fell in the centre, under the widest part of the vault; the niches held. Rock also fell over the southern part of Chamber B and over Chambers C and D. The thin wall between the north niche of Chamber B and Chamber C, about 0.10 m of rock in the model, gave way and opened B into C. That hole was the work of time, where the hole from C into D had been cut by hand (SCE I: 86–87).

Sjöqvist dug the tomb between September and November 1927 and published it in the first volume of the expedition’s report in 1934, chamber by chamber, with every object numbered. The finds were divided between the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia and the expedition, whose share is now in the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm.