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The Hellenistic inscriptions of Old Paphos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2013

T. B. Mitford
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Extract

The ruins of Old Paphos are now occupied by the village of Kouklia, some 10 miles to the south-south-east of (New) Paphos which lies below Ktima in western Cyprus. Since Old Paphos capital of an ancient city-kingdom, was alike the ecumenical centre of Aphrodite-worship and the ἰερόν of New Paphos, capital of Cyprus for the Ptolemies seemingly from the outset of the second century B.C., its Hellenistic inscriptions are relatively abundant. These I first examined in 1936. I have since then repeatedly revisited the site, to add to the unpublished and to rediscover others long lost. Finally, from 1950 to 1955 excavations were conducted in the area of the Aphrodite temple and in the outskirts of Kouklia, to make a notable enlargement of the total. Here into a handlist of the known inscriptions I incorporate the formal publication of the new material and, wherever this may call for fuller treatment, a greater emphasis on the old.

It will be seen from the preceding classification of the documents that there is numerically remarkable disproportion between their classes. Whereas the hard local limestones used for the statue-bases could be employed repeatedly as building material, the dice have been heavily weighted against the survival of the fine, white marbles: two lime-kilns which in 1888 were still squatting on the temple site explain the rarity of these.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 56 , November 1961 , pp. 1 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1961

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References

1 This bibliography makes no claim to be exhaustive. It serves indeed chiefly as a frame to carry my abbreviations. Those not included here may be found in SEG x.

2 By ‘Epigraphical Museum’ I denote the rooms within the Kouklia Chiftlik in which the inscriptions not found by us are housed under the custody of the Department of Antiquities. The ‘Chiftlik Museum’, however, denotes the room in which are temporarily stored the finds of the Kouklia Expedition.

3 Cf. also OpAth iii. 202.

4 Pliny, , NH xxxiv. 92Google Scholar: the bronze ‘statue’ of Zeno was the only object of value in the Aphrodite temple which in 58 B.C. Cato did not sell.

5 Cf. my discussion of this under Karpasia, AJA lxv. 123.

6 Cf. OGI 75, of Salamis.

7 Cf. my forthcoming Inscriptions of Kourion for the University of Pennsylvania.

8 But it should not be overlooked that mere dislike of Ptolemaic rule could account for much of the ‘backwardness’ ascribed to early Hellenistic Cyprus. Early inscriptions of cities honouring Ptolemies and their officers are indeed rare.

9 An inscription of Alexandria names a Polykrates, s. Polykrates s. Polykrates of Argos (RA vi (1886) 226 ff.)Google Scholar—a son, therefore, of the great Polykrates' younger son.

10 It may further be asked, if this inscription concerns the Andromachos in question, why it has escaped the erasure which elsewhere was his fate.

11 Respectively IGR iii. 954 and 955, joined by me in BSA xlii. 216, no. 6.