During excavations near the Bronze Age town of Hala Sultan Tekke on Cyprus, archaeologists have uncovered some unusually richly furnished tombs. In the underground burial chambers, dead people were found with magnificent diadems and necklaces, as well as a wealth of valuable burial gifts made of gold, precious stones and ivory. The tombs are among the finest in the Bronze Age Mediterranean and may contain the remains of the ruling elite Hala Sultan Tekkes.
Hala Sultan Tekke is located near today's Larnaca Airport in Cyprus. As early as 1897, archaeologists discovered the first traces of a Bronze Age culture there and began excavations. Since 1970, research teams have uncovered more and more parts of the Bronze Age city using new methods. Their finds show that Hala Sultan Tekke stretched over 50 hectares from 1600 to 1150 BC and included both elite residential areas and copper workshops. Objects from Egypt, Mycenae and the Levant also show that the people there already had extensive trade relations.
500 artifacts in just two tombs
In 2016, a team of archaeologists led by Peter Fischer from the University of Gothenburg discovered a Bronze Age cemetery in front of the gates of the old Hala Sultan Tekke, some with richly decorated graves. Members of the urban elite were buried in underground chambers, along with their jewelry and imported luxury goods. With the help of magnetometer measurements, the researchers have now discovered other, even richer graves there. "We compared the places where broken ceramic fragments were found during plowing with the magnetometer map," reports Fischer. "Several large cavities appeared around two meters below the surface of the earth."
When the archaeologists dug in these places, they discovered three burial chambers, each about four to five meters in size. In these long several well-preserved skeletons, surrounded by an enormous wealth of grave goods. According to the team, these far surpass the already rich finds from earlier graves in terms of quantity and quality. "We found more than 500 intact artefacts in two of these burial chambers alone," reports Fischer. "Many of these objects are made of precious metals, precious stones, ivory or high-quality ceramics." Valuable bronze weapons with ivory inlays and a gold-framed hematite seal were also found in the tombs.
Royal Dead
Among the dead was a woman surrounded by dozens of ceramic vessels, jewelry, and a round bronze mirror. With her in the grave lay the bones of a child about one year old who had been buried with a ceramic toy. "Some other people, both men and women, wore tiaras and some had necklaces with pendants of outstanding quality," Fischer describes the finds. The style and material of the pendants suggest that they were made in Egypt during the 18th dynasty, possibly at the time of Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. The tiaras are decorated with embossed images of bulls, gazelles, lions and flowers.
"Given the richness of these burial objects, it is a reasonable assumption that these were royal tombs, even though we don't yet know what form of government the city had at the time," says Fischer. "But those who were buried here were undoubtedly part of the ruling elite of Hala Sultan Tekke." This is also supported by the fact that many of the valuable grave goods come from other cultures in the Mediterranean region - they were apparently imported luxury goods and valuables. These include gold and ivory from Egypt, blue lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, red carnelian from India and turquoise from Sinai. Amber from the Baltic region was also among the finds. As the archaeologists explain, the elites of Hala Sultan Tekke could afford such imported goods because they had become wealthy exporting copper from the nearby Troodos Mountains. "Copper was an important commodity at the time because it was used in combination with tin to produce the harder alloy bronze - it gave the Bronze Age its name," explains Fischer.
Source: University of Gothenburg, Soderberg Expedition 2023