Palaepaphos-Skales Tomb 49: An Early Iron Age Chamber Tomb

In January 1979 a bulldozer was levelling the slope at Skales for farming. The plateau there has a hard crest over a thick bed of chavara, a soft clayey marl, and the blade cut into a cemetery that had been dug into that marl three thousand years earlier. The tombs it exposed were numbered 42 to 57 when they were published. George Ioannou, the Department of Antiquities’ custodian at Kouklia, emptied them to save what was in them. The Department’s systematic excavation of the cemetery, under Vassos Karageorghis, began in April, and every tomb from number 58 onwards was dug and drawn in the normal way (Karageorghis 1983, p. 9).

Skales was known before the bulldozer. A mission from the University of St Andrews and the Liverpool museums, led by T. B. Mitford and J. H. Iliffe, had excavated there in 1951 (Karageorghis 1983, p. 9). Karageorghis published the tombs of 1979 in 1983 as the third volume of the Alt-Paphos series, with the bones, inscriptions, imports, stones and anchors each studied by a specialist in an appendix.

Tomb 49 produced one of the largest groups of its period from Cyprus. Philippa Steele, in her study of early writing on the island, places it in what J. N. Coldstream called the “outstandingly rich” class of Cypro-Geometric burials (Steele 2019, ch. 2). Its rubble blocking was still in place when Ioannou reached it, so the tomb had not been robbed, and its catalogue runs to 198 numbered objects, almost every one with its height and diameter. What it lacks is the one record an excavator would have made first: a drawing of each thing where it lay.

All the Skales tombs run north-east to south-west, with the entrance on the south-west, cut into the slope (Karageorghis 1983, p. 10). A tomb of this kind has two parts: the dromos, an open trench that leads down from the ground surface, and the chamber, a room tunnelled sideways out of its far end. The narrow doorway between them is the stomion, Greek for “mouth”.

Tomb 49’s dromos, as excavated, is 3.15 m long. It is 1.40 m wide at the outer end and widens to 1.60 m at the chamber, with straight sides. Its proportions match the cemetery’s shorter, wider dromoi, whose floors, Karageorghis writes, slope smoothly into the chamber with no step at the door (pp. 11, 68). He notes that the dromos was not entirely excavated, and that there may have been steps at its entrance. Those steps are needed. The chamber floor lies 4.40 m below the ground at the stomion, and a ramp that climbed 4.4 m in 3.15 m would be steeper than a staircase. Our model gives the excavated dromos a ramp of about 21 degrees and continues it outwards as a flight of eight cut steps, drawn ghosted because nobody has seen them. The ancient ground was higher than today’s, by an amount the bulldozer removed and no one measured.

The chamber is round, 3.90 m across, with its ceiling 1.95 m above the floor (p. 67). Steele describes it as elliptical, but the plan she reproduces, redrawn from Karageorghis’s, shows a circle (Steele 2019, Fig. 2.4), and we follow the plan. Where Skales ceilings survived, in Tombs 48, 67 and 88, they were domes, and Karageorghis explains why the chambers were cut so deep: in soft chavara a thick roof of rock was what kept them standing (p. 11). Over the crown of Tomb 49 there were about 2.45 m of rock and soil even at today’s lowered ground level. The model’s walls rise straight to 0.90 m and then curve into the dome.

Marl of this kind cuts easily with a pick, and the tomb’s own contents show that both bronze and iron were in use. No tool marks are reported. Our estimate of the work, from the model’s dimensions, is 37 to 44 m³ of rock taken out (19.1 m³ of it from the chamber), which swells to 49 to 57 m³ once broken and carried up in baskets. At half a cubic metre to one cubic metre a person a day, that is 40 to 90 worker-days: four people for two or three weeks.

At Skales the stomia had collapsed, but the stones that blocked them give their size: a little under a metre high (Karageorghis 1983, p. 11). Tomb 49’s doorway had a second constraint, the bathtub described below, which is 74 cm wide and up to 73 cm high and had to pass through it. The model gives the opening 1.10 m by 1.00 m, through a lip of rock 30 cm thick. On the published plan the dromos runs almost straight into the chamber, swinging about five degrees to the left, with no passage drawn at the door.

When a burial was over, the doorway was closed with a wall of rubble and the dromos filled back to the surface with soil and stones (p. 68). Four of the stones from Tomb 49’s blocking had been worked, and they were catalogued with the tomb as A to D (p. 79). Stone A is an irregular block of calcarenite, 35 by 23 by 17 cm, with two signs about 9 cm tall cut deep into it on either side of a divider. Masson read the first as the syllable a and the second, less certainly, as e. Stone B is a rough cube, 26 by 14 by 20 cm, perhaps with a sign of its own. C is a fragment 33 cm long, pierced at the top, perhaps from an anchor.

D is the top of a trapezoidal stone anchor, 45 by 30 by 12 cm and 19.15 kg; complete, it stood about 70 cm high. Honor Frost, who studied the cemetery’s anchors, noticed that the chisel marks inside its rope hole were unworn. A rope run through that hole under strain at sea would have smoothed them, so this anchor was never used on a ship before its top ended up in a tomb door about 1 km from the coast (Frost, in Karageorghis 1983).

We show the four stones only in the last blocking, the one Ioannou found. Steele points out that they need not belong to that sealing alone (Steele 2019, ch. 2): the same stones could have been pulled out and put back at every reopening. The model cannot show stones leaving and returning, so that reading stays in this text, without a switch.

Ioannou saw two skeletons, nearly complete, lying side by side with their heads towards the door and their feet towards the back wall. Near them were fragments of a third skull (Karageorghis 1983, pp. 68, 81). Elsewhere at Skales the dead were laid on their backs (p. 12), and the model lays the two men that way, shown as their skeletons, between the bathtub on the left and the mass of pottery on the right.

The bones were studied by Schulte-Campbell for the volume, and they agree with the custodian’s count. Individual 49a was a man of 23 to 27, with an almost intact skull. Individual 49b was a man of 30 to 35, with arthritis in his left upper arm and in two vertebrae of the upper back, and gum disease. His skull had been shaped in infancy, flattened behind the crown in the form Schulte-Campbell classes as the Cypriot type, and pushed out of symmetry as well. The third person, 49c, is an adult of unknown sex represented by two fragments of jaw.

Schulte-Campbell thought 49a and 49b were probably related. The two skulls look alike from behind, the lower jaws have the same profile, and the cusps of the molars follow the same pattern. How closely they were related the bones cannot say.

We take the third individual to be the earliest. A person represented by two pieces of jaw was most likely moved after death: at Skales, earlier burials were swept aside to make room for new ones, or their bones were gathered into large vessels (p. 12). The model makes this person the first burial, cleared to the back of the chamber when the tomb was reopened. The order of the two men is unknown. The model has 49b buried second and 49a last, and nothing in the record fixes it either way.

The catalogue numbers 198 objects from the chamber (Karageorghis 1983, pp. 68–79). Nos 1 to 18 are metal: nine bronze bowls, a bronze strainer, a bronze rod tripod, a bronze spearhead, three bronze spits and a bronze brooch, with an iron knife (no. 12) and a silver brooch set with gold beads (no. 13). Nos 19 to 196 are 178 pots. No. 197 is a second strainer, catalogued at the end, and no. 198 is the bathtub. With the four blocking stones, the tomb produced 202 numbered things, every one a single object.

Most of the pottery is White Painted I, the pale wheel-made ware painted with dark bands and concentric circles that defines the period. Twelve barrel jugs, two flasks and two shallow bowls are Bichrome I, which adds red to the black. A handful of pieces are Proto-White Painted, the ware that came before. Twenty pots are Black Slip I, with a lustrous dark surface: mostly jugs, many of them fluted, with an amphora and three amphoriskoi.

Fifteen vessels by our count of the catalogue were made outside Cyprus, on the Levantine coast: four Phoenician Bichrome jugs, five Phoenician flasks, a Phoenician dipper juglet, a Levantine jug and four Canaanite jars, the pointed-based transport jars of the Levant. Patricia Bikai, who studied the imports for the volume, treated the painted Canaanite jar no. 80, decorated with palm trees, as a mainland import. Steele counts fourteen imports.

The numbers that repeat are the cups and bowls. There are nineteen one-handled cups (nos 100 to 118), almost identical, between 9.1 and 11 cm high, and twenty-seven small two-handled bowls on feet (nos 119 to 145), all between 7 and 8.4 cm. Sets on this scale look like drinking vessels for a gathering, and the bronzes by the door, described next, point the same way.

Ioannou’s account of what he saw is short and specific (Karageorghis 1983, p. 68). On entering the chamber he met three large White Painted amphorae, nos 19 to 21, “facing the stomion”. The middle one, no. 20, had the big bronze strainer no. 197 lying over its mouth, with a small bronze bowl inside the strainer. The strainer’s corrosion has left a stain on the amphora’s rim. To the left of the door, against the chamber wall, stood a large bronze bowl, three smaller bronze bowls and the rod tripod no. 11, with the three bronze spits leaning upright against the wall and the spearhead no. 15 on the floor.

Karageorghis read the tripod, the strainers and the small bronze bowls as a set for serving wine (p. 81). The strainer no. 197 is 38.2 cm across, a shallow dish with a sunken sieve at its centre and three handles of iron fixed with bronze rivets. Set over the amphora with a bowl in it, it looks like a service left ready when the tomb was closed: drink drawn from the jar, passed through the sieve and taken up in the bowl.

The tripod no. 11 is 13.5 cm high, a ring of twelve pairs of opposed spirals on three legs of three rods each, with buds hanging from it. Stands of this kind were made in the 12th and 11th centuries BC, so this one was probably already old when it went into the ground. Among the pots is a clay version of such a stand, no. 38, painted White Painted I, 24.8 cm high, with two of its legs mended in antiquity. The large bowl no. 1, 37.1 cm across, has two upturned handles each topped by the head of a goat, rosette discs where the handles meet the body and twisted wire bridging them; it has no match in Cypriot bronzework. The second large bowl, no. 2, is not placed in the account, and neither is no. 10, a bowl with a swinging handle whose closest parallels are Egyptian and Near Eastern. Which bowl was the one by the door, and which small bowl sat in the strainer, nobody wrote down. The model uses no. 1 by the door and no. 7 in the strainer.

The spearhead is 33 cm long, with two bronze rivets still in its socket and traces of the wooden shaft inside. The iron knife no. 12 still has traces of its wooden handle and its iron rivets. The account does not place the knife; the model lays it beside the last man.

Where were the amphorae? “Facing the stomion” fits two places: just inside the door, or against the back wall, facing whoever came in. Just inside the door they would have stood on the two men’s heads. The model puts them at the back wall, and offers the other place as a switch.

The three spits, obeloi in Greek, are bronze rods of rectangular section, tapering to a point, with a slit socket at the butt. They are 87.2, 86.5 and 76.5 cm long (nos 16 to 18). Spits of this kind were once taken for weapons. Karageorghis read them as roasting spits that had become marks of rank, perhaps with a value of their own, and grouped them with the spear as the gear of a man of standing (p. 80). Steele notes that most Cypriot spits are iron; three uninscribed bronze ones come from a tomb of about 1050 BC at Salamis, and obeloi are found in Cypriot tombs from then until the 5th century BC (Steele 2019, p. 58).

Near the socket of no. 16 five signs are incised. Émilia and Olivier Masson published them in the same volume, read as o-pe-le-ta-u: Opheltau, “of Opheltas”, a Greek man’s name in the genitive, with the ending -au of the dialect later spoken in Cyprus and Arcadia (Masson and Masson, in Karageorghis 1983). The Massons dated the spit to the second half of the 11th century BC. Leaving aside the palace records of Mycenaean Greece, it became the earliest text in Greek found anywhere in the Mediterranean, and it is earlier than any other Greek text from Cyprus by perhaps two hundred years or more (Steele 2019, p. 57).

The spit set off a debate about script. The Massons took the signs to be the first surviving writing in the Cypriot Syllabary, the script in which Greek was written on the island for the rest of antiquity. In 2008 Jean-Pierre Olivier argued that nothing in the signs belongs to the new syllabary, and that the name is written in Cypro-Minoan, the older and still undeciphered Bronze Age script of the island, using sign values that happen to carry over (Olivier 2008). Many scholars accept this; some do not. Steele asks that the spit be understood first as an inscribed object in its own tomb, before it is sorted into either corpus (Steele 2019, pp. 57–58).

The tomb is unusual in having several inscribed objects. Spit no. 17 carries two identical signs with a divider between them; no. 18 has a single sign and a bar on one side and a herring-bone mark on the other, which may be abbreviations or marks imitating writing. Block A from the door has the same sign, divider, sign pattern as no. 17, and one of the Canaanite jars, no. 78, has two marks cut into its handle. Only no. 16 can be read as words. Whether the name is that of the dead man, of a giver, or of an owner long before the burial is open. The spits differ in length, and Steele suggests that they were made at different times, perhaps for different people, even one for each of the men buried in the tomb (Steele 2019, pp. 57–60).

The name has been used as the keystone of the argument that Greeks from the Aegean settled in Cyprus at the end of the Late Bronze Age (Knapp 2008, p. 309, lists the scholars). Read with the rest of the tomb, it is one Greek name on one object among 198, in a grave whose pottery, bronzework and customs are Cypriot, with goods from the Levant. It shows that Greek was spoken and written at Palaepaphos by the time the spit was buried. Whose name it was, and how the men in the tomb would have described themselves, it cannot tell.

Where the spits stood is disputed in the sources too. Karageorghis puts them inside the chamber, against the wall to the left of the door (p. 68); Steele, also following the custodian, puts them against the wall of the dromos near the entrance (Steele 2019, p. 59). The plan drawn afterwards marks them with a dot at the left jamb of the doorway, which fits both. The model follows the excavator and stands them just inside, and the dromos position is a switch.

On the left side of the chamber stood a bathtub carved from one block of white chalk. It is oval, 153 cm long at the top and 140 cm at the base, 74 cm wide and 73 cm high at the end with a seat, falling to 66 cm at the other. Inside it is 45 to 50 cm deep. On its outer walls are three pairs of half-reel reliefs, and inside it has a small half-bowl 14 cm across, which Karageorghis compared to a soap dish. It has no drain hole (Karageorghis 1983, p. 79, and Appendix XI). The stone is chalk of the Lefkara Formation, probably from the lower Xeros valley north-west of Palaepaphos (Elliott, in Karageorghis 1983).

Karageorghis called it the earliest and most elaborate stone bathtub known from Cyprus. Earlier clay tubs come from sanctuaries, at Ayios Iakovos, Palaepaphos and Enkomi, and from Kalavasos, and he linked this one with a bath for the dead (Appendix XI). He suggested the three pairs of reliefs were grips for “three pairs of hands”. Our estimate of its weight, from the size of the shell, is 400 to 600 kg, which suits six people at the low end. It was brought down the dromos and through the stomion, perhaps on ropes, a sledge or rollers, and the model shows it arriving with the first burial, while the chamber was still empty.

When Ioannou found it, it was full of gravel to about 30 cm below the rim, and on the gravel stood about twelve bowls and cups (p. 68). No bones were reported in it, and it was not used as a coffin. Whether the gravel was put there or washed in is not known. Floods disturbed several Skales tombs, and a natural streak of gravel and sand runs through the marl about 3 m below the surface (pp. 11–12). Cups set on the gravel, though, mean the gravel was there before the last funeral, and our default treats it as deliberate fill, with water-laid gravel as the alternative.

Which twelve cups they were is not recorded. The model sets six cups and six of the small bowls on the gravel, in two rows.

“Most of the vases were piled up on the right side”, Ioannou said (p. 68). The right half of the model holds 165 vessels, and for all but one of them, the amphora no. 21 at the back wall, that sentence is all there is. The model stacks them by a fixed rule: the pointed Canaanite jars first, leaning against the wall, then the amphorae and hydriae, then jugs, deep bowls, kylikes and flasks in front, with the identical cups and small bowls nested in stacks of up to five. A clear strip is kept for the bodies and for anyone walking in. The arrangement is ours; the count and the side are the custodian’s.

The pile records a change in Cypriot pottery. The five Proto-White Painted kylikes (nos 95 to 99), stemmed drinking cups, are types of the last phase of the Late Bronze Age, Late Cypriot IIIB (p. 81). The jug no. 53 is Proto-White Painted too, its trefoil mouth closed by a modelled human face; the same potter made a jug found in Skales Tomb 78. Next to them are the White Painted I amphorae, among them no. 26, at 58.8 cm the largest, with a hole drilled through the rim after firing. The Bichrome I barrel jugs copy a Syro-Palestinian shape, and the Phoenician jugs and flasks beside them came from the Levant itself. Steele describes the whole as “overwhelmingly Cypriot in character” (Steele 2019, pp. 57–60).

Karageorghis divided the datable pieces between early and late (pp. 79–81). The earliest, of Cypro-Geometric IA, include the Proto-White Painted kylikes and jugs, the amphoriskos 28, the amphora 31 and the four Canaanite jars. The latest, of late Cypro-Geometric I, include the amphorae 29, 30 and 32, the jugs 63 and 76, the deep bowls 81, 82 and 89 and the bronze brooch no. 14. Nothing is certainly Cypro-Geometric II. Most of the pottery falls in between and cannot be placed within the period.

The early and late pottery means Tomb 49 was opened more than once. The model follows the simplest sequence the evidence allows. The tomb was cut around 1050 BC and received its first burial, the person now represented by two pieces of jaw, with the oldest goods and the bathtub. The door was walled up and the dromos filled.

To reopen it, someone had to dig the dromos out again, about 17 to 24 m³ of loose fill by our estimate, two or three days for a small team, and pull the blocking down. Inside, in our reconstruction, the first body was pushed to the back of the chamber; small vessels that had lain beside it, the kylikes, the face jug and the amphoriskoi among them, went onto the pile at the right. A man was laid on the floor, head to the door. The tomb was sealed again. Some decades later, in late Cypro-Geometric I, perhaps around 975 to 950 BC on our reckoning, it was opened for the second man, laid parallel to the first, and the last funeral left the arrangement Ioannou found: the amphorae, the strainer and bowl, the bronzes and spits by the door, the cups on the gravel in the tub.

Whether those last things belong to one funeral or gathered over several is unknown, and so is the date of the spit within the period (Steele 2019, ch. 2). Nothing ties a pot to a body. The model gives the datable early pieces to the first burial and the late pieces, with everything in the custodian’s description of the final arrangement, to the last; the 137 objects that cannot be dated go with the second burial as a neutral default, and each one says so on its card.

The cemetery stayed in use long after Tomb 49 was closed for the last time, into the Hellenistic period, with later tombs cut closer to the surface over the older ones (p. 10). None is reported cutting into Tomb 49, and its blocking stood until 1979.

Three kinds of evidence stand behind the model, and its “Where positions come from” view colours every object by which one placed it. The published plan, drawn after the tomb was emptied, marks one thing: the spits at the left jamb. Those 3 objects are coloured as placed from the plan. The custodian’s account and the catalogue place 28 more: the three amphorae, the strainer and the bowl in it, the bronzes by the door, the tub and the twelve cups on it, and the four worked stones in the blocking. The remaining 171 are placed by rule, following how the properly excavated Skales tombs were furnished and how the space could hold them. In the model, the custodian’s zones are firm and the exact spots inside them are ours.

The tomb itself is in better shape than its contents. The chamber’s diameter and height, the dromos’s length and widths and the floor’s depth are published measurements (pp. 67–68), and the plan, as reproduced by Steele, fixes the line of the dromos and the round chamber (Steele 2019, Fig. 2.4). The height of the doorway, the dome’s profile, the steps at the entrance and the height of the ancient ground surface are reconstructed, and each is drawn that way.

Where the sources disagree, the model takes the excavator’s reading and offers the other as a switch: the spits inside the chamber or in the dromos, the amphorae at the back wall or at the door, the steps beyond the excavated ramp or inside it. Two questions change nothing that the model can show, and the text weighs them instead: whether the gravel in the tub was laid or washed in, and whether the four stones went into the last blocking only or into every one. Three readings it rejects without a switch: an elliptical chamber, a dromos well off the chamber’s axis, which is common at Skales but absent from this tomb’s plan, and the bathtub as a coffin.

Between January and April 1979 George Ioannou took out 198 objects and the bones of three people, kept each tomb’s finds together, and could still say afterwards that the middle amphora had a strainer on its mouth with a bowl in it, and that the spits stood upright against the wall.