Dhenia

The cemeteries of Dhenia lie on and below the limestone plateaux around the village of Deneia, in the Nicosia district west of the capital. Over about 6 ha at the localities of Kafkalla, Kafkalla tis Malis and Mali, a survey in 2003 recorded 1,286 rock-cut tomb shafts, and the original number was probably two to three times higher [1, pp. 54, 57]. Jennifer Webb and David Frankel, who directed that work, estimate that between 9,000 and 20,000 people were buried here in the Middle Bronze Age alone, far more than natural growth of a village could produce, and they read the figure as the mark of a large influx of people early in that period [1, pp. 62–64]. The tombs were in use from about 2400 BC until the early 12th century BC [1, p. 57]. Looting over generations has damaged most of them, and the settlement that buried its dead here has never been found [2, p. 175].

The village is now officially spelt Deneia (Δένεια), the form used by the excavators in their recent publications; older literature calls the site Dhenia [3; 1].

The plateaux around Deneia

The tombs are cut into the top and the edges of an extensive plateau of hard limestone, "part of the largest continuous block on the island" [1, p. 57], just north of the Merikas river [4, p. 119]. Kafkalla is the large plateau immediately south and west of the village, more than 700 m from east to west and 600 m from north to south. Mali is a small area about 300 by 200 m some 300 m north-east of the village, and Kafkalla tis Malis lies about 1 km to the east. A fourth locality, Kakkaristi, south-east of the village, may also hold tombs, but none has been published [4, p. 121].

Deneia lies in the lowland south of the Kyrenia range, unlike the two great north-coast cemeteries of the Early and Middle Bronze Age, Lapithos and Vounous [4, p. 119]. The excavators suggest that Mali and Kafkalla tis Malis served a settlement to the north in the Ovgos valley, and Kafkalla perhaps one to the south in the Merikas valley [4, p. 121].

Map of Cyprus

• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Dhenia
2. 2Lapithos
3. 3Bellapais Vounous
4. 4Marki-Alonia
5. 5Alambra

Looting, rescue and survey, 1952 to 2004

The cemetery has been known since the early 20th century [1, p. 54]. Luigi Palma di Cesnola recorded no ruins in the area in 1878, and the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, which recognised the cemetery, chose to excavate at Lapithos instead [4, pp. 119–120]. Hector Catling's survey recorded Dhenia-Kafkalla and Dhenia-Mali, and took Mali for a settlement as well as a cemetery; later work has not confirmed a settlement there [4, pp. 119–120].

Most fieldwork since 1952 has been rescue work in a cemetery that looters were digging at the same time.

In 1952 the Department of Antiquities under Porphyrios Dikaios turned to Kafkalla, then "much looted but never scientifically examined". When the tombs were prepared for reuse in the Late Bronze Age, the earlier burial goods had been broken up and levelled with earth into a hard floor for the later burials; those later burials were almost wholly destroyed, but in four chambers the lower layers still held "great quantities of red polished IV pottery". A search for intact tombs at Mali, which the report calls an "archaic cemetery", found none [5, p. 133]. We know of no published Iron Age tombs from Deneia.

The next year pottery confiscated from looters reached the Cyprus Museum. With the Department's support and the help of G. R. H. Wright of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, the judge G. C. Griffith-Williams excavated two large looted tombs in the north of the cemetery. Both were Middle Cypriot and held "large quantities of fragmentary but restorable white painted pottery" [6, p. 172]. Wright later published these tombs, among them the tomb known as G.W. 1, with Paul Åström [7; 8, p. 49]. Further rescue excavations under Kyriakos Nicolaou in 1960 found chamber and shaft tombs at Kafkalla and Mali, among them a simple chamber tomb of the Philia phase and a tomb with two burial layers, one Middle and one Late Cypriot [9, pp. 32–33]. The Department's tombs from Kafkalla and Mali were published by Ino Nicolaou and Kyriakos Nicolaou in 1988 [10], and a Late Cypriot II tomb by Sophocles Hadjisavvas in 1985 [11]. Eight looted Middle Cypriot tomb groups that reached the Museum of Antiquities of the University of New England in Armidale were published in 2001 [12].

Most archaeologists had declined to work at so damaged a site. Frankel and Webb, for La Trobe University, treated looting as one more process that had shaped the record, much as on a settlement site, and worked from samples of sherds where complete tomb groups no longer existed [1, pp. 54–56]. In 2003 they recorded every identifiable tomb shaft, with the visible features and pottery around it. In 2004 they sampled tombs and the deposits inside them, but within a fortnight half the team caught murine typhus, "a disease previously unknown to archaeologists in Cyprus"; many shafts are now used for rubbish, which supports the rats and the fleas that carry it. The season was cut short and later seasons were cancelled [1, pp. 56–57]. The final report appeared in 2007 [3].

From the first tombs to the last

Long before the cemetery, a looters' pit at Kafkalla produced in 1961 an isolated group of painted Red-on-White pottery and stone tools that was assigned to Dikaios's Neolithic IB, the Troulli culture; nothing more is known of it [9, p. 32; 13, p. 27].

Phases

1. Philia phase and Early Cypriotabout 2400 to 2000 BC

   Relatively few tombs, at the edge of the main plateau and in the softer ground below it.

2. Middle Cypriotabout 2000 to 1650 BC

   At least 764 tombs cut on and below the plateaux of Kafkalla and Kafkalla tis Malis. The cemetery is still growing westward when tomb-cutting stops.

3. Late Cypriotabout 1650 BC to the early 12th century BC

   Some old tombs reused, no new tombs at Kafkalla; new tombs at Mali, the main cemetery until its abandonment.

The earliest tombs lie at the edge of the main plateau and in the softer soils below it at Kafkalla [1, p. 57], and they are relatively few [2, p. 175]. Two belong to the Philia phase at the start of the Bronze Age. Tomb 77 held a fragmentary White Painted Philia bowl; Tomb 166, a large shaft, held 13 vessels and sherds of Red Polished and White Painted Philia ware, a black-polished spindle whorl, a stone bowl and two copper spiral earrings. Philia tombs here, as at Nicosia-Ayia Paraskevi, are shallow circular pits [14, p. 9]. At this time Deneia was one of several small settlements along the Ovgos river, probably linked by the movement of copper from the north-west Troodos to north-coast sites such as Vasilia, and through the Early Bronze Age it was "no more important than many other small villages" [1, p. 66].

The great majority of the tombs, a minimum of 764, were cut in the Middle Bronze Age, on and immediately below the plateaux of Kafkalla and Kafkalla tis Malis [1, p. 57]: 662 shafts on Kafkalla and 102 on Kafkalla tis Malis [4, p. 121]. Most of the tombs sampled in 2004 were built at the start of the period and used for some three centuries [1, p. 59]. In late Middle Cypriot III an equally abrupt retraction left tombs half cut [2, p. 175].

In the Late Bronze Age several Kafkalla tombs were reused, but no new ones were cut there. New tombs were cut at Mali, which "appears to have served as the main cemetery for the associated settlement until its abandonment in the early twelfth century BC" [1, p. 57]. Late Cypriot finds are mostly ordinary mass-produced types, with a small quantity of Mycenaean pottery and a faience cylinder seal of Syrian origin among the few imports [1, p. 58]. As the coastal towns grew, the old copper routes from the north-west Troodos to the north coast lost their purpose and Deneia "was effectively by-passed" [1, pp. 66–67].

• Late Cypriot female figurine with bird-face nursing a childLate Bronze Age II · 1550–1200 BCAshmolean Museum

The tombs

On the plateaux each tomb begins with a vertical shaft, rectangular or circular, about 0.8 to 1 m across and about 1 m deep. From its base a tunnel-like opening curves down to a chamber hollowed out beneath the hard limestone capping, closed with large, close-fitting stone slabs. On the steep slopes below the plateaux, simpler shafts run horizontally into the hillside [1, p. 57]. (The general type is described under Bronze Age chamber tombs.)

The survey mapped where each kind of shaft lies. Larger shafts are commoner in the south-east of Kafkalla, circular shafts cluster in the south-west and along the scarp, and rectangular ones in the north-west. The pattern is probably partly chronological, with earlier tombs in the south and later ones in the north-west, and partly a matter of family or status [1, p. 57]. Near the western fringe of Kafkalla, 22 shafts were never finished: some are only outlined by pecking on the rock surface, others cut part of the way down. The cemetery was still spreading west when tomb-cutting stopped at the end of the Middle Bronze Age [1, pp. 57–58].

The cemeteries are "much larger and contain many more tombs than any other known Bronze Age burial ground on the island"; Vounous, by comparison, has 164 excavated tombs [1, p. 59]. The chambers are large as well. Eleven fully documented Deneia tombs have a mean floor area of 26.2 m², against 8.3 m² for other Middle Bronze Age sites, and estimated minimum areas for single tombs reach 34 m² (Tomb 789), 55 m² (Tomb 787) and 33 m² (Tomb 6), when the largest chamber at Lapithos measures 20 m² [1, pp. 59–60]. Priscilla Keswani describes Tomb 6 as "an extremely large (9 × 4 m) niched complex representing the fusion of two tombs", with about 175 objects of Middle Cypriot I to III [8, p. 49].

Not every tomb was large. Most of the Early Cypriot III and Middle Cypriot tombs published in 1988 are small, seldom more than 2 m across, with few finds or bones, beside three large tombs at Kafkalla. Keswani suggests that some of the small tombs were emptied in antiquity when their dead were moved into the large ones. She also points to gaming boards of the senet and mehen types cut into the bedrock at Kafkalla as a sign that funerals were social occasions [8, p. 49]. Webb and Frankel find "every reason to believe (though no evidence to confirm)" that each tomb belonged to a family and was used again and again [1, p. 64].

How many people were buried here

The tombs held many dead. Tomb 48 contained ten individuals and Tomb 789 at least 46, against a mean of 1.59 per chamber at Vounous A, 2.68 at Vounous B and 4.19 in Middle Bronze Age Lapithos [1, p. 60]. In the Tomb 789 sample, 62 per cent of the 46 had died aged 12 or under, 19 of them foetal or perinatal; so many children are unusual in Bronze Age Cyprus, where few sub-adults are found [1, pp. 60, 62].

Webb and Frankel modelled how many deaths a single village could have produced. With natural growth from 100 to 300 people at the start of the Middle Bronze Age to 400 to 1,200 near its end, the cemetery should hold between 1,300 and 5,100 adults over three centuries, most likely 2,500 to 3,400 [1, p. 62]. The tombs suggest far more. At least 764 Middle Bronze Age tombs are known, local people speak of five times as many, and with 1,500 to 2,500 tombs holding six to ten adults each, the cemetery would contain 9,000 to 20,000 burials [1, p. 63].

Their explanation is a major influx of people early in the Middle Bronze Age. Inland villages such as Marki and Alambra, some 25 and 32 km to the south-east [4, p. 119], were abandoned at about this time, and they see a wider gathering of people into larger centres. A burial ground shared by many villages seems unlikely to them, because there are many contemporary cemeteries nearby [1, pp. 63–64]. On this reading the very large tombs were one way for newcomers to claim a place in a burial ground that was not their ancestors' [1, p. 64; 2, p. 175], and Deneia became a central point on a copper route to the north, within a regional network led by Lapithos [1, p. 66]. The argument is theirs, and the numbers rest on estimates (see population and demography).

The pottery of Deneia

The 2004 sampling recovered more than 22,000 sherds and partial vessels from 17 chambers, almost all of Middle Bronze Age date, and 1,100 diagnostic pieces were recorded in a digital archive [1, p. 58]. Red Polished is the main ware and White Painted is less common. The closest parallels are at Lapithos, and some vessels moved from one site to the other [1, p. 64; 2, p. 175].

Black Polished ware, used for small, finely decorated vessels, is far more common at Deneia than anywhere else, and many pieces found elsewhere probably came from here [1, p. 64]. Some of its forms occur only at this site [2, p. 175].

• Black Polished beaker with spout and lug-handleEarly Bronze Age III · 2100–1850 BCAshmolean Museum
• Black-Polished small flask or bottleEarly Bronze Age III · 2100–1850 BCAshmolean Museum
• Red Polished black-topped bowlEarly Bronze Age III · 2100–1750 BCAshmolean Museum
• One neck (broken off) of Red Polished jut with three necksEarly Bronze Age III · 2100–1850 BCAshmolean Museum

Webb describes an "assertive local style" in the Red Polished pottery. Typical of Deneia are globular jugs with wide cutaway mouths, which J. R. Stewart called "monster jugs", and large thick-walled serving bowls, the "Deneia basins", probably used at gatherings connected with funerals. There are also eccentric and composite vessels. Decoration includes "fretwork", rings and "wheels" in relief, multiple pierced lugs and heavy concentric circles, in relief that Stewart thought "often bordering on the baroque" [2, p. 175]. The small black-topped Red Polished bowls point the other way: they are decorated from a limited set of motifs, yet "of the many hundreds known no two are exactly alike" [2, p. 175].

Excavated tombs have also given figured pieces. A fragmentary large spouted Red Polished bowl from Tomb 23 carries two schematic human figures, apparently holding hands, and a long-horned animal in relief, and a Red Polished jug 48.5 cm high from Tomb 1 has four long-horned goats in relief; Vassos Karageorghis counted Dhenia as "another centre of Red Polished ware production" [15, pp. 163, 167–168]. Clay plank figures were also buried here, among them a headless Red Polished plank figure from Kafkalla in the Ashmolean.

• Red Polished plank figurine, body without headMiddle Bronze Age I · 2000–1750 BCAshmolean Museum

Exotic goods are very few compared with the coastal cities of the Late Bronze Age [1, pp. 58–59]. Looting has scattered the rest of Deneia's pottery "across the world" [2, p. 175], and many vessels on the market are labelled as from Dhenia without any record of where they were found.

Where the finds are

Excavated material from the Department of Antiquities' work is in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford holds a group from Kafkalla and Mali presented by Catling in 1953, listed below, and the University of New England in Armidale holds the eight looted tomb groups published in 2001 [12].

The site today

Part of the cemetery now lies under a new housing estate beside the village, and many tomb shafts are used for rubbish [1, pp. 55–57; 4, p. 119]. Nothing is laid out for visitors.