A Family Tomb at Vounous, c. 2100 BC

Dikaios dug at Vounous in 1931 and 1932, on the north slope of a low hill about a mile and a half north-east of the abbey village of Bellapais, below the Kyrenia range and above the north coast. Tomb 36 belonged to his third season, which cleared Tombs 32 to 48. It lay in the upper south-eastern group of the cemetery, where the rock is poor and most of the tombs had fallen in, and its roof had collapsed onto everything inside (Dikaios 1940, pp. 3, 72, 96).

The excavators lifted the deposit in two layers. The upper one, under the fallen roof, was a mass of Red Polished pottery, the glossy red, hand-made ware of the Cypriot Early Bronze Age, “a great part” of it broken. No skeleton in this layer was in place. The bones were “in great disorder, mostly in the foreground of the chamber”, in the heap by the door, and skulls lay singly or in groups among the pots: two under a large jug east of the door, one beside a great bowl, one resting on a clay horn, three together in the north-west corner. Two human arms lay inside large bowls. Under all of this, in the lower layer, was the one body still lying as it had been laid, with a second, possibly doubled up, beside it; and on the rock floor of the east half the bones of the ox, with small bowls set among them (Dikaios 1940, pp. 72–74; pls V d–f, VI a).

Dikaios counted nine individuals. Priscilla Keswani, in her 2004 study of Bronze Age burial in Cyprus, calls it “the largest number of burials recorded in a single tomb at Vounous” (Keswani 2004, p. 58). No age or sex was recorded for any of them, so in the model and the drawings the nine are shown as skeletons of one adult size, without invented identities.

Vounous is a cemetery without a known settlement. Three expeditions dug there before 1940: Dikaios in 1931–32, Claude Schaeffer for the Louvre in 1933, and Eleanor and James Stewart in 1937–38. Between them they numbered 164 tombs, in two areas. Site A, dug by the Stewarts, holds the earlier tombs, cut into soft rock; Site B, where all three expeditions worked, holds the later ones, from the Early Cypriot II period into the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age. Across that span the tombs grew. Keswani’s figures for Site B give a mean chamber floor of 7.16 m² against 3.68 m² at Site A, and 2.68 burials per chamber against 1.59 (Keswani 2004, pp. 68, 76).

Dikaios placed Tomb 36 at the turn of his Period II and Period III, which corresponds to the transition from Early Cypriot II to Early Cypriot III (Dikaios 1940, p. 96). He dated Period III to 2300–2100 BC (pp. 163–164). Radiocarbon dates have since moved the Early Cypriot sequence later and shortened it (Manning 2013). On that scale Tomb 36 was cut and used around 2100 BC, somewhere between about 2150 and 2000 BC. How long it stayed in use is unknown: nine people could have died within a generation or across three.

Tomb 36 is rebuilt here because Dikaios’s account of it has what a rebuilding needs. He lists every object, with type numbers and counts; his narrative places about thirty objects and all nine skulls against the doorway and the compass; and three photographs show the heap, the jugs over the western bodies and the lower layer. Other Vounous tombs have their own stories, among them the Stewarts’ Tomb 164A with its headless dead (Stewart and Stewart 1950) and Schaeffer’s tombs, published in full only in 2003 (Dunn-Vaturi 2003). What Tomb 36 lacks is a plan or section. Dikaios measured it and described it, but no drawing of it was published.

A Vounous tomb has three parts: a sloping entrance trench, the dromos, cut down from the surface; a small doorway, the stomion, at its foot; and a rounded chamber hollowed out of the rock beyond. Dikaios gives Tomb 36’s dromos as roughly rectangular, 2.30 m long, 2.10 m wide and 1.04 m deep, short and wide for its type. The chamber opened to the north, so a mourner going down the dromos walked south. It was rounded, 3.00 m from north to south and 3.60 m from east to west. Off the sides of the dromos opened two side chambers, one facing east and one west. Each doorway was closed with a roughly rounded slab, held in place by small stones packed along its sides (Dikaios 1940, p. 72).

Everything else in the model comes from analogy and arithmetic. Dikaios’s general description of the Site B tombs, and his drawn plan and section of Tomb 11 (fig. 9), give the profile: a rough step at the back of the dromos, then an abrupt slope, then a level floor near the doorway, and a sharp drop from the doorway into the chamber (Dikaios 1940, pp. 25, 97). Fitted to the 1.04 m depth, that profile leaves little room. We put the doorway 0.70 m wide and 0.55 m high through 0.35 m of rock, a drop of 0.45 m to the chamber floor, walls rising to 1.00 m and a low dome reaching 1.25 m at the centre. Over that crown there is only about 0.24 m of rock, all of it in the hard surface crust. The two side chambers become small rounded cells about 1.10 by 1.00 m. The chamber’s floor, an ellipse on Dikaios’s two measurements, comes to 8.5 m², above the Site B mean.

The rock is havara, a soft calcareous marl, under a crust of harder kafkalla. Copper tools were becoming commoner by Dikaios’s Period II, and he links the larger, deeper tombs of Site B to them (p. 96), but soft havara can be worked with stone and antler picks as well. On our profile the dromos removed about 3.5 m³ of rock, the chamber 9.9 m³ and the side chambers 1.0 m³ together; with the doorway, about 14.5 m³ in place, which swells to about 19 m³ once broken and loose. At 0.4 to 0.6 m³ per person-day, rates measured for rock-cut tombs outside Cyprus, that is 24 to 36 person-days: a household’s work over two to four weeks. These figures are our estimate, and the Build mode shows each step with its spoil.

The spoil had a second use. Dikaios found the dromoi at Vounous filled with uniform whitish earth, the tomb’s own cuttings thrown back in, with the odd sherd of Red Polished pottery in it (p. 97). On his reading the dromos was dug out for each funeral and refilled after it, so the heap beside the trench was a store as much as a waste tip. Webb and Frankel point to jars left in some north-coast dromoi as a sign that a dromos could also stand open for a time (Webb and Frankel 2010); the model refills it after every funeral.

Dikaios’s catalogue of Tomb 36 runs to 135 objects: 129 from the main chamber and 6 from the western side chamber (Dikaios 1940, pp. 74–76). Of the 129, 123 are Red Polished vessels and clay models, 2 are spindle whorls and 4 are of copper or bronze. There is no pottery of any other ware: no White Painted, no Black Polished.

Most of the deposit is bowls. Eighty-two of the 123 vessels are bowls, and 59 of those are a single type: small hemispherical bowls, about 10 cm across if they match surviving bowls of the type, red with a black rim, each with a small pierced lug by the rim for a string. Dikaios found them set in clusters, on the floor and inside larger bowls, and in Tomb 13 some were still full of animal bones, as if “originally placed full of meat” (Dikaios 1940, p. 99). Two large bowls in Tomb 36 held smaller bowls when found (nos 28 and 76), two more lay one inside the other (57 and 58), and another a broken jug (63). The model fills the large bowls with 7 and 6 small bowls and sets 8 on the ox; those three numbers are ours, the total of 59 is Dikaios’s.

Next come pouring and storing vessels. Seventeen jugs, most of them one tall type with a tapering neck and funnel mouth, ten juglets, three bottles and four amphorae make a set for liquids on a large scale. Three cooking pots are the only kitchen vessels. Against this the metal is slight: one dagger blade with a midrib and a hooked tang, one pin and two thin points Dikaios queried as needles. In Keswani’s figures, metal appears in only 27 per cent of the earlier Site B tombs, at a mean of 0.6 objects per chamber, so four objects is above the local norm without being a hoard (Keswani 2004, pp. 79–81).

Set against the cemetery, the size of the deposit comes from the number of burials. The main chamber’s 123 vessels are well over twice the Site B mean of 50.8 pots per chamber; divided among nine people they come to fewer than 14 each, below the Site B mean of 18.7 per burial (Keswani 2004, table 4.8). Dikaios himself called Tomb 36 “not a big tomb” (p. 100). Tomb 13 had a chamber of 4.40 by 5.20 m, and Tomb 37 one of 6.00 by 6.10 m with a rock-cut bench (pp. 30, 76–78).

What the catalogue cannot say is which pots went with which funeral. Dikaios recorded two layers and the position of about thirty objects; for the rest he gave a type and a count. The model assigns every object to a funeral by plausibility, as described below, and marks it so.

When the vessels of the east half were lifted, Dikaios found a large part of the skeleton of an ox lying on the bare rock floor, with small bowls placed on and among the bones (Dikaios 1940, pp. 73, 100; pl. VI a). On the bones lay bowl 142, a small oblong bowl with a spout, with two birds looking outwards and a bull’s head modelled in the round on its rim. He recognised the same rite he had found in Tomb 13, where a layer of bones, possibly from one calf and including a hoof, lay on the floor under the later vessels, with small bowls among the bones. His reading of the order was that the animal was killed and laid on the floor as part of the funeral, and the rest of the gifts were heaped over it (Dikaios 1940, pp. 30, 99).

An ox was an expensive thing to bury. Cattle were brought back to Cyprus at the start of the Bronze Age, with the plough, after a long stretch of prehistory in which the island’s farmers kept sheep, goats and pigs and hunted deer. Keswani argues that cattle were wanted first for prestige and only then for traction and milk, and that in a society without markets the new animal was spent in feasts and funerals (Keswani 1994, pp. 14–17). Jennifer Webb and David Frankel, drawing on the animal-bone report from the Stewarts’ excavation, note that the cattle bones came largely from adult animals, beasts at the age of work and breeding, and conclude that the funerals involved the “targeted slaughter and probably consumption of adult cattle” (Webb and Frankel 2010, p. 193). The bone was never collected to modern standards at any of the three excavations, so how much of the ox was eaten before the rest went into the tomb cannot be measured.

The ox in Tomb 36 lay in the same room as the imagery of cattle. Bowl 10, 0.48 m across, has two pairs of bulls’ heads modelled in high relief on its sides, and from each neck hangs a wavy band that Dikaios read as a snake. It was found holding ox bones and the ring-vase 12, a ring on four legs carrying three small cups and a juglet (Dikaios 1940, pp. 72–74, 100; pl. XI e). Bowl 22, conical with a pierced base and a tube spout, carries horned animals and snakes in relief. Goblet 47 on its long stem held animal bones. The two clay horns, nos 96 and 109, are models of a bull’s horns about 0.30 m long, blackened at the tip and pierced near the base (pl. XXXVIII a). Desmond Morris gives their heights as 31.8 cm for no. 96 and 27 cm for no. 109, the less curved of the two (Morris 1985, figs 467–468).

Dikaios took the bulls and snakes as the emblems of a cult of earth and fertility deities, part of a larger argument built on the clay sanctuary model from Tomb 22 (Dikaios 1940, pp. 122–125). Morris answered that the wavy band under a bull’s chin on bowl 10 is more simply the free end of a rope tied round its neck, and warned, of the snakes on the sanctuary model, that a cult should not be built on two small squiggles before anyone is sure they are snakes (Morris 1985, pp. 231, 281). Neither reading is proven. The model labels the bands “snakes, or ropes”. What the tomb does show without argument is that the same chamber held a slaughtered ox, bowls with modelled bulls’ heads, a bowl of ox bones and a pair of clay horns.

At Site B the dead were laid on their backs, some with the legs drawn up and some straight (Keswani 2004, p. 57), in the right-hand part of the chamber as seen from the door, with the head towards the entrance. The pottery was piled in the left-hand part. Small personal things, a dagger, a pin, a little bottle, went on the body or by the head (Dikaios 1940, pp. 98–99). In Tomb 36 right-hand means west, and that is where Dikaios found the one body still in place: on its back, the skull to the north towards the door and turned to face east, the legs probably flexed, with a second, possibly doubled-up body beside it, both under “many vases” (pp. 73–74; pl. V e–f).

When a tomb was reopened for a new burial, the earlier dead were moved. Dikaios describes their remains “removed from their places and grouped anyhow along the sides”, to leave the right-hand part clean for the next body; Tomb 36, with its heap by the door, is his clearest case (Dikaios 1940, pp. 72, 99–100). Skulls were often kept apart from the long bones. At Tomb 17 four extra skulls had been swept aside; in Tomb 36 they lie singly or in groups through the deposit, two of them at jug 4, about 1.30 m east of the doorway, one immediately south of bowl 10, one by a large jug in a group of broken vessels, one on horn 96, and three together in the north-west corner. With the one in-place skull that makes nine, matching Dikaios’s count.

From two layers, a heap, scattered skulls and one articulated body, the model builds a sequence of 21 events: the cutting, 5 funerals, the ox, two clearances, five closings of the door, four reopenings, the collapse, the silting and the excavation. Two people are laid in the west half and the ox in the east at the first funeral. Two more follow. At the second reopening the first two are cleared into the heap, their skulls set by jug 4, and three people are buried with the largest group of offerings, 60 objects in our assignment: bowl 10 with its meat and ring-vase, the bowls filled with small bowls, the horns, the goblet. A second clearance moves those five to the heap and the skull groups, leaving two arms in bowls 57/58 and 76. Then come the doubled-up body and, last, the articulated one. The order of the funerals and the number of them are ours; the two layers, the heap, the skulls and the last burial are Dikaios’s.

Dikaios’s account has a puzzle in it, and he saw it. The body he calls the last buried lay in the lower layer, under the vessels. He resolved it from the skull, which showed in the upper layer, and from the fact that no body of the upper layer was in place (Dikaios 1940, p. 74). One way to square the two, which the model follows, is that the last body was laid in a space cleared down to the floor and the jugs were then heaped over it. On his reading the nine arrived one funeral at a time, as whole bodies, and most were later broken up by the living making room.

Keswani reads the same evidence differently. In the whole tomb only one individual was articulated, and none of the upper level. She suggests that most of the nine were brought into Tomb 36 as bones, already defleshed, as secondary interments, “some perhaps interred en masse” (Keswani 2004, p. 58). Vounous has other evidence for this kind of handling. In the Stewarts’ Tomb 164A the dead lay without their skulls, and the expedition’s anatomist found no sign that the heads had been cut off; the skulls had been taken away after the flesh decayed. In Site B Tomb 143 eight skulls lay with very few other bones (Stewart and Stewart 1950, pp. 226–227, 324, 328; Keswani 2004, p. 58). On this reading the heap and the scattered skulls in Tomb 36 are a deliberate arrangement of bones carried in, and there were no clearances.

The evidence does not decide between them. The model follows Dikaios, the excavator, by default; the switch “How did nine people get here?” replays the tomb on Keswani’s reading, with one or two primary burials and the other seven arriving as skulls and bones at the places where they were found. Every object stays where it is in both versions. Only the bodies change.

The model gives the tomb’s metal to its last burial, following Dikaios’s rule that small belongings stayed with the body. It lays the dagger blade, no. 112, at the waist and the pin, no. 7, at the shoulder, where a pin would have fastened clothing; at Vounous cloth has been found stuck to the corrosion on daggers, so the dead went into the tomb dressed (Dikaios 1940, p. 99; pl. XLII c). The blade has a central rib and a tang bent over at the top, a form now called a hook-tang weapon. Graham Philip classes these blades as spearheads rather than daggers (Philip 1991), and the inspector card gives both names. Juglets and bottles are set by the head, and over the body the large jugs and amphorae that Dikaios’s photograph shows piled across the western half (pl. V e). These positions follow the cemetery’s practice; Dikaios did not record them.

The two side chambers raise a contradiction in the report. The text says that of the two, one facing east and the other west, “the second was found empty”, which seems to make the western one empty; the catalogue then lists six finds “from the western side chamber” (Dikaios 1940, pp. 72, 76). The contradiction disappears if “facing” names the direction of the opening, as it does for the main chamber, which “faces north” with its door on the north side. The chamber facing east would then lie west of the dromos and open east into it: the western side chamber, with the finds. The chamber facing west lies on the east side and was empty. The model follows this reading.

The western side chamber held one small bowl, four juglets and one bottle, and no recorded bones. Six small vessels of this kind resemble the sets found with small burials at Vounous, and Dikaios notes that side chambers were used for children as well as adults (pp. 101–102). Children are rare in the cemetery: Keswani counts them at roughly six per cent of the minimum number of burials, against a pre-industrial expectation that infants and young children make up perhaps half of all deaths (Keswani 2004, p. 66). A child buried here would add a tenth person to the tomb. Nothing recorded shows one, so the model leaves the side chamber with its six vessels and no body, and the count stays at nine.

After the last body had been laid in the west half and the jugs piled over it, the door slab went back with its wedge stones and the dromos was filled for the last time. No later visit is recorded, and no robbing, which sets Tomb 36 apart from the robbed Tombs 22 and 37 to 40 (Dikaios 1940).

The roof failed because of where the tomb was cut. Dikaios explains that by his Period III the best rock of the hillside was full, and “tombs were cut anywhere indiscriminately”, among them Tombs 19 and 36 in the poor rock of the south-eastern group. Both had fallen in, and he thought both “perhaps some of the most important in the necropolis” (Dikaios 1940, p. 96). In the model the 0.24 m of crust over the dome gives way in blocks, which land on the upper layer and crush most of its pots. Soil then washes into the hollow and fills the chamber to the old ceiling line. The date of the collapse is unknown; it may have come within years of the last funeral, or centuries later.

The collapse also preserved the order of the deposit. The fallen crust sealed the upper layer where it lay, and the lower layer stayed under it untouched. In 1932 the excavators met the tomb in reverse: first the broken jugs and bowls of the last funerals, then the heap and the skulls, then the one body still in place, and only when the vessels of the east half were lifted, the ox on the bare rock with small bowls among its bones, and bowl 142, its two clay birds looking outwards, lying on top.

On the south side of the island, at Sotira-Kaminoudhia in the Limassol district, Stuart Swiny excavated an Early Bronze Age village and its cemeteries in 1981 and 1983. Tomb 14, opened in 1983, is the only chamber in Cemetery A with a well-preserved dromos, and it was found sealed, with its slab still standing in the doorway, and it is rebuilt on a companion page. It held one adult, probably a man, in his mid to late twenties, laid on his right side with his knees drawn up, and five objects: a Red Polished jug 41.2 cm high, two small amphorae, a bowl and a chert flake, perhaps from a sickle. There was “no metal, beads or pendants” (Swiny and Herscher 2003, pp. 127–128).

On every measured line the northern tomb is several times larger: twenty-seven times as many objects, nine times as many people, about six times as much rock cut out, and nine times the floor area. The southern tomb has no metal and no figured pottery at all: its vessels are plain Red Polished. At Vounous the incised and modelled north-coast style is everywhere, and Tomb 36 holds three figured bowls and two clay horns.

One tomb against one tomb could mislead, and the comparison needs three checks. Tomb 14 is a little earlier than Tomb 36: its jug and amphorae date it to Early Cypriot I/II (Swiny and Herscher 2003, p. 128). It is typical of its cemetery, however. Most chambers in Cemetery A held between one and nine objects, commonly three to six, and the whole cemetery produced only twelve metal objects (Swiny and Herscher 2003, pp. 104–133; Swiny 2003, p. 369). And the south could be rich in its own way: Tomb 15, an earlier tomb of the Philia phase cut 40 cm from Tomb 14, held three people, a copper-based dagger, an awl, two spiral earrings and a necklace of seven small human-shaped pendants with 132 stone beads (Swiny and Herscher 2003, pp. 129–132). It is also the only tomb at Kaminoudhia that was certainly reused (Schulte Campbell 2003, p. 424). At Vounous Site B, chambers were commonly reopened for new burials, at a mean of 2.68 burials per chamber.

Several Kaminoudhia chambers had no dromos at all and were entered through a hole in the roof, and there were simple cist graves (Swiny and Herscher 2003, pp. 104, 129, 133). The difference is in the whole way of burying. The group that owned a Vounous tomb cut a room and kept going back into it, and a funeral there could include a slaughtered ox and dozens of bowls of food. At Kaminoudhia most of the dead went into the ground once, with a few pots, and stayed there. The model’s North and south view sets the two tombs side by side at one scale, and Tomb 14 fits inside the chamber of Tomb 36 with room to spare.

Dikaios left measurements, a narrative and three photographs, and no drawing. Every outline in this model is therefore our reconstruction on his measurements: the shape of the dromos floor, the doorway, the height of the dome, the size and position of the side chambers. Where we had to choose, we chose the profile his Tomb 11 drawing shows and the depths his 1.04 m dromos allows. A chamber as tall as Tomb 11’s, about 1.8 m, would have left no roof at all under a dromos that shallow.

The contents divide more sharply. All 135 catalogued objects are real, with Dikaios’s types and counts, and the model adds 7 deposits his text describes but did not number: the ox, the bones in bowl 10 and in the goblet, the two arms, and the heap, drawn as two deposits. Of the 142 entries, 39 are placed where Dikaios’s narrative or photographs put them, and 103 are placed by the cemetery’s recorded practice: the dead in the west half with heads to the door, goods heaped in the east, small bowls nested in large ones, large jugs over the western bodies, small belongings by the head. The nine dead are placed from his words too, by the skulls he describes and the one body still lying as laid, so the view counts 48 positions from his description. Dikaios gives measurements for only eight vessels; the rest are sized from their types. The Explore mode’s “Where positions come from” view colours every object by the source of its position, and each object’s card says the same in words.

The sequence is the most interpretive part. The two layers, the heap, the skulls, the arms in bowls, the ox under the vessels and the last burial are recorded. The number of funerals, the order in which the nine were buried and which pots went with which of them are not, and they could be arranged otherwise. The bodies are shown without age or sex because none was recorded. Dikaios called the Vounous chambers family tombs; whether the nine in Tomb 36 were related is a reasonable guess that no test has checked. Where scholars disagree, on the snakes or ropes of bowl 10, the name of the blade, and how the nine arrived, the model shows the excavator’s view by default and offers the other beside it.