Achna

Achna was an open-air sanctuary of a goddess in the east of Cyprus, in a valley beside the old village of Achna, about halfway between Larnaca and ancient Salamis. Villagers came upon it by chance in the spring of 1882, and that autumn Max Ohnefalsch-Richter excavated it for Sir Charles Newton of the British Museum [1, pp. 1–2; 2, p. 261]. Inside a low stone enclosure he found more than a thousand figures of terracotta and limestone, from small statuettes to colossal statues, and all but one of them female [3, p. 1]. They were dedicated from the Cypro-Archaic period, probably not before the 6th century BC, into Hellenistic and probably Roman times [4, p. 24; 2, p. 261]. Most of them are in the British Museum. The sanctuary has never been excavated again, and its finds have never been published as a whole [2, p. 261].

Where the sanctuary lay

Ohnefalsch-Richter described the position with a straight line drawn on the map from Larnaca to Salamis: Achna lies about halfway along it, on the edge of a well-watered, fertile hollow in an otherwise dry plain. South and south-east, towards Xylotymbou, there was bare rock; north and north-east, towards Acheritou, the rock had only a thin cover of iron-red soil [1, p. 1]. The sanctuary lay in the winding valley of Achna, at a point where it narrows, about 50 m from the last houses of the village and not far from the road [1, p. 1]. Its northern part, the side towards the village, had been destroyed years before, when an orchard was planted there [1, p. 2].

The exact spot of the enclosure is not marked today, and the point on our map is approximate.

Discovery and the excavation of 1882

In the spring of 1882 the villagers were digging square pits at intervals along the valley for the government, the kind usually dug to destroy swarms of locusts. At one point they struck rough terracotta statues "packed as close as sardines in a box". The village children played with them, and some of the best were sold to a barber in Larnaca. That sale led Ohnefalsch-Richter to the site [1, p. 2].

He dug there in September and October 1882 for Newton [1, p. 345]. Newton had no adequate Treasury grant for Cyprus, and the excavations Ohnefalsch-Richter carried out for him between 1880 and 1883 were on a fairly small scale [5, p. 244]. Newton's agent in Cyprus was Claude Delaval Cobham, District Commissioner at Larnaca, and the museum's registers name Cobham rather than the excavator [5, p. 245]. The finds were registered in London in January 1883 as given through Cobham. The money ran out before the work was finished: Cobham recalled Ohnefalsch-Richter to Larnaca, and he never reached the south-western end of the enclosure [1, p. 508]. He had meant to dig further to the east and south-east as well [1, p. 344].

Ohnefalsch-Richter wrote that the work "was accomplished with the greatest care" [1, p. 304], and he published a stone-by-stone plan of the enclosure that marks the statue bases found in place and the spots where the main groups of offerings lay [1, pp. 344–345]. Stone-by-stone plans of this kind went beyond the standard of earlier sanctuary excavations on the island, whose reports largely lacked topographical plans [6, pp. 98–99]. The objects themselves were registered with little record of where each was found, and no full report followed [5, p. 245; 2, p. 261]. Of twelve figures of women holding birds from the site, for example, only two can be tied to a particular findspot [7, p. 194].

The walled enclosure

The sanctuary had no temple building. It was a sacred enclosure filled with offerings, mostly limestone sculpture and terracotta figurines [4, p. 24; 2, p. 261]. Ohnefalsch-Richter's plan shows the parts he could trace:

• The enclosure wall (P on the plan): low and roughly built of broken stones, river pebbles or rubble, laid dry or bedded in earth, never with lime [1, p. 344].
• The entrance (E), with a threshold of masonry [1, p. 344].
• The statue bases. The larger statues were fixed with lime mortar. A large archaic clay statue of a woman wearing shoes with upturned toes stood opposite the main entrance, on the north-east, held in place by a small square wall of stones and mortar built round its base [1, p. 344]. In one corner a stronger piece of masonry about 2.4 m wide enclosed a space paved with small stones and mortar [1, p. 344].
• An altar of earth marked out with stones [1, p. 345].

Virgin soil lay no deeper than about 4 feet (1.2 m). The bases and feet of statues on the plan stood on the old trodden surface, some only a foot and a half below the modern ground. At some time in antiquity the offerings had been violently broken up; Ohnefalsch-Richter reckoned from the fragments that the largest terracotta statues had stood at least 3.5 m high [1, p. 2]. Small clay jugs at several points held chains of silver and glass, and he marked their places on the plan as well [1, p. 345].

Dates of the sanctuary

Ohnefalsch-Richter believed the enclosure went out of use in the 4th century BC [1, p. 2], and Myres thought that even its most Greek pieces were no later than the 3rd century BC [3, p. 1]. Later study of the figures in the British Museum and the Louvre dates the oldest of them to the end of the Archaic period and carries the series on into Roman imperial times [2, p. 261].

Phases

1. First offerings7th or 6th century BC

   Mould-made terracotta women in long tunics, in a style made around Salamis. The earliest pieces are probably not before the 6th century BC.

2. Archaic and Classical votives6th to 4th century BC

   The main series of terracotta and limestone votaries, musicians, and large clay statues.

3. Late figuresHellenistic and Roman periods

   Women holding a fawn or a flower, and later musicians. Greek dedications are of Hellenistic or early imperial date.

The votive figures

All the terracotta figurines from Achna that Annie Caubet examined were made in moulds: the detailed front pressed in a hollow mould, a rough back added, the base left open, and a small vent hole pierced in the back. Some were made with care, others in haste with two-part moulds. The clay is beige to pinkish or ochre, and most if not all of the figures were painted, sometimes over a whitish ground [2, pp. 261–262]. Many of the terracottas and even some of the stone figures still had their colour when they were found [3, p. 1].

Sabine Fourrier assigns the Archaic figures to a Salamis/Achna group, made in a series of moulds each taken from the last, so that the details grow ever softer until the painted decoration has to stand in for them [4, p. 24]. See also terracotta figurines in the compendium.

Women holding their breasts, flowers and birds

The commonest Archaic type is a woman pressing her breasts with both hands. At Achna she is always clothed: painted red and black lines mark a garment [2, p. 262; 1, p. 347]. The women wear a narrow tunic with a fold at the knee and a fringed sash, and many necklaces [2, pp. 262–263]. Rings worn as pendants on the chest seem to be peculiar to the Achna workshops [2, p. 263]. Other women hold a flower or a bird.

• "Terracotta Breast Goddess"Archaic II · 600–475 BCBritish Museum
• Terracotta Flower FigureArchaic II · 600–475 BCBritish Museum
• Female Worshipper with BirdArchaic II · 600–550 BCBritish Museum

Musicians and headdresses

Players of the lyre and of the frame drum appear a little after the Archaic women, probably in the Cypro-Classical I and II periods, and seem to go on into imperial times [2, p. 262]. Kalathos headdresses come in with the finer Classical figures. Those of Achna are distinctive: flatter than the kalathoi of Kition, they are a single front panel rather than a cylinder [2, p. 263]. See music and instruments.

• Elaborately Dressed Lyre Player FigurineArchaic II · 600–500 BCBritish Museum
• Limestone Priestess StatuetteArchaic II · 540–530 BCBritish Museum

Large statues and Greek-style figures

Fragments of terracotta colossi showed that the largest statues stood at least 3.5 m high, and part of the breast of one was put on show in the British Museum [1, p. 2]. Myres gives the height of the largest as 3.6 m [3, p. 1]. The archaic figures were the better preserved, often with their heads. Limestone and clay figures in a purely Greek style, with a deer, a dog or a torch, were mostly headless and smashed [1, p. 304]. A single fragment of a male figure carrying a sprinkler, Apollo or a priest, was the only male piece [1, p. 330; 3, p. 1].

Caubet put the analogies for the Achna figures first with Arsos, then with Kition and Salamis [2, p. 264]. A woman holding a flower or a small deer at the waist, the figure that led Ohnefalsch-Richter to name the goddess Artemis, appears only from the end of the Hellenistic period [2, p. 262].

• Artemis Terracotta FigureClassical · 450–300 BCBritish Museum

Ring-dance censers

Stone vessels in the form of three women holding hands in a ring, once four, were found "in large numbers" in the enclosure and in the other shrines of the district. Ohnefalsch-Richter took them for incense burners [1, p. 351]. A terracotta tree top from a ring-dance group is among the finds in the British Museum. See ring-dance groups.

• Terracotta Tree Top ModelArchaic II · 600–300 BCBritish Museum

A piece in the Drakopoulos collection of a kind found at this site. It does not come from the site.

• Two Veiled Figures from a Terracotta Ring-Dance Group, with the Stump of the Central TreeArchaic · 750–480 BCDrakopoulos collection

Which goddess was worshipped

No dedication names Artemis. Ohnefalsch-Richter called the sanctuary a temenos of "Artemis-Kybele" from the figures themselves [1, p. 2], above all the women holding a deer [4, p. 24; 2, p. 261]. The only inscription he found runs in one line round the foot of a small censer or lustral vessel about 9 cm high, shaped like a column or altar. Most of it could not be read, but the last word is ΙΕΡΟΝ, "holy" [1, p. 2].

A dedication in Greek to Aphrodite Golgia, the goddess of Golgoi, was found built into the wall of a modern house at Achna [8, p. 190]. Stella Lubsen-Admiraal dates it to the 4th century BC and suggests that Achna was a branch of the goddess's sanctuary at Golgoi [9, p. 261]. As the stone was not found in the enclosure, it does not prove which goddess was worshipped there. The Greek inscriptions from Achna are of Hellenistic or early imperial date [2, p. 261], so neither name can safely be read back into the Archaic cult. We call her the goddess of Achna.

Achna and the kingdom of Salamis

Fourrier reads the style of the Archaic figurines as Salaminian. In her view Achna and the shrines around it stood in the territory of the kingdom of Salamis, and the type of woman in a long tunic and fringed sash, with scarabs and seals hung on the chest, was created in the zone south of Salamis that runs from Ayia Napa-Makronissos to Acheritou, for a local cult of a goddess [4, p. 24]. Caubet saw in the figures the response of local traditions to the Phoenician influence that was decisive at Kition, and placed Achna and Arsos directly in the orbit of Kition [2, p. 264]. Achna may have lain in a border zone between the spheres of Kition and Salamis, and its finds point to workshops of Salamis [10, p. 354].

Map of Cyprus

• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Achna
2. 2Salamis
3. 3Kition
4. 4Golgoi
5. 5Idalion
6. 6Makronissos Tombs

Other cult places near Achna

Ohnefalsch-Richter numbered the cult places of Cyprus in a list. The main enclosure is No. 1, and several more lay close by [1, pp. 11–12]:

Pharangas was not part of the Achna excavation. Ohnefalsch-Richter says that the workman of Alexander Palma di Cesnola found it, that its finds went to the British Museum, and that Alexander di Cesnola published them as finds from Salamis [1, p. 12]. Myres instead says the site was worked by Luigi Palma di Cesnola [3, p. 1], and where exactly Pharangas lay is unclear [10, p. 375]. Myres adds that five other sanctuaries found at the same time gave similar votive statuettes [3, p. 1].

A cemetery was also explored south of the village [3, p. 1]. Pottery registered from Achna with the 1882 finds, such as Black-on-Red jugs and a bowl with ram's-head handles, probably came from tombs rather than from the sanctuary.

• Black-on-Red Ware JugArchaic I · 750–600 BCBritish Museum
• Zoomorphic Handle BowlArchaic I · 750–600 BCBritish Museum

Where the finds are now

Most of the figures Ohnefalsch-Richter found went to the British Museum; a few that he bought in Larnaca went to other collections [1, p. 347]. Cobham gave duplicates to the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia in 1894 [3, p. 1]. Others are in the Louvre [2, p. 261]. Several figurines in the Pierides collection in Larnaca are said to come from Achna, but their exact origin is unknown [4, p. 24]. Typical Achna terracottas also travelled widely in the eastern Mediterranean, probably through Salamis [10, p. 354]. We know of no remains of the enclosure on view at the site.