Burial practices on Late Bronze Age Cyprus
The typical Bronze Age Cypriot tomb type is the chamber tomb cut
into the soft limestone bedrock. Chamber tombs began in the Early
Cypriot period (around 2400/2300 BC) and remained the most common
form of tomb until around the end of Late Cypriot IIC (around 1200
BC), when new types of tomb were introduced. These were mostly
simple shaft or pit graves, although a few new chamber tombs were
also constructed, while some older ones remained in use (see
Keswani 2004 for a comprehensive survey).
A cross-section of a burial chamber with a
chimney-shaped dromos or entrance, from the French
excavations at Enkomi (Tomb 1949/11) (after C.
Schaeffer, Enkomi-Alasia. Nouvelles Missions en Chypre
1946-1950 (Paris, 1952), pl. XXVII.)
The beginning of the Iron Age, around the eleventh century
BC, saw the appearance of a new type of tomb, the chamber tomb with
a long dromos. This is sometimes thought to have been
modelled on Greek types, though none of these are represented at
Enkomi which was abandoned before this time.
Chamber tombs varied in their construction. The majority have a
dromos (a chimney-shaped shaft or long sloping entranceway) with
one or more rounded or irregularly-shaped chambers leading off the
sides. Some were equipped with low benches for laying out the dead
or with small niches cut into the walls of the chamber or dromos,
seemingly used for the deposition of infants or children (such as
those marked 'A' and 'B' on the accompanying drawing of the
tomb section). The chambers were usually sealed with large, flat
slabs of stone.
Apart from chamber tombs and shaft or pit graves, other types of
tombs also occur at Enkomi. These are rare and only around 10
are known from all excavations at the site. The first of these are
tholos tombs. They were of a much smaller scale than Mycenaean
tholos tombs but constructed with a round floor plan and a
corbelled roof of mudbrick or stone.
The second type are built tombs, constructed from
carefully cut blocks of stone (ashlar) with a rectangular
floor plan and a slightly corbelled roof. The majority of tombs
from the British Museum’s excavations are chamber tombs but there
is one tholos tomb, Tomb 71 (Tomb 48 is a chamber tomb), and four
built tombs (Tombs 1, 11, 12 and 66). Tomb 66 is the only tomb of
either tholos or built type ever found intact, and remains one of
the wealthiest known from the site. However, the wealthiest tomb
known from Enkomi is a chamber tomb, Tomb 93, so tomb type cannot
be simply correlated with status.
The tombs were typically used for multiple burials, sometimes
for periods of up to 500 years. Number of inhumations, length of
use and numbers of grave goods are highly variable. A tomb may
house anywhere from one to 62 burials and contain a variety of
grave goods. Pottery is the most common type of grave good, with
some tombs containing over 500 vessels. Other goods deposited
include metal or stone tools and vessels, gold, silver or stone
jewellery, faience, glass, ivory and other exotic materials.
Priscilla Keswani has shown that there is a high likelihood
that complex programmes of mortuary ritual were being carried out
and that bodies and grave goods were being moved between tombs
(Keswani 2004). The wealthiest tombs have been shown to be those in
use for longest, and particularly those in use during Late Cypriot
IIC, the period of the greatest prosperity of the town. It is also
possible that all the tombs found within the settlement represent
those of ‘elites’ and low status individuals were buried elsewhere,
probably in the extramural rural cemeteries. Even with
fine-scale excavation techniques it is often difficult to attribute
groups of grave goods to an individual burial or to divide the tomb
into different phases. Partially because of the nature of the
bedrock, flooding, the fact that many tombs were looted, and the
potential that Bronze Age Cypriots themselves were moving the
material around.