Tamassos Royal Tomb 12: A Built Stone Tomb of the Sixth Century BC

Tamassos lies in the foothills about 20 km south-west of Nicosia, near the village of Politiko, on the edge of the copper country. It was a kingdom: the prism of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, written in 673/2 BC, lists Admetos, king of Tamassos, among the ten kings of Cyprus who sent building materials to Nineveh. Its kings were buried outside the city wall to the north, in the cemetery called Chomazoudhia, beside what was probably a main road and a gate (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, p. 220).

Ohnefalsch-Richter, a German working in British Cyprus, dug at Tamassos in 1885, 1889 and 1894. In 1889 he worked for the Berlin Museums and opened twenty-three or twenty-four tombs at Chomazoudhia. Four were big enough to be called royal, and his numbers for them have stuck: Tomb 4, cut into the earth around 700 BC; Tomb 11, built of stone and plain; and Tombs 12 and 5, built of stone and carved. Tomb 12 is the one whose contents he found still lying where they had been put.

He wrote it up in a long manuscript, Tamassos und Idalion, which was never printed, and his draughtsman E. Carletti drew the tomb in plan and section. The drawings are lost. In 2007 Hartmut Matthäus published the part of the manuscript on Tomb 12, with a schematic find-plan placing Ohnefalsch-Richter’s 35 numbered entries (Matthäus 2007, pp. 221–224, fig. 2). The walls are known from a survey of the restored tomb, with plan, long section and two cross-sections, published in 2002 (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, fig. 1). A description of 1889 and a measured drawing of the empty building are what this reconstruction stands on.

The names need care. Ohnefalsch-Richter’s Tomb 12 is “Tomb 2” in Olivier Masson’s study of 1964 and on the Department of Antiquities’ signs, and his Tomb 5 is their “Tomb 1”; one paper calls the two carved tombs “XI and V”, which is a slip for XII. Here the excavator’s numbers are used throughout.

The first thing he recorded at Tomb 12 was the door: “the door slab was found in position.” The robbers had come in through that same door and had put the slab back after them.

Most Cypriot tombs of the period were chambers cut into soft rock. At Chomazoudhia the tombs were dug into earth (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, p. 220), and for Tombs 11, 12 and 5 the builders dug a pit and built a room of dressed stone inside it, walled off from the surrounding earth (Franklin 2011, p. 131). Descriptions of a “rock-cut royal tomb” at Tamassos refer to Tomb 4, which Buchholz reinvestigated in the 1970s; Tomb 12 is built.

The chamber is 3.54 m long and 2.22 m wide inside. Its side walls, one block thick at 0.21 m, rise in four or five courses to 1.21 m, and above them a gabled roof reaches 2.33 m at the ridge (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, fig. 1). The rise of 1.12 m over a half-width of 1.11 m gives a pitch of 45 degrees. The floor is paved with limestone flags, sunk 6 cm at the back where the sarcophagus stands. The wall faces show the pattern of headers and stretchers, blocks laid end-on and side-on as in a bonded wall, but the “headers” are no deeper than the stretchers: the pattern is drawn on a skin one block thick (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, p. 224).

Ohnefalsch-Richter wrote that “two monoliths support the pointed roof.” We read that as one slab for each slope, each about 4.1 m long and 1.9 m down the slope. Their thickness is not published; at the 0.22 m we have given them, each weighs 3.9–4.1 tonnes (our estimate).

The sarcophagus is a single block of limestone, undecorated, lying across the back of the chamber with its long axis from wall to wall. It is about a metre wide, and the door is 0.86 m. It cannot have come in through the door, so it was set on the floor before the walls were closed. The same argument is made for the larger sarcophagus of Tomb 5, “too large to have been brought in after the tomb was built” (Lightbody 2008).

The pottery is of the kind archaeologists call type V, and Matthäus dates the tomb to the Cypro-Archaic II period, probably the first half of the sixth century BC (Matthäus 2007, p. 215); the Fitzwilliam Museum dates its sword to the early sixth century. Tombs 12 and 5 are the latest of the four royal tombs (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, p. 230).

The way down is a stair of twelve steps, each 18.2 cm high and 35.9 cm deep, running 3.95 m on the axis to a landing a metre long (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, fig. 1). Masson counted fourteen steps, and the figure is repeated in the Fitzwilliam catalogue (p. 129); the survey shows twelve. The cutting is 2.53 m wide at the bottom and narrows towards the top. Its sides are lined with ashlar in the lower courses and rough stone above.

At the foot stands a façade, and it is dressed as the front of a temple. Two pilasters flank the door, 0.50 m and 0.57 m wide, each carved in low relief with a Proto-Aeolic capital: a pair of volutes curling out from a central triangle, the form of the stone capitals from the royal buildings at Megiddo and Samaria. The door frame cuts away the inner volute of each. The pilasters are thin slabs set against the wall and carry nothing; the Tamassos examples are two or three centuries later than those at Megiddo and Samaria, and should not be used to reconstruct them (Franklin 2011, pp. 131–134). Pilasters of this kind on a tomb are known only at Tamassos (Walcher 2005).

The door, 0.86 m wide and 1.29 m high, is set in a frame stepped back twice, about 6 cm each time, the way a doorway in a sanctuary was framed (Walcher 2005, p. 25). Above it ran a plain frieze and a course of dentils, small square blocks in a row like the ends of roof joists. By 1889 the dentils had fallen into the stair, and they are now lost (Matthäus 2007, p. 221).

Every one of these forms began in timber: recessed jambs copy layered door frames, dentils copy joist ends, the carved ceiling of Tomb 5 copies beams. Buchholz, Matthäus and Walcher trace the route to Phoenicia, citing a timber-roofed ashlar tomb at Trayamar in Spain and a ceiling with beams in threes at the temple of Eshmun near Sidon (2002, pp. 226–228). Vassos Karageorghis saw Anatolian influence at Tamassos instead (1982). Whatever the route, the excavators describe the result as a tomb in the form of a sanctuary, “a subterranean sanctuary” for a king (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, p. 228; Matthäus 2007, p. 219).

Nothing survives about who built Tomb 12 or how long it took, so the figures in this section are ours, worked out from the survey. The order of work follows from the building itself. First the pit and the cutting for the stair: about 65 m³ of earth and soft marl, which at one to one and a half cubic metres per person per day, with iron picks and baskets, is 45–65 person-days of digging. Then the floor flags, then the sarcophagus, lowered in while the pit was still open on every side. Then the walls to 1.21 m, the triangular gable ends, the two roof slabs, the façade with its pilasters and dentils, the door slab, the stair, and finally the backfill around the chamber and a cover of earth over the roof.

The stone comes to 20 m³ of dressed limestone, or 45–50 tonnes: walls, gables, floor, roof, sarcophagus, the stair and the lining of the cutting. The quarry has not been identified, and the tool marks have not been published.

What stood above the tomb is unknown. Today the ground over the vestibule is at 3.05 m above the chamber floor, under a modern roof, and the model gives the tomb an earth cover reaching 3.00 m, about 0.3 to 0.4 m over the ridge. A mound may have marked it; the survey’s authors write “if indeed a tumulus covered the Royal Tombs” (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, p. 229). The tumulus is a switch in the model, off by default.

Only traces of the skeleton were left (Matthäus 2007, p. 212). Ohnefalsch-Richter could still see how the man had been laid: on his back, legs straight, arms along his sides, head to the east and face turned to the west, towards his feet and the room (Ohnefalsch-Richter in Matthäus 2007, p. 221). A face turned that way suggests the head was raised on something, a cushion or a headrest that has perished. He called him “ein Fürst”, a prince. That he was a man rests on the excavator’s judgement alone.

He was alone. Cypriot chamber tombs were usually family vaults, opened again for each new death over generations. Tomb 12 held one burial and was never reopened for another, and Matthäus counts the single burial among the marks of rank (2007, p. 216). No other bodies were recorded in the chamber, and nothing in the stair, though Ohnefalsch-Richter does not say whether he searched it.

His name is not known. Admetos, the king on Esarhaddon’s prism, is named in 673/2 BC, seventy years or more before this burial, and no inscription was found in the tomb. What lay with him identifies his office. By his right arm was a bronze mace head 7.5 cm high, ribbed and crowned with a lobed knob, which Ohnefalsch-Richter took for the handle of a sceptre; beside it a plain hemispherical silver bowl about 10 cm across. Two flat clay plates lay at his feet. Two larger bowls, one 18 cm and one 20 cm across, had stood by his right leg and his left hip; the robbers took them, and only their rings pressed into the earth remained (Ohnefalsch-Richter in Matthäus 2007, p. 221).

Matthäus’s find-plan draws the mace head on the north side of the body. The manuscript says “by the right arm”, and a man on his back with his head to the east has his right arm on the south. The plan was drawn from the same text, so it is no second witness, and the model follows the words; the plan’s version is a switch.

Ohnefalsch-Richter numbered 35 entries. Some are a single object, such as the sword; some are heaps. Turning them into a count of objects means deciding what each heap held, and the decisions are set out here so that the total can be checked.

The pile of pottery in the left corner he describes as a stack of plates and bowls, “about ten better preserved” among fragments: we count ten, and split them as five plates, four bowls and one bulbous bowl with two small handles. He gives no number for the spits; Matthäus writes “a dozen” (2007, p. 216), and we count twelve standing, with a thirteenth that the robbers threw. The buttons are fourteen collected by the sarcophagus and about twelve more in a cauldron. “Several” bronze bowls are counted as three, and “some” clay lamps as three. His entries 20 and 23, a cup and a plate, are one incense burner. A gold nail head kept with the sword is added from the Fitzwilliam catalogue (p. 129).

That makes 81 objects in the chamber in 1889, and two silver bowls known only from their impressions: 83 in all. The jewellery and the gold the robbers took are not counted, because nobody knows what they were. Nor are the six limestone statues found beside the tomb in 1997, which stood outside it, if they belonged to it at all.

The layout is the excavator’s own observation. “The south-west corner and the area left of the door were reserved for the spits and tripods; the south-east corner and the area right of the door for the incense burners, lamps and the bronze vessels for eating and drinking” (Ohnefalsch-Richter in Matthäus 2007, p. 223). In Matthäus’s reading the man lay at the back with his personal things, and the front of the room was laid out as the setting of a meal (2007, pp. 216–217).

In the south-west corner, Ohnefalsch-Richter found “a dense pyramid of mighty lances” standing in and over a large stone tripod mortar. He took them for spears. They are obeloi, iron roasting spits, long and thin, with a socket at one end and two small lugs that let them be stacked; wood was still in the sockets. One measured 73.5 cm as preserved (Matthäus 2007, p. 213, fig. 9). In the model the twelve stand points up in the bowl of the tripod, leaning together into a cone. By 1889 some had sunk, some had fallen across the corner, and some had rusted into one mass. A smaller tripod mortar stood just to the north, and in front of both lay the pile of clay plates and bowls.

Against the middle of the east wall leaned a bronze cauldron of Greek type, without handles, round-bottomed, with a sharp shoulder and a narrowing mouth, “excellently preserved”, and 44.4 cm across if, as Matthäus thinks probable, it is the cauldron now in Cambridge; in the green oxide on its floor were about a dozen buttons. Against the west wall, a third of the way along, stood a second cauldron, of Levantine type, wide-mouthed, 39.8 cm across, with two pairs of rings that once held swinging handles (Matthäus 2007, p. 213, figs. 7–8).

Spits, cauldrons and plates are the gear for roasting meat and serving it to many people. Matthäus reads the set as the equipment of a funerary banquet, and the arrangement of the chamber as the setting of one (2007, pp. 216–217). The same kit turns up in the richest Cypriot tombs of the period: spits, firedogs and cauldrons in Tomb 79 at Salamis, and spits with a helmet, shield and sword in the warrior tombs at Kouklia. Whether a meal was eaten at the graveside, or the gear was put in for the dead man’s use, or both, the tomb cannot say.

The south-east corner held the things for light, smoke and drink. The taller incense burner is a Phoenician type, 21.5 cm high: a stem of stacked petals with three volute rods holding up a ring. Ohnefalsch-Richter called it a torch holder and photographed it upside down. The other was a beaker-shaped burner standing on a flat bronze plate, about 12 cm high; he listed the cup and the plate as two finds, and Matthäus put them back together (Matthäus 2007, figs. 10–11).

With them were an iron lamp in the open saucer form called a shell lamp, three clay lamps of the same shape, and a small one-handled pot. Ohnefalsch-Richter gives its height as “0.96 M”, which would make it almost a metre tall; he meant 9.6 cm.

The drinking set is bronze: a richly decorated jug of Phoenician type, a wide-mouthed local jug 19.8 cm high, and bowls, one with rings on its rim, all found in fragments (Matthäus 2007, pp. 213–214, fig. 12). Beside them stood a clay jug about 25 cm high with black bands and a wide, plate-like rim, and a plain oinochoe 22 cm high. The manuscript does not say where the oinochoe stood; the model puts it with the other jugs.

Two pots stood apart. A small unpainted hydria with three handles sat on the threshold against the right-hand jamb, the same shape and size as a painted one in Tomb 5. And an amphora 45 cm tall lay overturned on the centre line, about 1.5 m inside the door, painted with bands and with dotted concentric circles, ten on the shoulder and eight on the neck. Ohnefalsch-Richter’s description fits White Painted V; if his bands were red, it was Bichrome V, which is a switch in the model.

One object was found on the wall. Above the door, on the inside, a laurel leaf of gilded silver had been fixed into a joint between the stones with a gilded silver nail. It is veined, pierced at both ends, and the nail was still in one of the holes (Ohnefalsch-Richter in Matthäus 2007, p. 224). From the stair it could not be seen. It faced into the chamber, towards the sarcophagus.

Ohnefalsch-Richter calls it “one of the gilded silver leaves”, which implies there were others. If so, the others may have gone with the robbers. The model shows the one he found, at the height of the joint above the lintel, which is our reading. Where the leaf is now has not been traced.

The weapons were found where the robbers had thrown them. The helmet, bronze, of the pointed “Tamassos type” with a visor, stood upright in the gap between the east end of the sarcophagus and the east wall, its visor collapsed; it came out in pieces. A helmet of the same type in Berlin is catalogued as from “Royal Tomb XI”, which may be this one under a misread number; where the Tomb 12 helmet is now is not settled.

The sword lay along the east wall, south of the helmet. It is iron, 71 cm long, with a leaf-shaped blade and a raised midrib. The hilt was faced with ivory plates edged in silver over tin and held by six bronze rivets with domed heads of silver or electrum; there were traces of a wooden scabbard. Ohnefalsch-Richter lifted it in boxes packed with cotton. It is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (GR.334.1892; Fitzwilliam 2009, cat. 175, pp. 128–129). Homer’s heroes carry swords “studded with silver”; the nearest Cypriot match is an iron sword with silver-headed rivets from Tomb 3 at Salamis. A gold nail head on a hollow bronze rivet, kept with the sword, may come from some other object that the robbers took.

The shield was a bronze one with a spiked boss, about 18 cm across where it survives. It lay between the sword, the knives and the large cauldron (Matthäus 2007, fig. 6). Ohnefalsch-Richter does not list it among the things the robbers threw, though it lay among them; the model leaves it where it fell, and has the other reading as a switch.

Ohnefalsch-Richter could tell how the robbers had come in. “Here no opening had been made in the roof,” he wrote, as one had been in Tomb 5 (Ohnefalsch-Richter in Matthäus 2007, p. 224). They dug down the stair, moved the door slab and went in at the door.

Inside, they went to the sarcophagus. They took the two large bowls whose rings stayed in the earth by the body, bowls Ohnefalsch-Richter guessed were Phoenician silver with figures in relief, and the “jewels, gold and silver things”. To reach them they threw out what was in the way: the helmet, the sword, two single-edged iron knives and one spit went “behind the head end and in front of the sarcophagus.” The knives and the spit landed about 0.75 m in front of it (Ohnefalsch-Richter in Matthäus 2007, pp. 221–222).

They left everything else: two cauldrons, two incense burners, two bronze jugs and the bronze bowls, twelve iron spits, the iron lamp, the shield, the sword with its silver rivets. Ohnefalsch-Richter’s explanation was that they came before “the bronze-hungry age”, when bronze and iron were not worth the carrying. The date of the robbery is unknown.

Then they pushed the slab back into its place, so well that it was “found in position” in 1889, and refilled the stair. The model draws their cut down through the stair fill as a funnel of darker earth; its shape is our guess.

Where the weapons stood before the robbery is our reading of the manuscript’s “by and on the body”: the helmet by the head, the sword and knives on the body, the spit by the left leg. In the model those places are marked as speculative. Nobody was buried in the tomb afterwards, and no later objects were reported from it. As far as the record goes, the robbers were the only people to open it between the funeral and 1889.

The model’s timeline runs through 10 events, from building to restoration. After the funeral the door slab was set and the stair filled with earth. At some point, perhaps at the funeral, statues may have been set up outside: in January 1997, while restoring the tomb, the Department of Antiquities found two limestone sphinxes and two pairs of lions in a pit beside it. Where they first stood is unknown. Reports place the pit between Tombs 5 and 12, or next to Tomb 12, and one account has them at the entrances of the built tombs (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, pp. 228–229; Hadjisavvas 2010, p. 156). The model shows them only as ghosts, and only at the event where they might have been set up.

Then came the robbery, and after it the slow work of decay. The wooden handles of the knives and the wood in the spit sockets rotted. The spits sank, toppled and rusted together. Earth seeped in under and round the door, 0.20 to 0.50 m deep (we make it deepest by the door), burying the small things and leaving the cauldron, the spits and the taller burner standing clear. Outside, the dentil course and the outer door frame fell into the stair (Ohnefalsch-Richter in Matthäus 2007, pp. 221–224).

That is the state the model shows by default: the chamber as Ohnefalsch-Richter opened it, silt on the floor, the slab in place, the weapons where the robbers dropped them.

Tomb 5, the other carved tomb, is the grander building. A stair of eleven steps leads to a façade 2.89 m high, and behind it are two chambers, an antechamber and a burial chamber, each about 3.2 m long and 2.42 m wide, with walls 1.66 m high and a ridge at about 2.56 m (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, fig. 2). Its ceilings are carved as rounded beams in groups of three. In each side wall of the antechamber a niche holds a false door, carved with a lock of four bars and a bolt. Over both doorways, on the inside, are false windows with balustrades of volutes and palmettes. The sarcophagus is 2.40 m long outside, 2.132 m inside, its sides 0.533 m high, with a stone footstool in front of it.

David Lightbody, measuring Tomb 5 in 2006, found that it was laid out in a cubit of about 0.53 m: each chamber six cubits long, the sarcophagus four and a half cubits outside and four inside (Lightbody 2008). Tomb 12 does not fit a cubit so cleanly: its 3.54 m is 6.7 cubits, its 2.22 m is 4.2 (our check).

Tomb 5 was robbed through a hole in its roof, and very little of its contents came back: a sword, a mace head, knives, fragments of spits, a stone tripod and “numerous” plates (Matthäus 2007, p. 217). The list matches Tomb 12, item for item, as far as it goes. Tomb 5 has the carved ceiling; Tomb 12 still had its spits standing in their tripod. The plate sets the two side by side at the same scale: Tomb 5 for the carved interior, Tomb 12 for the furnishing.

The four royal tombs of Chomazoudhia span a century or more. The earliest, Tomb 4, of around 700 BC, is a chamber cut into the earth with a long passage in which a horse and chariot were buried; it held bronze blinkers and frontlets for the horses, a helmet, fittings from a shield, and a Phoenician silver bowl showing a horse. Tomb 11 came next, built of stone and plain, with an Attic black-figure cup by the KX Painter of about 580–570 BC. Tombs 12 and 5 are the last (Buchholz, Matthäus & Walcher 2002, p. 230; Carstens 2006, pp. 53–54). Tomb 11 no longer exists; its stones were taken for building.

Over that century horse gear disappears from the royal tombs, and Tomb 12 has none at all. In its place is the banquet set, laid out in a chamber built like a sanctuary (Matthäus 2007, pp. 216–217). Matthäus reads the change as a new way of displaying a king’s burial: the meal in the room instead of the chariot in the passage.

Tamassos has four built tombs. Idalion, the neighbouring kingdom to the east, has fourteen or fifteen, and Antoine Hermary has suggested that the Tamassian tombs show Idalion’s influence, or its control. Tamassos stood on copper: timbers from the old mines around Tamassos are dated 660 ± 110 and 540 ± 60 BC, and inside the city a metal workshop was joined to the temple of Astarte.

The walls, stair, door, façade and sarcophagus position are measured on the 2002 survey. The roof as two slabs is the excavator’s word; their thickness is ours. The sarcophagus is drawn 2.00 m long, shorter than the 2.15 m that can be scaled from the survey, because Ohnefalsch-Richter’s helmet stood upright in a gap at the east end, and a 2.15 m box would leave 7 cm; the longer reading is a switch. No lid is shown, because he mentions none and the robbers threw things out of the box; a flat lid can be switched on in the funeral view only.

The objects are placed in three ways, and the “Where positions come from” view colours each one by its source. 62 are placed from Ohnefalsch-Richter’s words, such as “exactly in the south-west corner” or “against the middle of the east wall”. 19 are placed from Matthäus’s find-plan, rescaled to the surveyed chamber, which is good to about 20 cm; the plan is itself drawn from the same text and is not to the scale of the survey. 2 are placed by our rule: the oinochoe, whose place is not given, goes with the other jugs, and the gold nail head goes with the sword. The estimated counts are the ten plates and bowls, the twelve spits, and the three bronze bowls and three clay lamps.

Where the scholars or the documents disagree, the model follows the excavator and offers the other reading as a switch: the mace head on the north side, as on the find-plan; thirteen spits in the tripod instead of twelve; the shield thrown by the robbers; the amphora as Bichrome. The man’s height, 1.65 m, is assumed, and the cushion under his head is a guess drawn from the turn of his face. Only traces of his skeleton survived; the model and the drawings show him as a whole skeleton, laid as Ohnefalsch-Richter describes him, so that he can be seen where he lay. The direction of the tomb, its long axis about 330 degrees, is read from the survey’s north arrow to within 15 degrees.

The finds were divided after the excavation. The landowner’s share included the sword, which Sir Henry Bulwer, the High Commissioner, bought and which reached the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1892. Berlin received the shield, the mace head and the local bronze jug. The rest was shared between the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia and Cambridge: the Levantine cauldron is in Nicosia, and the Greek cauldron, probably the one from this tomb, and the taller incense burner are in the Fitzwilliam (Matthäus 2007, pp. 211–213, figs. 7–10).

Some are lost. The small silver bowl from beside the mace head is known only from Ohnefalsch-Richter’s photograph, and the beaker-shaped incense burner only from his watercolour. The helmet and the laurel leaf have not been traced. Hans-Günter Buchholz returned to the cemetery between 1970 and 1981, and the Department of Antiquities restored Tomb 12 and roofed its vestibule; the statues of 1997 came out of the ground during that work.

The shield went to Berlin with the mace head and was lost there after the Second World War. It survives as a watercolour: a bronze boss with a spike, about 18 cm across, painted where it lay between the sword and the cauldron.