The Foundry Hoard – page two
Thanks to the British Museum’s 1896 Turner Trust excavations at
Enkomi, the Museum possesses the first melting hoard of bronzes to
have been reported from Cyprus. The find circumstances were briefly
described in Excavations in Cyprus (p.16) which merely
says ‘…we found…in what appeared to be the remains of a foundry or
smith’s workshop a series of bronze implements…’, with a reference
to op. cit. Fig. 25, a line drawing of 21 objects form what has
come to be known as the ‘The Enkomi Foundry Hoard’.
In fact, the hoard comprises nearly 100 individual items, whose
varied character makes this the quintessential melting hoard. It
has a number of objects fit for use – tongs, charcoal shovels, a
sledgehammer, furnace spatulae, all gear from a metalworker’s kit.
There is raw material in plenty – a complete oxhide ingot weighing
36.92 kg, and six fragments broken from similar ingots. There were
worn or broken tools from the farm – ploughshares (points for
wooden scratch ploughs), sickles and pruning hooks. There were
carpenter’s tool’s – fragments of large, toothed saws, flat axes
and adzes, a shaft-hole adze, double shaft-hole adzes, and
axe-adze, tanged and socketed chisels. A number of bars and
billets, quite solid strips and slabs of metal, all basic castings
that a smith would have worked into finished forms, either complete
in themselves or components of larger, complex objects. There were
also many fragments of once sizeable objects that had been
deliberately cut up into pieces manageable in the remelting
process, including many pieces of a large tripod stand,
reconstructed by the museum’s conservation department. One or two
items in this category must have come from complex objects no
complete example of which has survived, one of which is truly a
bronze-worker’s tour-de-force – a pair of bronze ten-spoke
wheels, the axle on which they were mounted, and the mechanism for
attaching them to a much larger object, at the identity of which
only guesses can be made. Surely, this was part of something that
ran on wheels – if so, whatever it was must have possessed at least
four sets of such wheels.
Perhaps the most significant objects are the
least prepossessing. These are the eight jets, each one with
between one and four runners, each one representing a separate
casting process, either in a two-piece mould that would have been
used again or again, or in a cire-perdue (lost wax) mould, made for
a single use and destroyed in the process of removing the casting
from its embrace. Molten metal had to continue to be poured into
the mould until the integral pouring cup at the top of the mould
was itself full of metal, which in turn meant that the one or more
channels within the mould via which the molten metal was
distributed as rapidly as possible into the casting space, were
also filled. When the mould was opened, or broken and the cast
removed, it had adhering to it the metal that had filled the
channels and the pouring cup. These excrescences were broken off by
the founder and, no doubt, stored away in a recycling box. There
were other kinds of waste from a successful casting, but none of
these are represented in the hoard. Missing from the hoard, too, is
any trace of a mould, or of the crucible(s) in which metal would
have been melted ready for casting.
The importance of the Foundry Hoard was first
highlighted by C.F.A. Schaeffer (Schaeffer 1952, 29-31) some
years after he had correctly identified the site of the Enkomi
settlement whose cemeteries had been so mercilessly plundered or
excavated for the previous 40 years and more. He demonstrated that
the settlement was in the very area where at least four
archaeological excavations had taken place in search of tombs,
repeatedly encountering massive walls and other proofs
of settlement without understanding that these ruined structures
were of the same period as the tombs they sought. It remains
surprising that the 1896 discovery of the Foundry Hoard did not
then or later alert students of the Late Cypriot Bronze Age to its
full significance.
From the middle of the twentieth century
further excavations by C.F.A.Schaeffer, and by Porphyrios Dikaios
for the Cyprus Department of Antiquities have recovered other
melting hoards at Enkomi, though none as eloquent as the Foundry
Hoard. Comparison of the contents of these new hoards with the
Foundry Hoard has suggested that they all probably belong to a
particular horizon in the town’s history, at a period near the end
of the Bronze Age, a period of high prosperity shortly to be
brought to an end by the major misfortunes by which the settlement
was overwhelmed. Estimates of the date at which these hoards may
have been lost vary from late in the thirteenth century BC to
early in the twelfth century BC.
The Foundry Hoard objects are numbered
F.1 to F.86 in this catalogue.