Marion, Kaparka Tomb 14: A Family Chamber Tomb Used for Three Funerals, c. 450-375 BC

Marion stood on the bay of Chrysochou in the north-west of Cyprus, one of the island’s city-kingdoms and one of those that struck coins in its kings’ names. Its dead were buried in rock-cut tombs on the low plateaus around the town, and more than 850 of them have been recorded since 1885, most of the 6th to 4th centuries BC (Childs, Smith and Padgett 2012, p. 49). The first to dig there in numbers was Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, in 1885 and 1886, for private backers who took a share of the finds; his results were published by Paul Herrmann in 1888 (Herrmann 1888). The best-known tomb of those years, his Tomb 92 with its marble kouros, left no record from which it could be rebuilt.

The Swedish Cyprus Expedition worked at Polis from March to the end of July 1929 (Gjerstad et al. 1935, p. 182). Erik Sjöqvist excavated the tombs. Those of Kaparka were numbered 14 to 61, and Tomb 14 was the first in the series. The rock there, the excavators wrote, was “several strata of alluvial matter of varying hardness, separated from each other by more or less thick layers of pebbles and sand”, unsuitable for cutting rock tombs; most Kaparka tombs were found with their roofs fallen in (pp. 218–219). Tomb 14 was one of them.

The tomb can be rebuilt because of the publication of 1935. In six pages it gives a table of dimensions, a plan, a long section and a cross-section, a find-plan with every object numbered where it lay, a list of nine layers from the surface down to the rock, and a register of all 56 objects with their size, their depth and the burial period each belongs to (pp. 219–224, Fig. 75:7–10). Einar Gjerstad later used it as a fixed point for the chronology of Classical Cyprus (Gjerstad 1948, p. 254). The tomb is small and its goods are ordinary: most of the Attic pottery is the mass-produced kind, and there is no gold.

The first funeral here took place within a decade or two of a recorded event: in 450 or 449 BC the Athenian general Kimon captured Marion, during his last campaign against the Persians in Cyprus (Diodorus 12.3.3). The tomb’s three funerals fall in the half-century after that campaign, while Athenian pots kept reaching Marion in quantity.

Tomb 14 has the three parts of a Cypriot chamber tomb of its time: a dromos, the open passage dug down from the surface; a stomion, the short doorway at its foot; and the chamber cut into the rock beyond. The dromos is 5.00 m long and runs north to south, narrow at its mouth and widening to 1.34 m at the back, with vertical sides and rounded corners (Gjerstad et al. 1935, p. 219). Its front part goes down in five wide steps and the rest slopes gently to the door. The table gives the depth there as about 2.00 m; on the published section the door lies about 2.4 m below the 1929 surface, the difference being the sand and soil over the rock.

One step down from the dromos leads into the stomion, 0.95 m long and 0.95 m wide, “square in shape”, and a second step down from the stomion reaches the chamber floor (pp. 219–220). The chamber was “very carefully cut, and quite rectangular in shape with rounded corners”: 2.55 m from front to back, 2.45 m across, with a level floor (p. 220). On the published section that floor lies about three metres below the 1929 ground surface. The doorway enters the chamber a little to the west of its centre line.

Three niches were cut into the chamber walls, each at a different height and each rounded in plan, which the excavators called loaf-shaped. The east niche, in the front half of its wall, has a level floor 0.50 m above the chamber floor, and its roof was still roughly flat when found. The west niche’s floor is 0.92 m up, the back (south) niche’s 0.72 m up, and both slope down towards the chamber (p. 220). The register puts no object in the east or west niche. The sizes of the niches and of the dromos steps (treads about 0.50 m, risers about 0.25 m) are our measurements from the published drawings, good to about ten centimetres.

No part of the chamber roof survived, so its height is unknown. We draw a flat ceiling 1.50 m above the floor with rounded edges. The preserved roof of the east niche is flat, and the nearest published comparison, Marion Tomb 12, was given a reconstructed height of 1.20 m (p. 215). A slightly vaulted ceiling, 1.60 m at the crown, is offered as a switch in the model. We did not draw a domed roof: the plan is rectangular, and the one roof that survives, over the east niche, is flat.

Alluvium of this kind is easy to dig and poor at holding a roof. On our estimate, measured on the model, the dromos gave up about 9 m³ of rock and soil, the stomion less than one, the chamber about 9 at the height we draw, and the three niches about 1.4: some 20 m³ in the ground, about 27 m³ once loosened and carried up in baskets. At half a cubic metre to a cubic metre per worker per day, allowing for lifting the spoil two or three metres, that is 20 to 41 worker-days: four people for one to two weeks. No tool marks were reported. Iron picks and mattocks are assumed, as for other Classical tombs.

The door was closed with “a carefully cut poros slab, held in position by small stones around its edges”, and the slab was found in place although the stomion had fallen in around it (p. 219). Poros is a soft calcarenite that dresses easily. The slab stood at the outer end of the stomion; 0.70 m of its height survived, tilted a little inwards. We draw it a metre wide and 0.22 m thick, filling the doorway.

Every later funeral meant taking the slab out again, and first digging out the dromos fill, up to about 9 m³ of it. On the same estimate, a small team could do that in a day or two.

The first floor was the rock itself, with sand spread over it. On it the excavators found 15 objects and “some scanty remains of a male skeleton” along the back wall (Gjerstad et al. 1935, p. 221). Beside the bones lay an iron strigil, the curved scraper used to clean oil and sweat from the skin after exercise, now in fragments about 24 cm long, and an Attic red-figured guttus, a small round flask with a spout and a ring handle that lets oil out a drop at a time, painted on both sides with a crouching panther (pp. 222–223). The period’s goods also include a terracotta dove with a flat tail and three knobs for feet, whose place was not recorded; we set it beside the man.

In the south-east corner two Plain White amphorae, each 47 cm tall, stood upright side by side. An Attic black-glazed bowl 16 cm across was laid over both their mouths, and inside the bowl stood a second red-figured guttus, painted with a lioness on guard on one side and a resting jackal or lynx on the other (pp. 222–223). For one bowl to bridge two mouths the jars had to lean towards each other a little; the model leans them about 15 degrees. Further forward on the east side the plan shows a Bichrome Red bowl 24 cm across with an Attic stamped bowl set inside it, and one of three Bichrome Red amphoriskoi (small two-handled jars, 11 to 18 cm tall). The places of the other two amphoriskoi, a miniature Black-on-Red jug, a sack-shaped jug in the ware the excavators called Black Lustrous, and a second small Attic bowl were not recorded; we set them along the east wall and near the corner, with the rest of the group.

The excavators reasoned from where these goods lay: “on account of the position of the tomb-gifts of this burial period, there must have been more interments” (p. 221). On our reading the group along the east wall belongs to a second body laid beside it. Nothing of that body survived, and the model draws it as an inferred burial.

The date of this first period is argued by a few years. Gjerstad placed it by the Cypriot pottery at about 435 BC; Lucy Talcott had dated the Attic vases into the last quarter of the century, a gap Gjerstad called very slight (Gjerstad 1948, p. 254 n. 2). The Beazley Archive now dates both red-figured gutti to about 460–440 BC (Eriksson 2011, cat. nos. 7, 8), which would make them a little older than the funeral. We give the period as c. 450–430 BC and set the model’s first funeral at about 440.

After the funeral the poros slab went back into the doorway, wedged with its small stones, and the dromos was filled with chavara, the soft, chalky local subsoil, laid in two horizontal layers at the bottom (Gjerstad et al. 1935, pp. 219–220). Inside, the closed chamber began to fill. Sand and gravel from the crumbling rock spilled over part of the floor near the door, and a layer of “culture earth”, the excavators’ term for dark soil mixed with organic matter, formed over the goods (layer 8 of their nine; p. 221).

Many Cypriot chamber tombs, from the Bronze Age on, were reused by pushing the earlier bones and pots aside to clear the floor. The family who reopened Tomb 14, some time in the last quarter of the 5th century, did something else. They spread a filling of sand over the first burials (layer 7) and laid the next one on top of it (p. 221). The new floor stands about 0.13 m above the rock near the door and about 0.25 m near the middle of the chamber, levels we read from the depths the register gives for each object. That the sand was spread on purpose, to level a floor over the earlier dead, is our reading of the excavators’ “sand-filling”; it fits everything recorded.

The first goods stayed where they had been put. The two amphorae in the corner, 47 cm tall, were too tall for the new floor to cover, and on these levels their necks, with the bowl and the guttus on top, still stood above the sand when the second funeral took place. They were found in 1929 as they had been placed, the bowl still across the jars’ mouths and the guttus still in the bowl.

Gjerstad distinguished successive burial periods in several other Kaparka tombs as well, among them Tombs 43, 47, 56 and 60 (Gjerstad 1948, p. 254). Tomb 14 has three of them, published with a find-plan and a layer list.

No trace of a skeleton survived from the second period (Gjerstad et al. 1935, p. 221), yet its goods are the largest group in the tomb: 27 objects, laid out in two lines, one down the long axis of the chamber and one along the west side. Down the axis lay big Cypriot jars on their sides. Two Plain White amphorae, 56.7 and 55.5 cm tall, lay one in the front half of the chamber and one just inside the door. Further in lay a White Painted amphora 44 cm tall, painted with leaf trails and palm leaves, its mouth covered by a wide Bichrome Red bowl used as a lid, with two holes pierced in its base (pp. 222–223).

Along the west side lay the things of one person’s toilet. A bronze mirror 13.4 cm across has a crescent at its tang where a wooden handle was fitted. A bronze rod 17 cm long, swollen at both ends, was used to apply cosmetics, and beside it lay a lump of red pigment that has since turned bluish-purple. There were also iron tweezers with a loop for hanging and a bronze mount, and an iron knife with a leaf-shaped blade and three rivets in its handle (pp. 222–223). Mirrors and cosmetic gear are often, though not always, found with women. No bone survived to say whose they were, and the model draws this burial without a sex.

Many of the bowls went into the tomb one inside another. Five Attic black-glazed bowls were found nested in a single stack. A Cypriot saucer lamp sat inside one Attic bowl, which sat inside another. An Attic black-glazed guttus lay inside a Cypriot Red Slip bowl whose shape copies an Attic one (pp. 222–223). This is how bowls are stored or carried; whether they came from a household shelf or straight from a dealer cannot be told. The only red-figured vase of this period is a squat lekythos, a small oil flask, with a band and a few careless spirals on its shoulder, dated about 450–400 BC (Eriksson 2011, cat. no. 101).

By our count the second period has 11 Attic vessels to 12 Cypriot, counting the lamp; Gjerstad counted 11 to 11 (Gjerstad 1948, p. 178 n. 5).

Between the second and third funerals the chamber filled further: culture earth (layer 6), then rock debris and sand fallen from the ceiling and walls (layer 5) (Gjerstad et al. 1935, p. 221), some 20 to 30 cm in all on the section. The third burial surface lies about 0.45 m above the rock. This time the dromos was only partly dug out, and its upper fill differs from the original chavara (p. 220).

The third burial went into a box. A sarcophagus built of stone slabs set on edge stood in the middle of the chamber, and inside it, with no remains of the body, was “a deposit of pottery” (p. 221). The objects that lie within its outline on the find-plan are a Plain White deep bowl, a small Attic black-glazed bowl, and four Attic bowls stamped inside with palmettes, two of them with radiating lines as well (pp. 222–223). Only the east end slab was found in place; the robbers took the rest. The size of the box is our reconstruction: 1.70 by 0.76 m outside, its slabs 0.50 m high. The surviving slab measures about 0.9 m on the plan, but a box that wide would run through the jar and bowls recorded beside it, so we drew it narrower. Its cover was either stone slabs or wood that has perished. The model shows stone and offers wood as a switch; both are speculative.

Around the box stood the largest pots in the tomb. A Plain White torpedo jar, a storage jar with a pointed base and a sharp conical shoulder, 56.7 cm tall, lay on its side behind the box. The excavators recorded that “some large ‘torpedo’ pithoi” had been taken by the robbers (p. 221); we draw 2 more, the fewest the plural allows, and remove them when the robbers come. A Plain White amphora 64 cm tall, the largest vessel to survive, lay near it. Nearby were three Attic black-glazed bowls, a black-glazed stand, an iron knife with a lancet-shaped blade and traces of its wooden handle, and a fat guttus painted with four female heads in the red-figure manner, which the register marks “local manufacture”, a Cypriot potter’s copy of Athenian red-figure (pp. 222–223).

The third period has 14 objects. Gjerstad counted 10 Attic vessels to 3 Cypriot, evidently including the local guttus among the Attic (Gjerstad 1948, p. 178 n. 5). In the 4th century Marion’s tombs grew larger, with rectangular plans, cut-stone walls and barrel-vaulted roofs (Childs, Smith and Padgett 2012, p. 49). Tomb 14 is still a simple chamber, but by about 390 BC its family was already building a box of stone slabs inside it.

Bone survived badly in Tomb 14. The man of the first period is “scanty remains” along the back wall, the second period left no bone at all, and nothing of the body was found in the sarcophagus (Gjerstad et al. 1935, p. 221). The only skeleton in fair condition lay in the back niche, 0.72 m above the chamber floor: most of the arms and the legs survived, the body “in dorsal, outstretched position with the head towards the west end” (p. 221). A row of stones ran along the edge of the niche, apparently to keep the body from rolling out onto the chamber floor below.

The excavators could not tie the niche burial to a period (p. 221). Our reading puts it in the third. Their text says the sarcophagus held “one of the interments” of that period, so there was more than one, and a niche 0.72 m up is easiest to reach from a floor that had already risen some 0.45 m. The edge stones suit a body laid above a floor of soft fill. A burial in the first or second period is equally possible, and the model notes it without offering a switch.

The model therefore shows 5 burials: the two with bone (the man by the back wall and the niche burial), and three inferred from their goods (a second body in the first period, the body of the second period, and the body in the sarcophagus). All five are shown as skeletons lying on their backs, the posture of the niche burial and the usual one for Classical Cyprus; for the three without bone, the place and the posture are ours. Of the man by the back wall only the legs can be made out on the excavators’ plan: the drawings show only his leg bones, while the 3D model completes him as a whole skeleton. Gjerstad wrote that at Marion the poor were laid “on the bare rock floor”, the better-off in wooden coffins (Gjerstad 1980, p. 157). No coffin wood, textile or food was recorded in Tomb 14, and the model shows none.

Beyond the bones, the goods are the only clues to who these people were: a strigil with the man of the first period, and a mirror and cosmetic set with the unknown body of the second. No inscription in the tomb gives a name.

Of the 56 objects, 49 are vessels: 25 made in Athens and 24 in Cyprus, counting a Cypriot lamp and the local copy of a red-figured guttus among the Cypriot (Gjerstad et al. 1935, pp. 222–223). The Attic share is twenty black-glazed bowls, a black-glazed guttus, a black-glazed stand, and three small red-figured pieces: the two animal gutti of the first period and the squat lekythos of the second. The Cypriot share is the storage jar, amphorae, jugs, amphoriskoi and bowls, in Plain White, White Painted, Bichrome Red, Red Slip and Black-on-Red wares, with the lamp, the local guttus and the Black Lustrous jug. The other seven objects are the strigil, two knives, the tweezers, the mirror, the cosmetic rod and the dove.

The mix is typical of Marion. Marion was one of the main importers of Attic pottery in Cyprus, and Gjerstad held that the Swedish excavations there, with those at Vouni and Kition, alone gave statistically safe figures. Of 261 Attic vases from Marion tombs with datable burial groups, about 52 per cent were plain black-glazed, 34 per cent black-glazed with stamped decoration, 13 per cent red-figured and one per cent white-ground, mostly bowls, cups, skyphoi, gutti and lekythoi, and “most of the vases are second rate mass products” (Gjerstad 1948, p. 178). The Attic share of the pottery in those tombs peaked in the late 5th century, at 39.1 per cent: the date of Tomb 14’s second funeral. At Korakas near Vouni, by contrast, sixteen Classical tombs held one Attic vase between them, a red-figured lekythos (p. 178 n. 1).

Gjerstad drew a distinction that fits this tomb. Gutti and lekythoi were “probably only containers for the real import article, in this case oil”, but bowls cannot have served as containers and “must have been imported for their own sake” (p. 178). On that reasoning, the family of Tomb 14 bought Athenian tableware and oil in Athenian flasks, and kept their storage jars, amphorae and jugs Cypriot. Rich Attic imports do not make them Greek settlers. Marion’s own inscriptions are in Cypriot Greek, written in the island’s syllabic script, and its personal names show a mixed population.

The stacked floors made the tomb useful for dating. The layers fix the order of the three groups, and the Attic vases, whose dates were known from Athens, tie each group to the calendar. Gjerstad set the end of his Cypro-Classical I and the beginning of Cypro-Classical II at about 400 BC on this tomb, with its second period at the end of the one and its third at the start of the other (Gjerstad 1948, p. 254).

After the third funeral the slab went back into the doorway for the last time; it is the one found in 1929. When the roof came down is not known. The chamber, the stomion and the roofs of the west and back niches fell in two layers of rock debris (layers 2 and 3), and the door slab tipped a little inwards but stayed in its place (Gjerstad et al. 1935, pp. 220–221). The alluvium that had been so easy to cut had failed, as it did over most of Kaparka.

Then came robbers, at a date nobody can fix; they may have been ancient or modern. They sank a shaft from the surface above the middle of the chamber, down through the fallen rock to the top burial. They lifted out one end and both sides of the sarcophagus, and its cover if it was stone, and some of the torpedo jars, and then, in the excavators’ words, the work “soon stopped” (p. 221). Everything below that level was left untouched: the goods of the first and second funerals, under the third floor, were never reached.

Sand and gravel (layer 1) filled the crater to the surface. The nine layers the excavators recorded, from the top down, are: sand and gravel; rock and gravel; silted rock debris; culture earth, with the robbers’ shaft cut through all four; partly silted rock debris and sand, with the third burial on top; culture earth; the sand filling, with the second burial on top; culture earth; and the sand-covered rock floor of the first burial (pp. 220–221). The model’s Through time mode steps through 17 events, from the cutting of the tomb to the excavation.

Several customs of Marion’s cemeteries are absent from Tomb 14. From the late 5th century, families put large terracotta statuettes in the dromoi, men reclining on couches and enthroned women, often broken first. They placed small limestone blocks inscribed with a name inside the dromos or the chamber, and from the very end of the century some set up relief stelai copying those of Greece (Childs, Smith and Padgett 2012, pp. 49–50). Tomb 14 had no statuette, no name-block and no stele, and the model adds none. Whether anything marked it above ground is not known.

The kingdom outlived the tomb by about sixty years. Its last king, Stasioikos II, sided with Antigonos in the wars after Alexander’s death, and in 312 BC Ptolemy I razed Marion and moved its people to Paphos (Diodorus 19.79.4). Ptolemy II refounded the town about 270 BC and named it Arsinoe after his sister and wife. Tomb 14 lay under its crater fill until 1929. Its finds were then divided, as the Swedish expedition’s were, between the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia and Stockholm.

The plan and depth of the dromos, stomion, chamber and niches, the door slab, the nine layers and the burial period of every object are excavated and published. So is the place of most objects: of the 56 catalogued objects, 37 stand where the find-plan draws them, 11 where the register’s words put them (one bowl inside another, a bowl resting across the mouths of two amphorae), and 8 where nothing recorded their place, so we set them by the practice of the tomb itself, beside the body or along the wall where their period’s goods lay. In the plan’s close groups the small numbers cannot all be read with certainty, so many objects there are placed by group rather than one by one. Where two objects collided we moved them by up to 12 cm, within the error of the drawing. The “Where positions come from” view colours each object by its source, and each object’s card says it in words.

The heights of the objects rest on one reading of ours. The register gives each object a figure such as “75” or “104”, and we read these as centimetres below a level line drawn on the section about 1.25 m above the chamber floor. Read that way, the first period lies on the floor, the second at 0.13 to 0.34 m and the third at 0.48 to 0.54 m, which matches the layers exactly.

Reconstructed: the roof and its height, the full size and cover of the sarcophagus, the two looted torpedo jars, the three bodies without bone and their posture, the period of the niche burial, the height of the niche ceilings and the diameter of the robbers’ shaft. The orientation of the tomb, with the dromos running in from the north, is good to about 15 degrees. Two small conflicts in the publication are left open: the register gives a graffito to bowl 48 but the list of inscriptions gives one to bowl 28, and whether the Black Lustrous jug was made in Athens or in Cyprus is not stated (pp. 222–223). Where the evidence allows two readings, of the roof and of the sarcophagus cover, the model shows the one we prefer and offers the other as a switch.