Tamassos

Tamassos was one of the city-kingdoms of Iron Age Cyprus. Its remains lie at the village of Politiko on the left bank of the Pediaios river, about 21 km south-west of Nicosia, in the foothills of the Troodos where the copper ores of the island come to the surface [1; 2, p. 61]. An Assyrian king listed Tamassos among the kingdoms of Cyprus in 673/2 BC, and its last king sold it to the king of Kition in the 4th century BC [2, p. 61; 3, p. 289]. Excavation has uncovered part of the town and its wall, a sanctuary of Aphrodite-Astarte with copper workshops beside it, and a cemetery of the 7th and 6th centuries BC whose two stone-built royal tombs can still be entered [4, pp. 219–220; 1]. A second sanctuary, of Apollo, lay at Frangissa to the west. Tamassos is also the only Cypriot kingdom for which ancient writers name copper mines [2, p. 61].

The town and its copper country

Politiko stands on the north-eastern edge of the Troodos, on the pillow lavas that carry the island's copper sulphide ores. Mines lie within a few kilometres to the south and west: Kambia (Pitharochoma and Peristerka) and Kapedhes to the south-east, Agrokipia and Mitsero (Kokkinoyia and Kokkinopezoula) to the west, and old adits and slag heaps on the hill of Kokkinorotsos, 3 km south-west of the town [2, p. 61]. Wooden props found in the galleries at Kambia have been dated by radiocarbon to the Geometric to Classical periods, and props from Kokkinoyia at Mitsero to the 9th to 7th and the 6th to 3rd centuries BC [2, p. 62]. The Sydney Cyprus Survey Project recorded a slag heap 27.5 m long and 10 m high beside the Kokkinoyia mine, with Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical pottery in its layers, and ancient spoil heaps at Agrokipia [2, p. 62]. The slag from Kokkinorotsos comes from several stages of turning sulphide ore into copper [2, pp. 61–62]. On how the ore was mined and smelted, see copper metallurgy.

The ancient writers knew these mines. In the first book of the Odyssey (1.184), Athena, disguised as Mentes, says she is sailing "to Temese for copper" with a cargo of iron. Whether Homer's Temese is Tamassos was already debated in antiquity. Strabo praises the copper mines of Tamassos, and Stephanos of Byzantium, in the 6th century AD, calls it a city in the middle of the island with excellent copper [2, p. 61].

Map of Cyprus

• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Tamassos
2. 2Idalion
3. 3Kition
4. 4Salamis
5. 5Golgoi
6. 6Amathus

The land round Politiko was settled long before the kingdom: a village of the Bronze Age has been excavated at Politiko-Troullia [5]. We know of no town at Tamassos itself before the Iron Age.

Discovery and excavation

In 1836 villagers digging in a dry river bed near Tamassos found a bronze statue, of which the head survives (see below) [6, p. 102].

Max Ohnefalsch-Richter excavated at Tamassos twice. In 1885, for Falkland Warren, he cleared the sanctuary of Apollo at Frangissa in about two and a half weeks, from 17 October to 2 November [7, pp. 215–218]. In 1889, for the Berlin museums, he opened a cemetery of 24 Cypro-Archaic tombs at Chomazoudia, among them the four that are now called the royal tombs [4, p. 219; 8]. His book on Tamassos and Idalion, finished in March 1908, was never published, and the manuscript is in Berlin [4, p. 220].

From 1970 to 1981 a German expedition directed by Hans-Günter Buchholz excavated part of the town, its sanctuaries and its wall. Buchholz re-excavated Tomb 4, and his team studied and restored Tomb 5; the Department of Antiquities restored Tomb 12 [4, p. 220]. The results were reported season by season in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique [9; 10; 11; 12; 13] and summarised in a book with K. Untiedt [14]. The architecture of the royal tombs was published by Buchholz with Hartmut Matthäus and Katja Walcher in 2002 [4]. In January 1997 restoration work between Tombs 5 and 12 turned up a group of limestone sphinxes and lions [4, pp. 227–228].

Since 2021 a team from the universities of Frankfurt and Kiel and Würzburg under Matthias Recke and Philipp Kobusch has been looking for Ohnefalsch-Richter's sanctuary at Frangissa, found it, and excavated large parts of it in 2024 [15].

Phases

The history of Tamassos is pieced together from a few written sources and from excavations that cover a small part of the ancient town. The dates below are approximate.

Phases

1. Bronze Age neighboursEarly and Middle Bronze Age

   A village at Politiko-Troullia, in the district of the later town. We know of no town at Tamassos itself.

2. First tracesCypro-Geometric, before about 750 BC

   Geometric remains under the Archaic layers of the sanctuary of Aphrodite-Astarte.

3. The kingdomCypro-Archaic, about 750 to 480 BC

   Admetos of Tamesi on Esarhaddon's prism (673/2 BC); first city wall; sanctuary and copper workshops; royal tombs 4, 11, 12 and 5; sanctuary of Apollo at Frangissa.

4. Classical Tamassosabout 480 to 333 BC

   City wall rebuilt; sanctuary damaged at the time of the Ionian revolt and rebuilt. Pasikypros sells the kingdom to Pumiathon of Kition.

5. Under Salamisfrom about 333/332 BC

   Alexander gives Tamassos to Pnytagoras of Salamis.

6. Ptolemaic townfrom about 300 BC

   The sanctuary is rebuilt under Ptolemy I; new water channels, squares and streets.

7. Late Antique Tamassos4th to 8th centuries AD

   The church of Agios Herakleidios, with building phases from the 4th century; a lamp of the 8th century.

The kingdom of Tamassos

The earliest written record of the kingdom is Assyrian. In 673/2 BC Esarhaddon listed ten kings of Cyprus who sent building materials for his palace at Nineveh; one of them was Admesu (Admetos), king of Tamesi, that is Tamassos [16; 2, p. 61]. Tamassos therefore had its own king by the early 7th century BC, and the Neo-Assyrian empire counted it among the island's kingdoms.

The end of the kingdom is told by Duris of Samos, quoted by Athenaeus. Pasikypros, king of Tamassos, sold his kingdom for fifty talents to Pumiathon, king of Kition, and retired to Amathus as a private man [3, p. 289; 17, p. 79]. After the siege of Tyre in 332 BC, Alexander took the territory of Tamassos from Pumiathon and gave it to Pnytagoras, king of Salamis, who had helped him at the siege [3, p. 294; 17, p. 79].

A man of Tamassos appears earlier in the record of Kition. A Red Slip bowl from the earliest floor of the temple of Astarte at Kition, of the end of the 9th century BC, carries a Phoenician inscription which, in the reading of André Dupont-Sommer, records sacrifices to Astarte by a man called ML who had come from Tamassos. Not every scholar accepts the whole of this reading [18, p. 124].

The city wall and the town

South of the royal tombs the German expedition found part of the town and a fortification wall built in two periods, the first Cypro-Archaic and the second Cypro-Classical; the later wall stands behind the earlier one [4, p. 220; 10, p. 886]. Stretches were exposed between the sanctuary of Aphrodite-Astarte and the royal tombs. The tombs therefore lay just outside the inhabited area, to the north, probably beside a main road, and perhaps near a city gate [4, p. 220]. The sanctuary stood inside the wall [19, p. 61]. On city walls of the period elsewhere on the island, see fortifications.

Imported Greek pottery is known from both the tombs and the sanctuary: an Attic black-figure cup from Tomb 11, and a fine black-figure sherd from the area of the sanctuary of Aphrodite-Astarte [4, p. 229; 19, p. 61].

The sanctuary of Aphrodite-Astarte and its copper workshops

In its third season, in 1972, the German expedition found a sanctuary of the goddess close to the royal tombs. It had a walled court, a vestibule and a cella, with the entrance on the north. Stone orthostats still stood in place, but the mud-brick walls above them had gone, and the plastered floor of the court showed traces of fire [9, p. 665]. The excavators called the goddess Aphrodite-Astarte, joining her Greek and Phoenician names (see Astarte figures). Near the north wall of the court lay an Archaic female head with red paint on the hair and a silver coin of Euelthon, king of Salamis in the later 6th century BC [9, p. 665].

The oldest votive offering identified round the altar dates from the 7th century BC. The altar itself was built at the end of the 6th century, and around it lay dishes, bowls and jugs with offerings of farm produce, lamps, incense burners and small sculptures [19, p. 61]. Below the Archaic layers there were traces of a Geometric settlement [10, p. 886]. The offerings included clay and stone doves, terracotta figurines of Astarte, and limestone sculpture painted red: a horseman in a fur cap, Aphrodite enthroned holding a pomegranate, a seated temple boy, a priest holding a bowl, a cock 8 cm high and an incense burner. There were also a fragment of a hollow terracotta statue some 2.5 m tall and pieces of a large limestone copy of a Greek bronze Apollo [10, pp. 887–888].

West of the sanctuary, and probably inside its precinct, lay a metalworking quarter, used from the Archaic period to the end of the Classical or the early Hellenistic period. Copper was melted and worked there, and the excavators found furnaces, slag heaps and casting equipment [9, p. 665; 10, pp. 886–888]. Buchholz compared the pairing of a goddess's sanctuary with copper workshops to the Late Bronze Age sanctuaries at Enkomi and Kition [9, p. 665]. Slag and other metalworking waste in the soil show that the work went on in the Hellenistic period [12, p. 790].

Pieces in the Drakopoulos collection of kinds found at this site. None of them comes from the site.

• Limestone Head of a Boy, probably from a Temple Boy StatuetteClassical · 450–300 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Handmade Horse and Rider with a High Painted CrestArchaic I · 750–600 BCDrakopoulos collection

The altar of the Mother of the Gods

On the west side of the excavated area a second altar came to light, again with offerings round it. It is a single block of hard limestone measuring about 1.40 by 1.25 m, with a central basin ringed by 18 smaller cavities like offering bowls. A dedication to the Mother of the Gods (Kybele), found in the neighbourhood in the 19th century, suggests that the altar was hers [19, p. 61; 18, p. 151]. The same seasons produced a limestone statuette of Kybele standing on two lions, a statuette of Artemis, a head of Hathor and an incense burner standing on a sphinx [19, p. 61].

Destructions and the Ptolemaic rebuilding

The temple was destroyed twice, once at the time of the Ionian revolt against Persia in 498 BC and once under Ptolemy I [19, p. 61]. Of the Archaic and Classical temple almost nothing survives. The building put up under Ptolemy I reused older material, among it an Ionic limestone capital 0.88 m long, and there were remains of an earlier timber stoa [12, p. 790]. The altar of Kybele was destroyed in the same period and covered by stone walls, with a large water channel on its west side [13, p. 997]. After the Ptolemaic conquest the area was laid out again with a water supply, open squares, streets and new temples [19, p. 61]. Terracotta heads of Greek type of the 1st century BC show that the sanctuary was still visited [12, p. 790].

The royal tombs at Chomazoudia

Ohnefalsch-Richter's cemetery of 24 Cypro-Archaic tombs at Chomazoudia lies north of the town. Four of its tombs stand apart from the others, and he called them the tombs of the kings of Tamassos. Tomb 4 is a chamber cut in the earth with a long dromos (entrance passage). Tomb 11 was a built chamber of ashlar masonry, now destroyed; Ohnefalsch-Richter sold its stones to the villagers of Politiko as building material. Tombs 5 and 12 are built of ashlar blocks, with rich architectural ornament carved in the stone, and have no equal among the tomb monuments of Cyprus [4, pp. 219–220, 229]. On the Bronze Age forerunners of Cypriot chamber tombs, see Bronze Age chamber tombs.

Tomb 4 is the earliest of the four; the silver bowl found in it has its closest parallel in the early 7th century BC. An Attic black-figure cup of about 580 to 570 BC dates Tomb 11, and Tombs 12 and 5 were built in Cypro-Archaic II, probably in the 6th century BC. A closer date for them is still to be worked out [4, pp. 228–230].

Tombs 5 and 12

Both tombs are entered by a stepped dromos cut down into the ground. Tomb 12 has a single rectangular chamber; Tomb 5 has two, an antechamber and the burial chamber behind it [4, p. 221]. The dromos of Tomb 5 has eleven steps, and each chamber is about 3.2 m long and 2.8 m wide inside [4, p. 232].

Plan · Cypro-Archaic II, 6th century BC

Royal Tomb 5 at Tamassos

Politiko, the Chomazoudia cemetery north of the town

+2.14 m0.0012345678

01 m

Scale bar: 1 metres.

Choose a number on the plan, or a name below, to read what was found there and how well it is known.

1. 1The stepped dromos
2. 2The entrance and its lintel slab
3. 3The antechamber
4. 4The two false doors
5. 5The false windows above the doors
6. 6The burial chamber
7. 7The sarcophagus
8. 8The footstool

Key

• Ashlar walls, as surveyed
• Roofed floor
• Dromos, open to the sky
• Sarcophagus and footstool
• Lintel slab overhead
• Upper end of the dromos, not preserved
• Edges of the steps

Inside, the stone copies a building of timber. The ceilings are gabled and carved to look like rows of slightly rounded beams laid in groups of three, with wider gaps between the groups. The door frames are recessed in steps, and above the lintels the ends of wooden beams are imitated in stone. Flat pilasters beside the doors carry Proto-Aeolic capitals: a triangle with large volutes, whose inner volutes are cut away by the door openings. Each tomb held a plain stone sarcophagus with a stone footstool [4, pp. 221–222]. Tomb 5 also has two false doors set in niches, each with a lock carved in relief, and two false windows with balustrades, whose frieze of volutes round palmettes recalls Phoenician ivories of the "woman at the window" type [4, pp. 222–227]. The walls are cut to look like masonry of headers and stretchers, although the blocks are all the same depth [4, p. 223].

Matthäus and Walcher look east for the models. Built tombs with the same features occur in Phoenician cemeteries at Akhziv, at Trayamar in southern Spain and near Tangier, roof blocks with beams in groups of three come from the sanctuary of Eshmun at Sidon, and Proto-Aeolic capitals are known from Iron Age Israel. They read the tombs as images of a sanctuary, built perhaps to honour the dead king as a hero [4, pp. 222–227]. Other scholars had looked for the models of the imitated timber work in Asia Minor, where wooden chamber tombs under mounds are typical of Phrygia from about 700 BC [4, p. 225]. On the Phoenician presence in Cyprus, see Phoenicians.

What the tombs held

In the dromos of Tomb 4 a horse and chariot had been buried, with bronze blinkers and frontlets; the tomb also held a bronze helmet and fittings of a shield, and a Phoenician silver bowl with a horse, comparable to a bowl from the Bernardini tomb at Praeneste of the early 7th century BC [4, pp. 228–229]. When Buchholz returned in 1972 he found a sword fragment, a bronze helmet, a large bronze plate with Hathor heads and lotus flowers in repoussé, and a horse's blinker with an "eye" inlaid in ivory, malachite and asphalt in one of the large royal tombs [9, p. 665].

In the sarcophagus of Tomb 12 lay a helmet, an iron sword with an ivory hilt, two iron knives, a lance head, a bronze mace head of Near Eastern type, silver bowls and two pottery bowls. Near the door were iron spits (obeloi), stone tripods, pieces of a bronze shield, an iron lamp, a cauldron of Greek type, a two-handled cauldron of eastern type, a Phoenician bronze jug and Cypro-Phoenician incense burners [4, pp. 229–230]. Cypriot pottery, Phoenician metalwork and the Greek custom of burying spits and firedogs with the dead appear side by side [4, p. 230]. On the weapons, see Iron Age arms and armour; on the bowls, metal vessels.

The sphinxes and lions found in 1997

In January 1997, during restoration work between Tombs 5 and 12, the Department of Antiquities found six Archaic limestone sculptures: a pair of sphinxes in Egyptian style and two pairs of lions. Their backs are left rough. They probably flanked the entrance to a dromos or stood on a tomb mound [4, pp. 227–228]. They are now in the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. On the motif, see lions, sphinxes and griffins.

The sanctuary of Apollo at Frangissa

The sanctuary of Apollo lay outside the town to the west, in the Frangissa valley near the village of Pera Orinis [15]. A shepherd showed it to Ohnefalsch-Richter, who excavated it for Falkland Warren in October and November 1885 [7, pp. 215–218; 20]. He recorded the walls and the many statue bases on a plan, which he published in 1891 and again in 1893 [7, p. 217; 21]. The landowner, a farmer and wine merchant of Pera, insisted that the ground be filled in and levelled afterwards, and the exact place was soon forgotten. The finds became the subject of a lawsuit, Warren against Watkins, which Warren won [7, pp. 215–218].

The excavation produced hundreds of votive statues, some of colossal size [15]. Among the pieces now in museums are Archaic limestone figures of men in helmets or wreaths, temple boys, and terracotta warriors, chariots and horse-and-rider figures. Part of the finds stayed in the Cyprus Museum; Warren's share is now mainly in the British Museum, which bought it from his executors in 1910, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto [20].

• Over life-size bearded head from a male figureArchaic II · 500–450 BCOntario Museum
• Cypro-Syllabic Horseman StatuetteArchaic II · 590–540 BCBritish Museum
• Four-Horse War Chariot ModelArchaic I · 700–600 BCBritish Museum
• Thymiaterion (incense burner) supported by Baal HammonHellenistic · 350–250 BCOntario Museum

Two inscribed bases name the god. Each is written in Phoenician and in the Cypriot syllabary, and both date from the 4th century BC. In them the Phoenician god Reshef corresponds to the Greek Apollo, called in one of them Alasiotas, "of Alasia" [22]. On the two scripts, see writing and literacy.

The new excavations have found the sanctuary again. In 2024 the team uncovered large parts of its foundations and its court of dedications, with more than 100 statue bases, some of them of colossal size, and great quantities of statue fragments in the 1885 backfill that had gone unrecognised in the haste of the first dig. Larger-than-life limestone feet show that colossal male figures stood here in the Archaic period. Two of the new bases are inscribed, one in the Cypriot syllabary and one naming the Ptolemies; there were also beads of marbled glass, Egyptian faience amulets and a large peristyle court of the Hellenistic period [15]. A later season found more than 20 bases still in place under the 19th-century fill, covered by a levelling layer of about 480 BC [23].

The bronze statue from the river bed

In 1836 villagers digging for water in the dry bed of the Pediaios near Tamassos found a bronze statue of a youth, about life size. It broke up as they carried it away [6, p. 102; 10, p. 888]. The head came to the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth House and is now in the British Museum; a bronze leg of the same alloy in the Louvre may come from the same figure [6, p. 102]. The head is in the Severe Style of about 460 BC and is probably the work of a Greek sculptor; it is usually taken to be Apollo [24, p. 167; 6, p. 105]. The large limestone copy of a bronze Apollo found in the sanctuary of Aphrodite-Astarte has been taken for a copy of this statue [10, p. 888].

Later Tamassos and Agios Herakleidios

The town outlived the kingdom. In Late Antiquity its church honoured Herakleidios, whom tradition makes the first bishop of Tamassos, a disciple of the apostle Barnabas. The church at the monastery of Agios Herakleidios, beside the ancient site, has building phases from the 4th, 5th and 6th or 7th centuries, and later ones down to the 18th century. A lamp of the 8th century suggests that the place was not wholly abandoned in that century [25, pp. 213–214].

Visiting Tamassos

The site lies at Politiko, about 21 km south-west of Nicosia, and is managed by the Department of Antiquities. Visitors can see the remains of the sanctuary of Aphrodite with its altar, part of the city's fortifications, copper-working installations and the two royal tombs, which are entered by their stairs down into the chambers [1]. Opening times and the entrance fee are on the Department's and Visit Cyprus's pages. The monastery of Agios Herakleidios stands next to the site.

The finds are dispersed. The sphinxes and lions are in the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. Objects from the 1889 tombs went to Berlin [9, p. 665], the bronze head is in the British Museum, and the sculpture from Frangissa is shared between the Cyprus Museum, the British Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum.