The Excavation

Khirokitia was lived in through the seventh and earlier sixth millennia BC. Its round houses had a base of river stones set in mud and walls of mud-brick above.

The dead were buried inside the house, in pits cut into the floor and sealed under new plaster. Stone bowls, often broken on purpose, went with most burials, and about one in five had a heavy stone, often a quern, laid on the body.

The oldest pieces in the collection are later: sherds of Combed Ware from the Late Neolithic, made long after the round-house village was abandoned, when people returned to sites such as Khirokitia.

Vounous lies on the north slope of a hillock running down to the sea. Its Early Bronze Age tombs are cut into havara, a soft white rock, with a sloping passage down to a doorway closed by a slab.

A tomb was a family's for generations. Each time it was opened, the new body was laid on the raised right-hand side and earlier remains were pushed aside; jugs, spouted bowls and tulip-shaped cups came from the funeral feast, with the bones of cattle killed at the graveside.

In Late Bronze Age towns the dead were buried among the living, in rock-cut tombs beneath streets and courtyards. Tomb 11 at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios is the only tomb at the site found intact and sealed.

It held three young women on two rock-cut benches, a child of about three and three newborns, with 177 registered objects: paired Mycenaean kraters and jars, Egyptian glass, ivory boxes in the shape of ducks and 432 g of gold.

The royal tombs of Salamis have a chamber of dressed limestone, a forecourt with a moulded cornice, and a long sloping passage. The chambers were almost all robbed long ago; the great finds come from the passages.

The dead were drawn down the passage on a hearse or chariot, and the team was killed there and left where it fell. Amphorae and dishes of food were stacked along the walls before the passage was filled.

The excavator, Vassos Karageorghis, first compared these funerals with that of Patroklos in the Iliad, and later concluded that Homer was describing customs shared by the elites of the Mediterranean in his own time.