NIKOS IOANNOU
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Gold from Enkomi: what Late Bronze Age tombs show about Cypriot goldsmiths

Cyprus was rich in copper, but gold was another matter. In a 2009 study of Cypriot goldwork, Maria Filomena Guerra and Thilo Rehren explain the small number of gold finds from before the Late Cypriot period by the likely absence of gold sources on the island. If that is right, the gold worked in Cyprus arrived by trade. Reports on a 2026 study of tombs at Hala Sultan Tekke name Nubia and the Ada Tepe mines in Bulgaria as possible origins for the gold found there, though neither is confirmed.

Enkomi is one of the best places to look at what happened once gold reached the island, and also one of the hardest to read.

A copper town and its tombs

Enkomi lies on the east coast of Cyprus. Anna Reeve’s 2021 study of Cypriot collections describes it in the Late Bronze Age, which she dates from 1650 to 1050 BC, as a coastal centre for trade, exchange and copper production. She links the growing trade in luxury goods with a wish among the wealthy to set themselves apart.

The town’s dead were buried within the settlement area, many of them in chamber tombs. Elisabetta Pezzi, writing for a University of Florence project, calls Enkomi the most explored and published site of the period in Cyprus. She suggests there may have been about 1,000 tombs, while another summary gives about 2,000. Either way, official research has opened fewer than 200. Work at the site ended with the Turkish invasion of 1974, and the fate of objects then held in mission storage is unknown.

Who dug, and what they kept

The first large excavation was run by the British Museum, paid for by a bequest of 1892 from Emma Tourneur Turner. It lasted from March to September 1896. Alexander Stuart Murray led it at first, followed by Percy Christian and then A. H. Smith, while local workers did the digging. They opened about 100 tombs, many of which had already been looted.

Reeve’s account shows why the results need care. Recording at Enkomi was thin compared with other British Museum digs of the same years. Objects were judged after excavation for their scientific and aesthetic interest and for the value of their material, and gold ranked highly. Plain local pottery and broken objects were often left behind. Two-thirds of what was kept went to the British Museum and one-third to the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. When the museum later gave some finds to Leeds, it sent no gold jewellery, although gold jewellery was common among the finds.

Interpretation was also shaky. Murray dated the tombs to the 7th century BC, far too late, and his dating was challenged in print by Arthur Evans as early as 1900. Later teams added more evidence. Pezzi records a Swedish expedition in 1930, a French mission from 1934, and work by Porfirios Dikaios of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities from 1948 to 1958. The Swedish team reported burials with robes held by gold pins, some with diadems on the forehead and gold over the mouth.

What the objects show

The British Museum’s image records describe the Enkomi pieces closely, and they show several ways of working gold.

A necklace of gold and cornelian (1897,0401.604), dated 1400 to 1200 BC, is the fullest example. It has 16 spacer beads shaped as joined figure-of-eight shields, a barrel bead with soldered suspension rings, a fluted bead with soldered caps, 42 spiral beads twisted from gold and soldered, and 38 plain biconical beads. The record lists moulding, repoussé, twisting and soldering, and it says the spacers have Aegean inspiration or production.

A gold foil strip (1897,0401.518), possibly a diadem or mouth-piece, is simpler and catalogued as made in Cyprus. It was hammered into a narrow band with rounded ends, then impressed with four seated sphinxes alternating with S-spirals. Each end is pierced with two holes. Gold toe-rings in another record were hammered flat at the ends and incised with dashes and chevrons.

Not all the gold was made locally. Two pendants (1897,0401.42 and 1897,0401.166) are catalogued as made in the Levant, one a pear-shaped plaque probably showing Astarte, the other a disc with repoussé bosses. A hammered gold sheet from Tomb 66 (1897,0401.273), once thought to be a mask, is now restored as a shallow bowl 16 cm across. The record treats it as a probable import from Mycenaean Greece of about 1400 to 1300 BC.

Comparable pieces show that these forms were not unique to Enkomi. A gold diadem from Hala Sultan Tekke, also in the British Museum, carries figure-of-eight shields and bulls’ heads stamped with prepared punches, so that a design could be repeated. The record calls bulls’ heads a common motif in Cyprus. The Metropolitan Museum’s Cesnola Collection includes a gold earring with a bull’s head, dated about 1400 to 1050 BC, and a gold band catalogued as a mouth plate or frontlet, dated about 1450 to 1200 BC.

The techniques, in plain terms

The museum records use a handful of technical words. In general goldsmithing usage they mean the following.

None of these is unique to Cyprus, and most are still in use at the bench today. What the Enkomi records add is a sense of how they were combined in single pieces, and how often a stamped or hammered local object sat beside an imported one in the same tomb.

What the tombs cannot tell us

Tombs record choices about the dead, not a workshop’s daily output. Reeve, drawing on Keswani’s work on Bronze Age burials, notes that placing valuables in a tomb was itself a public statement by a family, and that grave goods could be used to claim status as well as to reflect it. None of the records read for this article names a maker or identifies a goldsmith’s workshop at Enkomi. Because of the way the finds were selected and recorded in 1896, what survives may also favour the imported and the impressive.

Better-recorded tombs help. The 2026 study of Hala Sultan Tekke, by Peter Fischer, is reported to have found nine gold diadems and two mouth-pieces in tombs excavated between 2016 and 2024. Heavier diadems show wear and were probably worn in life, while lighter ones may have been made for burial. Fischer’s team argues the pieces were made in Cyprus, with Egyptian, Aegean and Near Eastern ideas adapted rather than copied.

That gives a fair summary of what can be said about Enkomi. Goldsmiths working in Late Bronze Age Cyprus had access to imported metal and imported models. They hammered, stamped, twisted and soldered gold, and they used shapes and motifs shared across the eastern Mediterranean. Which Enkomi pieces they made, and which arrived finished, has to be decided object by object.

Nikos Ioannou Jewellers is a family goldsmith in Cyprus, founded in 1961, with family craft dating from 1945. The maker’s own line on method reads: “Uniquely crafted from solid hand hammered and laid out 18 karat gold sheet, which is then formed to shape, in a specially blended archaic style yellow color.”

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