The tombs
The 1896 excavation was carried out under the
direction of three different individuals. Mr A.S. Murray,
then Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British
Museum, directed from the 28 March until early May. A Cypriot
resident, Mr Percy Christian, continued from early May until July.
Mr A.H. Smith, an assistant in the Cypriot Department of
Antiquities, continued from July until September.
Image: site plan of the British Museum
excavations at Enkomi, 1896 (Excavations in Cyprus,
p. 30)
The original British Museum excavation
notebook is written in two different hands, and the quality of
recording for the latter entries is far more comprehensive than the
former, although still far from complete. The accounts of Tombs
1-37 were written by Murray and Tombs 38-100 by Christian. As
Christian has written up the majority, it would appear that he took
responsibility for writing up the final report after Murray left.
The 1897 register entries were also written by Murray. The
notebooks have been published (Tatton-Brown 2003) but the
individual tomb entries published in this catalogue contain
some additional information and where the accounts differ the
information contained here should be considered to supersede this
publication.
The Ottoman antiquity regulations still in
force at the time of the 1896 excavation stated that two thirds of
the objects could be exported and one third would remain in Cyprus
(Stanley-Price 2001; Wright 2001). It was further agreed upon not
to break up the tomb groups, in order to facilitate future study by
researchers and to enable the presentation of whole tomb groups in
the British Museum or Cyprus Museum (CM). The majority of the
material is consistent with this policy but a few items held in
each museum are from tombs allocated to the other institution. It
would seem that negotiations were undertaken to disperse some
unusual objects or duplicates that either the British Museum or
CM tombs may not have contained examples of.
Additional information on the
tombs published here comes from Excavations in
Cyprus (Murray et al,1900) and from archives of the Department
of Greece and Rome, including the original
field notebook (Tatton-Brown 2001; 2003). Further
information on the tombs assigned to the CM is from A Catalogue
of the Cyprus Museum (Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter 1899) and
certain of the Mycenaean pottery was included in Corpus Vasorum
Antiquorum Cyprus Museum (hereafter CVA CM)
(Karageorghis 1963). The Swedish Cyprus
Expedition Volume IV, Part 1C and ID The Late Cypriote Bronze
Age (Äström 1972) includes specific ware types for some of the
local pottery (hereafter SCE IV1C) and
approximate relative dates for the tombs in the CM.
It should be stressed that the tombs in the CM
have never been studied in their entirety and it is not certain
which items mentioned in the notebooks were retained. Frequently,
the information in the notebooks does not correspond to the
registered objects. Certain of the notebook entries are
particularly brief, especially Tombs 1-37 recorded by A.S. Murray,
and it can only be conjectured that some objects were considered
too ordinary to mention. Despite the fact that the excavation was
undertaken before the development of ware names for the Cypriot
pottery, it is often possible to interpret the descriptions or the
sketches to obtain an idea of the original contents of the tombs.
Where possible this is noted in the additional information
below.
Tomb status is divided into three categories:
intact, looted and disturbed. Disturbed implies that the tomb may
be either looted or emptied deliberately. As the notebooks rarely
state the condition beyond saying whether the door sealing stones
were in place, tombs with an incomplete or fragmentary array of
grave goods may have been looted (either in recent times or during
Bronze Age occupation), disturbed by roof collapse or flooding, or
deliberately disinterred by the occupants of the site during the
rebuilding episodes of the overlying settlement layers.
Tomb locations
Image: location of tombs excavated by
the British Museum. Those in pink are tombs on the
low 'cliff' on the south-east edge of the site whose location is
accurate to within 15 metres. The location of the tombs in
green is more approximate but likely to be accurate to within 25
metres. The numbers in red are those of some important tombs
from the French excavations at Enkomi (Tholos tombs PT1336 and
PT1432; chamber tombs PT1851 and PT1907) (Image by M. Dalton, after
Schaeffer et al. 1971, pl. IV; see Dalton 2007 for details)
The map of the site published by Murray in
Excavations in Cyprus (1900) includes the locations of
most of the tombs excavated in 1896 as well as some major
topographic features such as the low cliff bordering the settlement
on the east, the main roads crossing the area and what appears to
be a fragment of the northern and southern section of the Late
Bronze Age town wall. Although the plan was based on official
cadastral maps showing field boundaries, and can be reconciled in
general terms with the modern excavation map published by the
French expedition in 1971 (Schaeffer, 1971), the exact location of
the tombs themselves is more difficult to plot precisely in
terms of the LCIIC-IIIA urban layout.
However, Mat Dalton has published
a series of maps in the Report of the Department of
Antiquities, Cyprus for 2007 showing the location of
all the tombs excavated by the four major campaigns at
Enkomi (Dalton 2007). He has kindly made these images
available for use in this catalogue here (Maps), as well as
the composite map included here. Employing a variety of
approaches to the published sources, he has managed to plot as
closely as possible the approximate findspot of all
the British Museum excavated tombs which were marked on the
original plan of 1900 in relation to the LCIIC-IIIA settlement
grid. Although some details remain impressionistic, these
maps must be regarded as the most definitive presentation of this
data to date in the absence of more precise information from
the original excavators.
A guide to all of the tombs discovered at Enkomi