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“After lunch to inspect the Museum – we were welcomed by Mr Markides and taken round by the Committee – it is very well arranged by Mr Markides who really is the father of the whole thing. There are however too many duplicates & nothing of real outstanding interest”.
Rupert Gunnis, Diary, 12 December 1926
- 1 Henry Moore Institute Archive, Leeds, Rupert Forbes Gunnis Archive, Inv. no. 2011.218, Boxes 18‑20, (...)
- 2 Pilides 2018.
1Rupert Gunnis (1899-1965) made this diary entry two weeks after arriving in Cyprus. He had landed on 30 November together with the new Governor of the British colony, Sir Ronald Storrs (1881-1955), as his Personal Secretary and Aide-de-Camp (ADC) (fig. 1). One of Gunnis’s first official duties was to represent Governor Storrs at the funeral of the wife of George Jeffery, the longstanding Curator of Ancient Monuments.1 After lunch that day, he made his first visit to the Cyprus Museum, giving due credit in his diary to its Curator, Menelaos Markides (1878-1942),2 for its good arrangement while at the same time criticising the quality of the exhibits on display.
Figure 1 — Sir Ronald Storrs, ca 1930.
From H. D. Purcell, Cyprus, 1968.
- 3 Gunnis Diary, 23 December 1926; Cyprus Museum Committee (hereafter CMC), Minutes, 23 December 1926; (...)
- 4 Gunnis Diary, 20 March 1928; Stanley-Price 2024a.
2Gunnis took an immediate interest in helping the museum, spending much of his free time – and his office hours too when necessary – over the next five years either on its premises or in the field following up reports of illicit digging. He at once had himself elected to the Museum Committee whose President ex officio was the Governor and whose other members were all Cypriot.3 Membership of the Committee qualified him to intervene on antiquities matters and to conduct excavations if authorised by the Governor. He resolved to increase the revenue accruing to the Museum from selling ‘duplicates’ from its collections. A by‑product of his voluntary work in the public sphere was his discreetly building up a private collection of antiquities – the Antiquities Law of 1905 allowed private collections so long as they were registered but the export of antiquities was strictly regulated. Within fifteen months of his arrival, however, he had accumulated sufficient antiquities to dispatch twelve packing-cases of them to England, to create a ‘museum’ at his family home there. He proceeded to sell this collection in England in 1933, the choice pieces being sold at auction as “Property of Rupert Gunnis, Esq”.4
- 5 His work in England predominates in biographical notices, of which the fullest is White 2007, despi (...)
- 6 Gunnis 1936.
3In the art historical world Rupert Gunnis is known for his subsequent career in England as a leading authority on British sculpture.5 For Cyprus his Historic Cyprus (1936; reprinted 1947, 1956, 1973 and 2014), remains a standard reference, a comprehensive survey and guide-book to the island’s historic monuments and churches, documenting much that has since been lost.6 Less well known are his attempts in the late 1920s to control unauthorised excavation, to acquire significant antiquities for the Cyprus Museum, and to rescue elements of historic buildings at risk of demolition or neglect. His efforts were rewarded when Governor Storrs, shortly before leaving in June 1932, created for him the post of Inspector of Antiquities. By then, Gunnis’s publicly visible work for the Museum Committee was widely known to co‑exist with his collecting and exporting antiquities for himself. These conflicting roles of Gunnis, and the issue of the Cyprus Museum selling ‘duplicates’, are the subject of this article.
4Gunnis’s private diaries document some of his archaeological work while ADC to the Governor. Most entries consist of only a few lines summarising his principal activities of the day (fig. 2; the text is reproduced below at note 33) but they include references to his excavations and to the sales of ‘duplicates’ at the Cyprus Museum. Another informative source (not consulted here) would be Gunnis’s extensive correspondence with his parents, much of it archived at the Henry Moore Institute, and other letters and photographs in private hands at Castle Howard in Yorkshire.7 Rita Severis has published relevant diary entries and letter extracts on the CVAR website blog, the fruits of her transcription of Gunnis material before its transfer to the Henry Moore Institute.8
Figure 2 — R. Gunnis, diary entry for 7 July 1927, in his distinctive script.
- 9 White 2007, figs. 7, 8, 9 and 13 (see figs. 4‑5 below).
- 10 The five (only) photos of monuments in his Historic Cyprus are all credited to Mangoian Bros., howe (...)
5An important Gunnis photoarchive is held by the museum (now part of The Amelia resource-centre) at Tunbridge Wells in Kent, the home-town of Gunnis after his return to England. The many Gunnis-related items in the museum’s object and natural history collections do not, apparently, include Cypriot material. However, it possesses seven photograph albums that belonged to Gunnis, three of which contain photographs of Cyprus. White reproduced four of these photos.9 The Cyprus-related photographs number some 730 in total. Many are the products of commercial photographers in Cyprus, for example various photos of monuments by the Mangoian brothers based in Nicosia or by Charles Glaszner & Son in Larnaca, many of which can be found in other photographic collections or publications. Also of commercial origin are the studio portraits of young policemen and other people. The photos of Gunnis attending ceremonial or semi-informal occasions must have been taken by official photographers or by friends and the prints then widely shared, but a large number of photos were probably the work of Gunnis himself.10 Most of them are captioned, either the page as a whole or individual prints (e.g. fig. 4 and fig. 8 below). The albums represent a rich resource for future research about Gunnis and about Cyprus during the years of his stay there.
- 11 State Archives (henceforth, SA), Nicosia, SA1/1383/1914. The Antiquities Law, 1905. Proposed amendm (...)
- 12 All excavations carried out against the law are ‘illegal’. They are also considered ‘illicit’ if th (...)
- 13 SA1/1383/1914. The Antiquities Law, 1905. Proposed amendment, f 25, G. Jeffery to Colonial Secretar (...)
6In 1925, a year before Gunnis’s arrival, there were official discussions about amending the 1905 Antiquities Law that had had the effect of discouraging applications from abroad to excavate. The discussions had been prompted by a Swedish proposal to undertake systematic excavations on condition that a substantial share of the finds could be exported to Sweden. After some debate, the law was amended, resulting in the four-year project of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition.11 The debate concerned the extent of the market for antiquities retrieved from unauthorised or ‘illicit’ excavations in the island.12 George Jeffery (1855-1935), with twenty years of experience as Curator of Ancient Monuments, agreed with the Governor (Malcolm Stevenson) that illicit excavation was not widespread but he then referred to the extensive damage caused by popular rumours of ‘treasure trove’, citing the disturbed floors and holes in the walls of Ancient Monuments such as the castle of St Hilarion and the churches in the old town of Famagusta. He further acknowledged that the situation was not under control by concluding: “The buying and selling of antiquities at the Museum tends to keep alive a commercial interest in such things, and a desire to supply the market”.13 In fact, the Museum’s sales were very few at this period (see further below, and table 1).
7Jeffery was alluding to the Cyprus Museum (1) purchasing casually discovered antiquities considered important enough to be in its collection; and (2) selling antiquities of minor importance, so as to make space and to raise funds. He implied that the Museum’s purchases and sales, rather than undermining the illicit market, were encouraging it. A principal aim of the 1905 Antiquities Law had been to counteract the widespread illicit excavation and export of antiquities. That Law, covering both monuments and museums, broadened the scope of antiquities protection and repealed the Ottoman Law on antiquities (1874) that Britain had inherited in 1878.14 The 1905 Law “to consolidate and amend the law relating to ancient monuments and antiquities, and to provide museums” was a landmark piece of legislation. It was important for declaring that the Cyprus Museum was a public museum and that all its collections, and all future acquisitions, “shall be held by the Government in trust and for the benefit of the inhabitants of Cyprus” (Section 38). It led to the opening in 1909 of a new building for the Cyprus Museum.15 It laid down rules for registering private antiquities collections, for reporting accidentally discovered antiquities, for authorising excavations, and for controlling the movement of antiquities within the island and strictly limiting their export, together with the penalties for breaking the law.
- 16 Pilides 2009, pp. 55‑56.
- 17 Pilides 2009, p. 57.
- 18 SA1/1429/14. The text of Farrell’s report is reproduced by Merrillees 2005, pp. 195‑198, from a cop (...)
8The new Law led to greater public awareness of archaeological issues, as reflected in Cypriot press coverage in the period 1905-1915.16 Its scope was disappointing, however, to British specialists such as George Jeffery who criticised the lack of government control over churches and mosques, the absence of enforcing measures and, especially, the scarcity of funding to implement the Law.17 Critics doubted that there was sufficient motivation and expertise effectively to control illicit excavation (on the lack of expertise, see the Skouriotissa case discussed below). The Museum Committee was responsible for enforcing the Law. But in 1909 the classicist Jerome Farrell, noting that Jeffery was not a member of the committee, commented: “The only interest of the elected members in Archaeology is of a commercial rather than a scientific character, and it is suspected, though not on certain evidence, that they use their position for their own pecuniary advantage, either by exporting antiquities, or by selling them at exaggerated prices to the Museum”.18
- 19 Myres, Ohnefalsch-Richter 1899; The National Archives (TNA), London, Colonial Office, Cyprus, Origi (...)
- 20 SA1/593/1912, G. Jeffery to Colonial Secretary, 20 March 1912.
- 21 SA1/1383/1914, ff 13‑19, J. L. Myres, Memorandum on the working of the present antiquity law in Cyp (...)
9The archaeologist J. L. Myres (1869-1954), drawing on Farrell’s report, lamented how the Museum’s collections had been neglected and disordered since he had prepared its first catalogue in the 1890s. Many objects had not been registered or, if once identified, had lost their labels to the depredations of the fish-moth (silverfish). The 1905 Antiquities Law that aimed to secure better protection for antiquities had, in his view, facilitated illicit traffic while deterring scientific excavations by introducing unreasonable restrictions.19 Within a few years of the new Law being passed, the Museum Committee proposed that it be amended so to encourage more applications to excavate from abroad.20 As for the antiquities market, Myres asserted in 1915 that “I can find no sign in London, Paris or New York, that the present Antiquity Law has seriously affected the supply of Cypriot antiquities of high quality, to those centres of the trade”.21
- 22 Pilides 2009, pp. 68‑69 and pp. 642‑648; Pilides 2018, p. 9.
- 23 SA1/534/1912. Illicit excavations and dealing in antiquities. H. Goold-Adams to Colonial Secretary, (...)
- 24 Markides 1916, p. 3; Pilides 2018.
- 25 This power entrusted in the 1905 Law to the High Commissioner was devolved to Markides on taking up (...)
10The supposed lack of competent staff was alleviated with the appointment in 1912 of Menelaos Markides as Keeper and Secretary, Cyprus Museum, and ex officio member of the Museum Committee.22 The High Commissioner immediately instructed him to crack down on the plague of illicit excavation in the island.23 In his first published report, Markides described the difficulties he faced: the widespread illicit digging and trading of antiquities, the quick profits to be made, the specialised tomb diggers in villages located near ancient sites and the antiquities dealers in the main towns and in some villages.24 He tackled these problems by enforcing a strict police surveillance, and by the three strategies of conducting his own excavations – and inviting J. L. Myres to excavate – to pre-empt the looting of sites; of making detailed registers of private collections, as the 1905 Law had stipulated (Sections 4‑6); and of not approving the export of any antiquities without inspecting them and issuing a formal permit.25 The Law included other measures to control the antiquities market, for instance that any accidental discovery of antiquities be reported promptly (Sections 7‑9), that no antiquity be moved within the island without written permission (Sections 29‑30) and that any sale or gift within the island of a previously registered antiquity be reported to the Museum Committee (Section 31).
- 26 SA1/959/1924/77, Colonial Secretary to Myres, 2 February 1924, reproduced in Papasavvas 2023, p. 20 (...)
- 27 SA1/1383/1914. The Antiquities Law, 1905. Proposed amendment, f 25, G. Jeffery to Colonial Secretar (...)
- 28 Markides 1916, p. 4.
11Markides’s efforts were constrained by his ill‑health after suffering a stroke in 1921, one of whose side-effects was a severe speech impediment.26 Of his three strategies to control illicit excavation, his own excavations (and those of Myres) set a standard for others to follow (although he proved unable fully to publish the results); he had registered the private collections of antiquities held in Larnaca, hoping to do the same for other towns (not accomplished, according to Jeffery);27 and he had strictly limited, to fewer than twenty a year, the number of permits for exporting antiquities.28 Those antiquities allowed to be exported after inspection and review were mainly those considered ‘duplicates’, a status discussed below (pp. 281ff).
- 29 White 2007, pp. 48‑49.
- 30 CO67 253/2, f 131, R. E. Stubbs, Governor, to P. Cunliffe-Lister, Secretary of State, 20 February 1 (...)
- 31 Georghallides 1985; Storrs 1937, pp. 576‑577.
12Gunnis’s enthusiasm for antiquities while ADC to Governor Storrs led him to intervene in several of the areas of responsibility of Menelaos Markides as Curator of the Cyprus Museum. These included re‑organising the museum’s collections; excavating; purchasing for the Museum accidental finds or objects in private collections; and selling ‘duplicates’ to raise funds. Since childhood Gunnis had enjoyed documenting and treasuring interesting items.29 But, as Storrs’s successor remarked, a little unfairly, “Gunnis is an amusing companion and an expert conchologist [referring to his fossil-hunting expeditions] but he has no archaeological or architectural knowledge whatsoever and, to do him justice, doesn’t pretend to any”.30 He enjoyed a certain status as ADC and Private Secretary to the Governor. This was not a politically prominent position – he is rarely mentioned in Georghallides’s massive account of Storrs’s governorship – but his election to the Museum Committee gave him the prerogative of intervening over antiquities matters.31 His lack of expertise and qualifications inevitably led to strained relations with professionals such as Markides and Jeffery and, later, John Hilton as the first Director of Antiquities.
13Gunnis’s interference started even before his election to the Museum Committee. “We inspected the Museum and I have promised the Director [i.e., Markides] to go and help him arrange his new finds, the Director is supposed to bring every find to the Governor, of late years this rule has lapsed, but I soon resurrected it, and only a few days ago the little man brought some gold earrings here which had been found in a tomb”.32 Contrary to his first impression of the Museum that “it is very well arranged by Mr Markides”, he was confiding to his diary the following summer: “Spent all the afternoon at the Museum arranging the antiquities to sell to the Americans on July 25th. The way the Museum is run is hopeless – I get more done than anyone else – I found in the basement boxes with Cesnola’s name on & the date 1878 and not yet unpacked – The vase I got at Episkopi is still on the floor – I put away myself the gold things I had found at Poli – & some of the bronze things –. Tea with old Markides at the Greek Club –”.33 Gunnis was referring to the Museum’s sales of ‘duplicate’ antiquities to tourists and to his own excavations at Polis and Episkopi (see below). The boxes with [Alessandro Palma di] Cesnola’s name on them were probably among those transferred in March 1909 from the premises in Victoria Street to the new Cyprus Museum.34
14As his frustration grew, he even started to give the Curator instructions: “Made Mr Markides turn out a box in the Museum since 1912 and never gone through! The whole thing is too hopeless & I doubt if one will ever get it straight”. … “Found stuff the old man [Markides] had thrown away in the garden from his excavations at Assos [Arsos], some of them quite nice”. … “None of shelves fitted for arranging Roman pottery. So like Markides! Made him firmly do two boxes of pottery”. … “I opened at the Museum several boxes packed in 1901 and never touched since. Poor Markides getting worse every day & can’t remember anything, all those boxes downstairs and no idea about their history. Labels, if any, eaten by silverfish. A most heart-breaking place to work in, no chance of ever getting it straight”.35 Gunnis also busied himself with the museum’s display. Noting that not a single object on display was labelled, he put to work writers of Greek, English and Turkish to produce labels using Government House invitation cards that were no longer required.36
15Gunnis, then in his late 20s, revealed in his diary an uncharitable disdain for ‘the old man’ [Markides] who was then barely 50 years old and who, despite his health problems, continued actively as Curator of the Museum until taking early retirement in 1931 (fig. 3). As White commented of Markides, “What he thought of this intervention from the governor’s secretary can only be guessed”.37
Figure 3 — Menelaos Markides with Rupert Gunnis.
Photo by John Lindros, from his film of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, 1927‑1930: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SGZ8OLNbx8, accessed 15 November 2024.
- 38 Ibid.
- 39 Pilides 2009, p. 225, n. 679.
- 40 Gunnis Diary, 4 and 5 February 1927 (the Serai), and 25 March and 29 March 1927 (the land of Christ (...)
- 41 Gunnis Diary, 5 February 1927; “that old idiot Jeffery”.
16Members of the Museum Committee could excavate if authorised by the Governor. All the excavated objects belonged to the Government (1905 Law, Sections 16 and 17). Gunnis, with no training in excavation method, promptly took advantage of this prerogative. Storrs occasionally joined Gunnis in an excursion to “open a tomb”.38 Gunnis’s initiation was immediate: on 28 January 1927 he watched a tomb being opened at the Armenian Orphanage. The following day, the Museum Committee decided that Jeffery should excavate at two sites in Nicosia but supervised by Gunnis, whose experience of excavation was inferior even to Jeffery’s.39 Gunnis himself excavated in the town “in a garden field behind the Mosque of the Serai” and “on the land of Mr Christofides”.40 When digging in Nicosia, he failed to consult Jeffrey who had to intervene when excavation threatened the stability of a Turkish minaret.41
17The two remained on very bad terms. Gunnis went on to open various tombs in Nicosia42 and in Kyrenia,43 spent a day at Episkopi in southern Cyprus digging “with the Museum man” (see below) and in June started work at Polis in the remote northwest.44 His digging in December 1927 at Enkomi has received more scholarly attention than his other excavations, all of them unpublished.45
18For the work at Polis, ancient Marion, Gunnis was accompanied by “George, one of the workmen from the Museum”, presumably George Anastasiou, and his own orderly Alexis Ioannou. This excavation, unusually, resulted in a formal report in which Gunnis explained his modus operandi:
- 46 Gunnis, “Account of excavations carried out at Polis tes Chrysochou in Cyprus by Rupert Gunnis in J (...)
As soon as I arrived on June 5th, I sent for the Muktar [Headman] of the village to come to the Police Station where I was staying and informed him that as I was excavating for the Museum I should expect his loyal co‑operation; this he promised at once, and during the month that I was there kept his word. I had no difficulty about digging on any land I wished, during the period I was at Poli as the inhabitants, knowing I was a member of the Museum Committee, were uncertain what power I had, and as I impressed on them the fact that everything found was for their Cyprus Museum and for the good of their island, were chary of claiming the third part of the find [sic] or their value in money to which they were by law entitled.46
19Gunnis was kept busy liaising with the Museum to follow up reports of illicit excavation or of accidental finds that landowners handed in to the nearest Police station, as the Law required, or to the Cyprus Museum. After a village priest had brought to the Museum a terracotta figurine found at Ayia Irini, the Swedish Cyprus Expedition immediately obtained a permit to investigate urgently the findspot, only to find that Gunnis had already made a trial trench there (he always claimed to have ‘discovered’ this famous site and then conceded it to the Swedes).47 Working closely with the police, he criss-crossed the island to conduct salvage excavations at looted sites or to acquire important finds for the Museum such as the fragments of the bronze sculpture of Septimius Severus found near Kythrea (figs. 4‑5).48 After a visit to the Karpass, he noted: “as the pottery has been taken from the tombs and all their provenance unknown, it is much better the museum should have it than that the villagers should sell it to the local collectors”.49 On a visit to Lefka the previous month, he had discussed with the police in the town “the best means of stopping the incessant digging for antiquities”, as part of an “intensive campaign under the Antiquities Law”.50
Figure 4 — Gunnis (centre) with members of the Famagusta police force.
Photo from a Gunnis album, Tunbridge Wells Borough Council t/a The Amelia.
Figure 5 — Gunnis with fragment of the Septimius Severus statue.
Photo from a Gunnis album, Tunbridge Wells Borough Council t/a The Amelia.
- 51 The Colonial Secretary, Reginald Nicholson, was Acting Governor for some eight months from December (...)
- 52 FCO 141/2415 [Cyprus: measures for prevention of smuggling of antiquities out of Cyprus], 1928‑29, (...)
- 53 FCO 141/2415, Chief Commandant of Police to Colonial Secretary, confidential, 13 May 1929.
- 54 FCO 141/2415, M. Markides to Acting Colonial Secretary, 17 May, 20 May and 27 May 1929. Markides hi (...)
20Gunnis’s “intensive campaign” against the illicit trade was acknowledged in spring 1929 during official discussions about the illegal export of antiquities. It may be no coincidence, given that leading personalities such as C. G. Gunther and J. L. Bruce of the Cyprus Mines Corporation and Loukas Pierides of Larnaca came under suspicion, that Governor Storrs was away on sick-leave during these discussions. As a keen purchaser of antiquities himself, Storrs might not have allowed these matters to be investigated by the police.51 The Acting Governor had received a reliable report that American officials of the Cyprus Mines Corporation at Skouriotissa were illegally exporting antiquities with the help of contacts at the ports to evade customs inspections, and made no secret of what they were doing.52 He quoted Gunnis as believing that “the sentences imposed by Judges for contravention of the Law are farcical & no deterrent” and proposed amending the Law “so as to provide for a minimum penalty such as will mark Govt’s determination to put down the practice of illicit buying & export or sale”. Gunnis was also reported as stating that Loukas Pierides (his fellow-collector and fellow-member of the Museum Committee) may have been one of those helping the Americans to export antiquities. In addition, it was claimed that Pierides had purchased antiquities supposedly on behalf of the Museum Committee but in reality destined for his own collection.53 Questioned about this claim, Markides confirmed that no member of the Committee (as Pierides was) had recently been authorised to buy antiquities for it. As for the Chief Commandant of Police’s request to have suspects searched at the ports, Markides regretted the lack of sufficient experts, the only experts being themselves antiquities dealers.54 It is also remarkable that in 1928, a year in which Gunnis had urged an intensive campaign against “the incessant digging for antiquities”, no fines for breaches of the Antiquities Law are recorded (table 1 below). Whether this statistic reflects the success or the failure of the campaign is unclear.
- 55 Pilides 2009, pp. 658‑659.
- 56 Stanley‑Price 2024a.
21The internal government discussion over the Skouriotissa case exposed a number of grey areas in the 1905 Law for controlling the antiquities market. Among them were the few experts who were not themselves dealers; the ability of high-ranking individuals to evade the law; and the permissions granted members of the Museum Committee to excavate. On Committee excavations, all finds belonged to the Government; but if a member had been granted a permit in a personal capacity, as had Loukas Pierides for his excavation near Sinda in 1925,55 the excavator was entitled to a share of the finds. It was a grey area, and one that a Museum Committee member could exploit to his own advantage. Gunnis’s diary entries reveal a desire to crack down on illicit excavation, but one that co‑existed with his successfully exporting several hundred objects to England, many of them probably the products of illicit excavations.56 These seemingly contradictory goals are reviewed in the concluding section below.
- 57 Merrillees 2023, pp. 36‑37.
- 58 G. Jeffery to the Commissioner of Nicosia, 15 July 1904; Pilides 2009, pp. 655‑656.
22Since its founding in 1882, the Museum had occasionally disposed of unwanted archaeological material, either by donating it to other museums abroad or by advertising it for sale. Disposals of material had the additional benefit of freeing up space for storage. Sales of ‘duplicates’ to collectors could, in principle, satisfy their interests and thereby reduce their resorting to dealers and tomb-robbers. As for donations or exchanges, the Commissioner of Larnaca, C. D. Cobham, made donations of ‘duplicates’ from his own registered collection to the Cyprus Museum and to the British Museum.57 In 1904, George Jeffery, who as Curator of Ancient Monuments was at times called in to advise on museum matters, identified “a large quantity of the commoner kind of Cypriot pottery heaped on the staircase landing of the Museum” that could be exchanged with other museums, material that J. L. Myres had apparently set aside to be sold. Jeffery had also inspected ‘duplicates’ at Larnaca which Cobham could provide for a requested exchange with the Egyptian Exploration Fund.58 In summary, the disposal of ‘duplicates’ could resolve problems of storage space, make possible beneficial exchanges of material with other museums, or, if put on sale, could satisfy the needs of collectors and souvenir-hunters while producing an income to fund fieldwork.
- 59 E.g. Tsirogiannis 2015, a useful review, citing earlier proposals for sales of ‘duplicates’ made by (...)
23What are ‘duplicates’ and why is the word used here in inverted commas? To take the second question first, a common view among archaeologists is that all archaeological material is significant, and aspects of its significance may not yet have been fully realised. New techniques of scientific analysis yield information today that could not have been imagined a hundred years ago. Moreover, the quantitative study of complete sets of excavated material is greatly impeded if parts of those sets have been donated to other museums, often in different countries, or even impossible if dispersed through sales to unknown individual buyers. The notion of a ‘duplicate’ that a museum can afford to discard is therefore a fluid one and controversial, being essentially subjective. It is not surprising that, despite a long history of the disposal of archaeological ‘duplicates’, rarely has the term been defined, even in discussions of their potential role in creating a licit market in antiquities.59
- 60 Piacentini 2017. The Palestine Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem, which Storrs knew well, opened i (...)
24Cyprus was not alone in selling antiquities at its national museum. Palestine and Syria had similar policies while the Salle de Ventes at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square in Cairo was on a scale that humbled those in other museums.60 Opened in 1902 and cleverly designed to have an entrance to it that was directly accessible from outside the museum, the sale-room helped fund the fieldwork of the Antiquities Service by selling ‘duplicate’ material from excavations. To increase further its income and to reduce theft and the illicit trade, the Service also sold complete funerary chapels (mastaba) discovered at Saqqarah to leading museums in foreign countries, as well as architectural elements, reliefs, statues, coffins and so on. The notion of ‘duplicate’ material at that period was a broad one, encouraged by the twin goals of generating income and reducing illicit excavation and theft. Moreover, decisions about the division of ‘duplicate’ finds made between the Antiquities Service and the foreign excavator could depend on the latter’s political or personal relations with the Director of the Antiquities Service or his staff. There were no clear definitions of what constituted ‘duplicate’ material. For example, Arthur Weigall, Inspector for Upper Egypt, reported:
[In Upper Egypt] I generally made the selection of what the Museum wanted, visiting the excavations for this purpose and going through the finds in the rough before they were cleaned or shown to advantage. I had no idea what the Cairo Museum required […] in any one class of objects, for my work gave me very little opportunities for visiting the Museum; and I therefore made a quite casual selection […] of what happened to strike me as being needed by us. Other excavators, considering that I was severe in my selection, preferred to take their finds to Cairo, where often only a few boxes were unpacked for inspection. Other excavators did not show their finds at all, but the selection was made at Cairo by means of photographs.
- 61 Piacentini 2017, pp. 81‑83. For a stricter conduct of a partage, compare the Swedish Cyprus Expedit (...)
25Furthermore, the excavator, if he wished, could buy later at the Egyptian Museum’s sale-room that share of the partage which had not been allocated to him.61
- 62 After 1925 and the declaration of Cyprus as a Crown Colony, the “Governor” instead of “High Commiss (...)
26The Cairo case illustrates how broad and subjective was the concept of ‘duplicate’ when applied to archaeological finds and their disposability. On the much more modest scale of Cyprus, it found concrete expression in the 1905 Antiquities Law. Its Section 32.1 declared that “No antiquity shall be exported from the Island without the permission in writing of the High Commissioner”,62 and then listed the penalties for contravention. The next section (33) reads:
33. No such permission to export shall be given unless the person desiring to export has exhibited the antiquity to the Museum Committee or its duly appointed agent and the Committee is satisfied that it has been declared or acquired under the sections enumerated in section 31, and that there are in the Museum exhibits of the same kind and quality, or the Committee does not require it, or that the Committee has lost its right to acquire it in the manner prescribed in Part 5.
27The phrase “exhibits of the same kind and quality” echoes the phrasing of the first antiquities law adopted in Greece in 1834. In that law, trading in antiquities within Greece was allowed provided that the “central and provincial museums have duplicate specimens of the same type and of the same quality” and that the objects in question were “without significance and superfluous” to the Greek museums (articles 77α, 77γ; 79‑80 of the 1834 law; emphasis added). This wording was dropped in the subsequent law of 1899 (in force until 1932) which abolished the export of ‘duplicates’, also referred to as ‘useless’ (or ‘unprofitable’) antiquities.63
- 64 No District Museums had yet been founded.
28The condition “that there are in the Museum exhibits of the same kind and quality” provided a vague, and ultimately subjective, indication of the criteria that ‘duplicates’ had to meet (Section 31 of the 1905 law refers to antiquities previously registered in private hands or recorded as sold or donated among individuals, and Part 5 refers to negotiations over purchasing antiquities from private individuals). Those antiquities for which there were “exhibits of the same kind and quality” appear to have been considered equivalent to the ‘duplicates’ mentioned in Part 6 (Sections 38‑45) of the 1905 Law. Thus, local or district museums, if established eventually, should be furnished “with duplicate or representative collections as far as may be possible” (Section 41); the Committee should “acquire, by purchase, barter of duplicate specimens or otherwise, Cyprian antiquities, sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of duplicate specimens of antiquities, when it is in the interest of the Museum or Museums that they should be so sold, exchanged or disposed of (Section 42, 4) … Provided that before selling, exchanging, or otherwise disposing of any duplicate specimens of antiquities, the Committee shall be satisfied that they really are duplicates, and not required by the District Museums” (Section 42; italics added throughout).64
- 65 Miers, Markham 1932, pp. 81‑85 in Pilides 2009, p. 651. For similar criticism, see also Sir George (...)
29In summary, for ‘duplicates’ to be considered as such, there had to be “exhibits of the same kind and quality” in the Cyprus Museum. Even some of the Museum’s exhibits were redundant by this criterion – hence Gunnis’s remark, quoted at the head of this article, about there being “too many duplicates” on display, and the comment by the Museums Association inspectors in 1932, before Porphyrios Dikaios (1904-1971) who succeeded Markides, re‑arranged the galleries, that “the aim seems to have been to display everything collected, the result being wearisome rows upon rows of pots identically similar in design” (fig. 6).65
Figure 6 — ‘Wearisome rows upon rows of pots identically similar in design’. Cyprus Museum exhibition gallery, late 1920s.
Photo: John Lindros, National Museums of World Culture – Mediterranean Museum, Sweden, CC BY‑NC‑ND.
- 66 CMC Minutes, 13 November 1911, quoted in Merrillees 2005, p. 210.
- 67 Dikaios 1961, p. x; Pilides 2009, pp. 69‑72 and pp. 646‑650.
30The quantity of ‘duplicates’ increased from 1912 in tandem with the greater excavation activity of Markides and other authorised excavators, such that it became urgent to extend the Museum to accommodate it. “This extension which will be a cloister, to be set apart, for the time being, for the deposition therein of the duplicates and triplicates [sic] and the various odds and ends which are now encumbering the Museum rooms proper or which may, hence, come into the possession of the Museum”.66 Under Markides, the Museum building was gradually extended to provide additional gallery and storage space.67
- 68 SA CM1/25, “Sale and exchange of duplicates”, (1912 June to 1928 April), passim.
- 69 See note 1 above. Three weeks after losing his possessions in the fire at Government House in Octob (...)
- 70 Cf. Storrs 1937, p. 575. The file SA CM1/25, Blue 156 contains a handwritten “List of duplicates”, (...)
31Space could also be found by selling, donating or exchanging the accumulated ‘duplicates’, with income being credited to the Cyprus Antiquities Fund established under the 1905 Law (Section 46). But in this period sale activity was minimal (table 1, fig. 7). In 1923 no sales income was recorded in the Fund’s account and in the following two years extremely little. These statistics reflect a continuation of Markides’s policy since 1912, noted earlier (see notes 25 and 28), of deliberately restricting export permits so as to discourage the illicit market. When sales did take place, it was Markides who approved them after inspection of the objects. He then forwarded the sale certificate to the High Commissioner (after 1925, the Governor) for his counter-signature in approval. By the 1920s Markides’s requests took a slightly different form, in asking whether, after he had made the sale, he had the Governor’s approval to forward to the Museum Treasurer the monies received.68 His requests to the Governor were submitted through the Private Secretary. From November 1926 this person was Rupert Gunnis who thereby gained an understanding of how the Museum’s sales operated. The dramatic increase in sales income to £200 for the year 1926 may reflect the arrival of Storrs and Gunnis, both of them keen collectors wishing to furnish their new houses appropriately, although they did not arrive until 30 November and Gunnis first visited the Museum on 12 December.69 The coincidence of dates is striking, although the relevant file (SA CM1/25) has no record of sales to them in the final month of 1926. It is also unlikely to be a coincidence that, at its meeting of 23 December 1926 at which Gunnis was elected a new member, the Museum Committee requested Markides to compile a list of ‘duplicates’ for sale either to other museums or to visiting tourists. Markides had been in favour of limiting sales of ‘duplicates’ but from December 1926 the Committee evidently adopted a new policy. Sales revenue then continued to grow for five years, the credit for this trend largely due to Gunnis’s enthusiastic promotion.70 The lower revenues after 1930 coincide with Dikaios assuming the curatorship of the Museum.
Figure 7 — Selected revenue streams of the Cyprus Antiquities Fund, 1922-1934 (data from Table 1).
Table 1 — Cyprus Antiquities Fund, 1922-1934, selected revenue categories. Currency is £, shillings and pence (£1 = 20 shillings; figures rounded to nearest shilling).
| YEAR |
GOVT. GRANT |
SUBSCRIPTIONS, DONATIONS |
SALES OF DUPLICATES |
ANTIQUITIES FINES |
| 1922 |
600 |
101 |
6.14 |
10.13 |
| 1923 |
1050* |
85.10 |
0 |
34.00 |
| 1924 |
700 |
77 |
0.3 |
12.16 |
| 1925 |
700 |
64.15 |
0.5 |
7.6 |
| 1926 |
700 |
61 |
200.6 |
15.5 |
| 1927 |
700 |
59.10 |
255.17 |
10.00 |
| 1928 |
1000 |
67.10 |
359 |
0 |
| 1929 |
1000 |
68 |
223.7 |
29.01 |
| 1930 |
1000 |
61.5 |
406.4 |
18.3 |
| 1931 |
891 |
83.14 |
169.10 |
23.10 |
| 1932 |
800 |
65 |
68.10 |
116.60 |
| 1933 |
650 |
156.19 |
139.10 |
33.8 |
| 1934 |
850 |
95.13 |
175.18 |
39.11 |
* Includes an additional sum of £850 earmarked for excavations. In 1930 £1 would be worth ca €2,300 today.
Source: The Cyprus Gazette, under ‘Cyprus Antiquities Fund’ or ‘Antiquities Fund’, 1922-1934, online at http://www.cyprusdigitallibrary.org.cy/collections/show/2 (accessed 13 November 2024).
32Gunnis’s first experience of retailing was in February 1927 when he was tipped off that a group of 150 tourists were about to visit the Museum (fig. 8). After arranging the duplicates and giving them labels with dates, he sold a few to “very rude and ill‑mannered tourists. I only sold £3 worth, I was accused of selling fakes and an American asked me for a certificate of authenticity”. He improved the quality and quantity of objects on offer, increasing the number on sale from 500 (mostly Iron Age and Hellenistic glass) to about 2000, all of them labelled.71 In July 1927 he was estimating to his parents that, by year‑end, revenue would be over £200, more than his salary (in fact his salary as ADC was £300 per annum).72 His estimate proved correct (table 1). Gunnis’s commitment to this cause is undoubted. The Mantovani tourist agency would notify Markides of the imminent arrival of a tourist group, whereupon Gunnis rushed to the Museum to act as salesman.73 His enthusiasm overcame the distaste that he felt for some of his customers and for the lack of appreciation he felt for devoting his spare time to this task. But its success was such that sales revenue far outweighed that from Museum subscriptions and donations and from fines levied for breaching the antiquities law (fig. 7).
Figure 8 — ‘Visit of first tourist ship’ (March 10, 1927). An arriving excursion-group boarding taxis at Larnaca’s Scala port.
Photo by Glaszner, from a Gunnis album, Tunbridge Wells Borough Council t/a The Amelia.
- 74 As Honorary Assistant Curator from 1932, she was named Acting Inspector of Antiquities during Gunni (...)
33His enthusiasm was also infectious to the museum volunteers such as Joan du Plat Taylor (who in 1932 became the Honorary Assistant Curator)74 and Olga Tufnell who were among a large group of volunteer sales assistants. Groups of Americans visiting from cruise-ships calling at Famagusta were a target-group:
- 75 Green, Henry 2021, p. 139, quoting a letter written by Olga Tufnell on 23 February 1930. By 1931 th (...)
[On Sunday] 300 [American] tourists from the Homeric and some 20 of us to sell them all we could in the sale room of the Museum. Force of habit was altogether too strong for me, I found myself conducting about 120 round and doing all the usual patter in my exhibition room voice! But the great thing was to get them quickly to the sale. Oh! gosh oh! gee. I’d rather do a week of exhib. than an hour of undiluted Americans. They won’t take anything with a break in it, and the flat bowls to be used as ashtrays went best, altogether we made £75.10.0 in 1½ hrs so the Mus. will be able to afford some excavating.75
- 76 Du Plat Taylor n.d., p. 15. A publication date of 1933 is suggested by a reference to the guide’s f (...)
- 77 J. R. Hilton to his parents, 10 February 1935, KCL, HILTON K/PP94, Box 1.
34In her guide to Nicosia, Mrs du Plat Taylor informed the museum visitor that “the SALE ROOM in the courtyard may be visited where duplicate pottery may be purchased. Enquiry should be made in the office on the right of the entrance…” (figs. 9‑10).76 In February 1935, with building work under way in the courtyard, it was in the Museum’s entrance‑hall that duplicates for sale were displayed for a large crowd of cruise-ship passengers.77
Figure 9 — Joan du Plat Taylor and helper at the Museum saleroom, ca 1930.
Photo from collection of R. S. Merrillees, gift of J. du Plat Taylor.
Figure 10 — Gunnis standing behind Taylor (right) at the Museum saleroom, ca 1930.
The sign reads ‘Smoking strictly prohibited’.
Photo from collection of R. S. Merrillees, gift of J. du Plat Taylor.
- 78 P. Dikaios, Keeper, for Secretary of Museum Committee, to Colonial Secretary, 4 August 1931, in Pil (...)
- 79 Government of Cyprus, Antiquities Law, 41/1935, Section 5, 4: https://www.cylaw.org/nomoi/arith/193 (...)
- 80 Martelli 1938, p. 274.
- 81 Information kindly provided by Despina Pilides, former Curator of Antiquities, Cyprus Museum. The S (...)
35In 1931 and 1932 sales revenue declined sharply although fines for breaching the Antiquities Law were much higher in 1932. In these years the worldwide financial crisis caused a reduction in tourism to Cyprus and a likely increase in illicit excavation as a potential income source. The figures also reflect the new role of Porphyrios Dikaios, Assistant Curator of the Museum since 1929 and now Curator in succession to Markides. He appealed against a cut in the Government grant in 1931 (see table 1) and warned that the sale of ‘duplicates’ was not a stable revenue: “… our stock of duplicates cannot last always: on the contrary it is soon going to be exhausted”.78 In reality, there were always sufficient ‘duplicates’ available for sale. The Cyprus Museum continued to sell ‘surplus’ antiquities, often the result of seizures of illicitly excavated material that was considered redundant for the national collections. The revised Antiquities Law of 1935 mentions the “duplicate antiquities exposed for sale at the Cyprus Museum”,79 a “wholly admirable museum where genuine objects dating from the pre-Christian era can be obtained at reasonable prices”.80 The practice continued in the Museum until finally being abolished in 1991.81
- 82 Stanley-Price, forthcoming.
- 83 Roueché 2001; Stanley-Price 2025.
36The disposal of ‘duplicates’ was controversial, however, and the sales in Nicosia elicited criticism in the early 1930s. The Museum attracted publicity following a large grant from the Carnegie Corporation for improving its premises, and for its Curator’s fieldwork which he presented at international conferences, in leading journals and in popular magazines such as The Illustrated London News.82 On the other hand, the public criticism made by W. H. Buckler and others of the state of Cyprus’s ancient monuments led to Peers and Hill making an influential inspection visit in 1934.83 These visitors could not resist passing comment on the Museum’s saleroom.
- 84 CO67 248/12, f. 81, Archaeological Joint Committee, London, 16 November 1932. The care of Cyprus mo (...)
- 85 CO67 249/11, f 153, W. H. Buckler to G. Hill, 24 January 1933, quoted by Roueché 2001, p. 159.
- 86 Miers, Markham 1932, pp. 81‑85 in Pilides 2009, p. 652.
- 87 Hill 1934, p. 8 (pagination is in reverse order of the pages), who provided no criteria for definin (...)
- 88 Hill 1934, p. 2; Stanley-Price 2024a.
- 89 CO67 249/11, f 80, P. Dikaios to J. L. Myres, 20 September 1933.
- 90 CO67 249/11, ff 95‑119. J. L. Myres to G. Clauson, 27 September 1933; CO67 253/1, ff 157–158, J. L. (...)
37At the meeting of the Archaeological Joint Committee devoted to Cyprus, Myres reported having heard that the Museum was in “lamentable condition” and continued: “The Museum has tried to raise a little money by having excavations and selling the results, but that does not seem quite a function of a Museum”.84 Buckler recognised the income argument but thought that the museum’s sale of antiquities “supplies food for gossip as to the integrity of diggers and especially of officials”. He recommended abolishing it as “unworthy of the government’s prestige”.85 Two visiting officials representing the Museums Association in Britain concluded that “really essential specimens were not being allowed out”, but they had no specialist knowledge of the archaeological material.86 During his inspection with Peers in 1934, Sir George Hill, Director of the British Museum, found the practice “not altogether dignified” but acknowledged that many great European museums adopted it and the large quantities of duplicates had to be handled somehow. He worried about the risk of selling what were not in reality duplicates – “a real danger, as past experience has shown”.87 Hill was probably referring to the pottery sold at Sotheby’s in December 1933 that had come from official excavations at Marion in 1889 (the year that Myres himself gives), had subsequently been catalogued by Myres, but had been disposed of by the Museum as ‘duplicates’.88 Myres had been surprised to find no mention of catalogued tomb-groups from Marion in Dikaios’s draft of a new guide to the Museum which he had asked Myres to review. Dikaios confessed that he had found very few labels with provenances on catalogued items, even on those objects on display. He could not answer Myres’s question about what had happened to the tomb-groups.89 Myres reported to the Colonial Office that the present Greek curator [i.e. Dikaios] had inherited a state of chaos and was trying to improve matters. But old collections were disarranged and tomb-groups broken up. “This [the disposal of duplicates] appears to be the official remedy for overcrowding; but of course it reduces what is allowed to remain on the shelves to a raree-show. It is as if the Record Office periodically scrapped the documents that are not on crested notepaper”.90
38The consignor of the Marion pots for sale at Sotheby’s was Rupert Gunnis. His ambiguous role in handling antiquities was by then well known to Hill and to others – Buckler (quoted above) probably had him in mind when commenting that the museum’s sale of antiquities encouraged “gossip about the integrity of diggers and especially of officials”. The sensitivity of the issue, and Gunnis’s high social standing in Cyprus and in England, discouraged any explicit mention of his name in connection with a scandal that was common knowledge. Finally, in March 1936, John Hilton, as the dismissed Director of Antiquities with nothing to lose, put on record his experience of Gunnis’s lack of co‑operation with the new Department of Antiquities, inaugurated on 1 January 1935.
- 91 Machluzarides 1990, Appendix A. The document published by Machluzarides survives as a draft in Hilt (...)
39Two weeks before his departure after seventeen months as the inaugural Director of Antiquities, John Hilton sent a confidential report to the Colonial Secretary in Cyprus, submitting “the following information concerning Mr. Gunnis, in case any of it is not already known to Government”.91 Hilton’s submission was based on his own experience of trying to work with Gunnis and on information in the Cyprus Museum’s files to which he had access.
40Two of the eleven paragraphs of his statement (reproduced here as Appendix 1) concern archaeological sites and can be briefly glossed. On 12 May 1935 Gunnis, the Inspector of Antiquities, recorded in his diary finding “a superb Neolithic site” at Miliou in the Paphos District. Instead of reporting its discovery to the Department and to Porphyrios Dikaios whose primary interest, Gunnis knew, was the Neolithic, he wrote privately to Stanley Casson at Oxford University and to Sir George Hill at the British Museum about their possible interest in excavating it (both immediately disclaimed any interest).92 The site, once Gunnis agreed to disclose its whereabouts, was inspected by Dikaios who declared it much too eroded to be worth inviting an archaeologist to investigate.93 Five months later, Gunnis investigated a cave above Aghirda in the foothills north of Nicosia, noting in his diary its fine stalactites. A report that he had also removed stone tools from it led Dikaios and Hilton to visit it the following month. They duly collected prehistoric finds from it, registered at the Cyprus Museum on 18 November and 26 November 1935.94 In both cases, despite being the salaried Inspector of Antiquities, Gunnis had failed to report to the Department these two site visits, demonstrating in Hilton’s view that Mr. Gunnis “is not prepared thoroughly to co‑operate with the Department”.
- 95 Stanley-Price 2023, p. 109; Stanley-Price 2024a. Even while Gunnis was Inspector of Antiquities, Di (...)
41Hilton’s other charges relate to the changing official status of Gunnis with regard to antiquities, and to the abuse of his position. In the opening paragraph, Hilton noted the previous month’s decision by the Governor, Richmond Palmer, to abolish Gunnis’s post as Inspector of Antiquities and to appoint him instead to the new Antiquities Advisory Board with an expense allowance to be debited to the Department of Antiquities budget. Palmer had handled this move in such a devious way that it was not generally known that Gunnis no longer enjoyed any official status nor responsibility for inspecting antiquities.95 The confusion over his status reflected official embarrassment about his illegally exporting antiquities (Section 2 of Hilton’s statement) that had inevitably damaged the image of the Department of Antiquities. In Hilton’s view (Section 4), even if the use of his powers to export objects was overlooked, Gunnis’s subsequent sale of his private collection in England to the Wellcome Museum and by auction at Sotheby’s could only have “created an impression which is far from negligible”, a typically English understatement.
- 96 SA CM1/25, e.g., 21 pieces of glass on 26 January 1927, and a broken statuette on 6 June 1927.
42To what extent had Gunnis abused his position in acquiring antiquities at the Cyprus Museum? During his first year in Cyprus, Gunnis bought a few duplicates and obtained the certificates allowing their export.96 The recorded sales to him are very few and of small quantities, and yet in March of the following year he dispatched twelve packing-cases of antiquities to England. How had he managed to accumulate so many? Many of them he must have acquired by other means, for instance purchasing from dealers or from villagers who had, as the law required, reported to the police any accidental discovery of antiquities. Thanks to his close relations with the police, Gunnis was the first official to learn of new discoveries, giving him an opportunity to purchase them for himself. Moreover, at some point, according to Hilton’s denunciation, he managed to export many more antiquities ‘legally’ by acquiring the authority to sign export permits for ‘duplicates’ sold in the Museum, ‘duplicates’ that often he himself had selected for sale. Thus, he was able to approve his own export requests, while omitting to keep a carbon copy of them on file (Hilton’s denunciation, Section 3). Inevitably the suspicion arises that he may have abused his signature authority to acquire pieces from the Museum collection that caught his eye and that he could designate as ‘duplicates’ to be disposed of.
- 97 CMC Minutes, 6 May 1932, in SA CM1/12A.
43The Cyprus Museum file CM1/25 “Sale and Exchange of Duplicates” ends in April 1928 – no immediate successor file has yet been identified. It may have been from this point in April 1928 that copies of sales certificates were no longer kept. The revenue statistics for the Cyprus Antiquities Fund would have been compiled from the monies received by the Museum Treasurer. Significantly, in May 1932, the Museum Committee (with both Gunnis and the retired Markides as an honorary member in attendance) rectified the lack of documentation by agreeing that export permits should have carbon copies and should record the prices paid.97 This was the first meeting of the Committee after Storrs’s departure and was held a few months after Dikaios had officially become Curator of the Museum. Gunnis’s acquisitions directly from the Museum are likely to have ceased at this point. As Inspector of Antiquities and the first recipient of reports of illicit excavations, however, he continued to travel throughout the island on behalf of the Museum Committee.
- 98 J. R. B. Stewart to A. J. B. Wace, 5 December 1935. See Stanley-Price 2024b.
- 99 Gunnis Diary, 15 December 1927; on Palma, see Merrillees 2014, pp. 412‑413 and on the engineer Gaff (...)
- 100 CO 67 253/2, 10 August 1934, ff 115‑121, T. Mogabgab to Sir George Hill; text also transcribed in H (...)
44As for his behaviour in the field while investigating reports, Hilton limited himself to recounting three incidents from among many, namely Gunnis’s alleged opening of a tomb at night in the area of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition’s concession at Polis (Hilton, Section 5); his purchasing of antiquities in Dali at a higher price if he were acquiring them for himself rather than for the Museum (Hilton, Section 6); and the police raids that he ordered on the private collections of George Basil Palma and J. C. Gaffiero. The visiting archaeologist who was the source for the Dali story was J. R. B. Stewart who in his own correspondence also referred to the nocturnal tomb excavation at Polis, a scandal that Hilton would have told him about.98 Hilton (Section 7) denounced the arbitrary nature of the police raids on the two private collections, both of which had been duly registered with the Museum.99 His comment (Section 8) that others who were in possession of illicit antiquities promptly smashed them out of fear [of prosecution] echoes the report of the same incident by Theophilus Mogabgab who commented that amongst the antiquities “were some real treasures. The loss was irreparable and Capt. Gunnis was aghast but the harm was done”.100
45In his final paragraph (Section 11), Hilton queried how Gunnis’s travelling allowance [of £150 per year, the same as his previous salary as Inspector] could be justified, before ending what was in effect his farewell official communication before leaving his position as Director: “in the light of Mr. Gunnis’ behaviour in the past and his present reputation, and attitude to this Department, I would recommend that all possible care be taken to avoid ambiguity in his position and grounds for misconception of the nature of his connection with Antiquities”.
- 101 CO67/264/8, f 80, Colonial Secretary to Acting Director Antiquities [P. Dikaios], 20 April 1936.
- 102 Stanley-Price 2023; Stanley-Price 2025.
- 103 Stanley-Price 2024a, Appendix A.
46Governor Palmer who, influenced by his friend Gunnis, had never had a high regard for Hilton, considered the latter’s charges not worth pursuing since their author had now left the island.101 But Gunnis’s role with antiquities did decline sharply from this point, despite Palmer’s lack of follow‑up, because a new Secretary of State for the Colonies, W. Ormsby-Gore, was determined to resolve this longstanding issue.102 Eventually, Palmer himself, shortly before leaving Cyprus in 1939, put on record his own bitter denunciation of Gunnis that included his suspected illicit trading in antiquities for his personal profit.103
47Two questions arise: why did Hilton not act earlier in reporting Gunnis’s behaviour to higher authorities? And how could Gunnis resolve to stop ‘the incessant digging for antiquities’ if he was also purchasing the products of that digging?
- 104 Stanley-Price 2023; Stanley-Price 2024a.
48The short answer to the first question lies in the power relations that obtained in Cyprus. Hilton’s arrival as Director of Antiquities challenged the dominant position that Gunnis had created for himself as the antiquities specialist, with the support of the Governors, first Storrs and then Palmer. Under Storrs he had had carte blanche in the antiquities field, a dominance given official recognition when Storrs created for him the post of Inspector of Antiquities. Having then ingratiated himself with Governor Palmer, Gunnis manoeuvred to maintain his own position while undermining Hilton’s authority.104 His misdemeanours in exporting antiquities were common knowledge in Cyprus and Britain. In his carefully phrased denunciation, Hilton provided information about Gunnis “in case any of it is not already known to Government”.
- 105 E. J. Forsdyke to “My dear Jack”, 9 November 1935, in KCL, HILTON K/PP94, Box 1.1. Professor J. D. (...)
- 106 “Hilton fell out with Gunnis who told him what to do”; A. H. S. ‘Peter’ Megaw, Hilton’s successor a (...)
49In Britain, Gunnis’s ambiguous behaviour was known to the Colonial Office and to senior figures in the archaeological world such as Sir George Hill, Director of the British Museum. The Museum’s Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, E. J. Forsdyke (who was to succeed Hill as Director in 1936) made a number of shrewd points about the matter in a letter (reproduced here as Appendix 2) that he wrote after it had become common knowledge that Hilton, whom he did not know personally, had been dismissed.105 Forsdyke asked why Hilton had not intervened earlier if as Director he knew of ‘malpractices’ and if Gunnis (whom he carefully does not name) was his subordinate in the Department. But Forsdyke had misunderstood the situation. Gunnis answered only to the Museum Committee – he was not a staff member of the Department of Antiquities. He is not listed as such in the Cyprus Gazette in the years 1935-1936 nor in the Cyprus Blue Book 1935. Moreover, Hilton in his denunciation refers to Gunnis not being “prepared thoroughly to co‑operate with [sic] the Department”. Rather, he was a close intimate of the Governor and never considered himself subordinate to Hilton. On the contrary, as he had with Markides, he used to give Hilton orders.106
- 107 See Appendix 2. On how looters viewed the Museum, see also the anecdote recounted by Gjerstad 1980, (...)
50Forsdyke ended his letter with an anecdote about the illicit market in Cyprus that typified, to him, what happened when officers of an Antiquities Department indulged in trafficking.107 He referred to the antiquities auctioned at Sotheby’s and then warned that the ‘notorious’ sale of ‘duplicates’ (using inverted commas) at the Museum could be dangerous and should be strictly controlled. Not much later, it emerged how Gunnis had exploited the sale policies in his own favour.
- 108 R. Gunnis to his mother, 8 February 1927, quoted by White 2007, p. 53.
- 109 Stanley-Price 2024b.
- 110 Green, Henry 2021, pp. 122‑123, 133‑134; Hilton n.d., and family correspondence (KCL, HILTON K/PP94 (...)
51Gunnis started collecting antiquities in Cyprus soon after arrival, confessing in a letter to his mother that from one of his excavations “… found some very nice pieces of pottery besides a silver mediaeval coin … which relics needless to add I have pinched for myself”.108 His collection had then grown quickly. His apparent enthusiasm for stopping the “incessant digging for antiquities” did not restrain him from simultaneously building up his own collection. The two activities, preventing illicit excavation and purchasing its products, co‑existed as if reflecting a state of denial – or perhaps indifference – that they were closely linked. Nor did the archaeologist J. R. B. Stewart, who lamented the illicit excavation of sites while also purchasing looted antiquities, appear to experience any cognitive dissonance.109 Gunnis’s love of intrigue and his devious nature enabled him to reconcile in his own mind these two contradictory goals. An alternative interpretation would be that his outward enthusiasm for stopping the “incessant digging for antiquities” was a deliberate strategy to divert attention away from his own acquisitions. In a not dissimilar way, Gunnis’s charming manners in the company of young ladies of his age such as Olga Tufnell, Joan du Plat Taylor and Judy Hilton (John Hilton’s sister) diverted attention away from his homosexuality.110
- 111 Tsirogiannis 2015, p. 87.
- 112 See Dikaios’s complaints in CO67 249/11, f 80, P. Dikaios to J. L. Myres, 20 September 1933; Gunnis (...)
- 113 O’Keefe 1997, pp. 66‑75.
52The drive to sell more ‘duplicates’ substantially increased the Museum’s income but did it help to undermine the illicit market for antiquities and thus reduce the extent of illegal excavation? The answer must be negative. Cyprus has not been exceptional in this respect: the experience of other countries is that authorised sales of ‘duplicates’ have not been effective in suppressing the illicit market for antiquities.111 The numerous reports in the late 1920s and 1930s of unauthorised digging, and the salvage excavations made in response to them, were a constant preoccupation of Markides and Dikaios as Curators and of Gunnis, first as Storrs’s ADC and then as Inspector of Antiquities.112 Jeffery’s opinion in 1925 that the Museum’s buying and selling might actually encourage the illicit market reflects an argument often heard in debates for and against a licit market.113 In the case of Cyprus, the impact of the legal sale of ‘duplicate’ antiquities is all the more difficult to assess, given that one of its strongest advocates manipulated it for his own benefit.
DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES
CYPRUS
CONFIDENTIAL
March 18, 1936
53Hon. Colonial Secretary,
With reference to your Confidential letters No. 1445/35 of the 30th December 1935, No. P. 1192 of the 10th February 1936, and No. 497/36 of the 17th February 1936, I have the honour to submit the following information concerning Mr. Gunnis, in case any of it is not already known to Government. The enclosure to the second of your above letters stated that Mr. Gunnis will have no official status. He is however given a special position and designation, with expenses paid through this Department. There is reason to doubt whether the alteration in this position will be readily discernible to the majority of the population; in whose eyes his frequent appearance in all parts of the island necessarily make him appear the chief authority in connection with antiquities.
2. Mr. Gunnis has a widespread reputation, both in the island and outside it, as an unauthorised exporter of antiquities on a considerable scale. This reputation, however exaggerated, must be a handicap to anyone engaged on work connected with the Department of Antiquities and can only do harm to the repute and effectiveness of the Department itself. That the reputation is not entirely without foundation is I think indicated by the following facts.
3. Before Mr. Gunnis became Inspector of Antiquities he was a member of the Museum Committee. He was given authority to sign export permits for antiquities sold in the Museum. This authority he used to sign permits (of a new type without duplicates) for the export of a large quantity of antiquities taken out of the island for himself. The cases were, I am informed by the Assistant Curator, addressed to the Curator of the Museum. At the same time the choice of objects in the Museum for sale was I believe largely determined by Mr. Gunnis.
4. That Mr. Gunnis exported large numbers of interesting antiquities during this period, if not after, is confirmed by the facts: (a) that he is known to have sold a considerable quantity of Cyprus antiquities to the Director of the Welcome [sic] Museum in London, Mr. Starkie; (b) that on the 12th December 1933, Messrs Sotheby & Co., offered for sale some 390 objects belonging to Mr. Gunnis, most, if not all of which were, I believe, from Cyprus; some of which were bought for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and some for the Archaeological Institute of the University of London. These were not therefore objects of negligible value; and a number of pieces of gold and other jewellery were among them. Even if the fact that Mr. Gunnis made use of his powers to export objects for his private collection can be overlooked, his subsequent sale of a large proportion of these objects can only have created an impression which is far from negligible.
5. In 1929 when the Swedish Archaeological Expedition were excavating near Polis, Mr. Gunnis took the present Chief Attendant of the Museum (George Anastasiou) and one or two policemen, and in secret at night opened a tomb not far from the site under investigation by the Swedes. What he found I do not know, but it appears that he replaced one or two small objects and a quantity of earth and “opened” the tomb again on the following day in front of villagers. I understood that he gave the Museum Attendant £10 “for payment of labourers.”
6. An Archaeologist visiting the Island in December 1935 was told in Dali that Mr. Gunnis was in the habit of buying Antiquities and that he gave higher prices when buying for himself than when buying for the Museum. His method of purchase on one occasion was described; having been allowed to look at a ring he threatened to break it unless his price was accepted. Similar stories are current and can only have a pernicious effect if the connection of Mr. Gunnis with the Department is allowed to continue.
7. This effect is exacerbated by the apparently arbitrary manner in which before, and since, he became Inspector of Antiquities Mr. Gunnis has conducted police raids of private collections such as those of Mr. Palma of Famagusta, and Mr. Gaffiero of Nicosia, while the notorious collections of more prominent members of the community were left untouched. The case of Mr. Palma appears to have been as follows – Mr Palma’s collection was seen from time to time by the late Curator of the Museum, Mr. Markides. Mr. Markides could, under the Antiquities Law 1904 [sic], and from time to time did remove objects which he desired for the Museum; payment for which, though offered by Mr. Markides, was refused by Mr. Palma. Letters exist showing that on one occasion at least Mr. Palma was authorised by Mr. Markides to purchase certain objects for the Museum; and he asserts that this occurred upon several occasions. There was, therefore, no secret about Mr. Palma’s collection. In fact, he submitted a list of his collection on 6th April, 1924 and was authorised to retain the objects in the list. In 1927 the list was probably as nearly up‑to‑date as those of most collections. Yet in 1927 Mr. Gunnis, being in the neighbourhood, suddenly decided to send the police to seize the whole collection. On Mr. Palmer’s [Palma’s] suggestion that at least the Curator of the Museum should supervise the packing, the house was guarded until the next day when Mr. Markides arrived. Mr. Palma was then handed a paper stating that he gave over everything and was told that if he signed it he would not be brought to court. In some natural confusion and fear he signed the paper. A few days after he applied to the President of the Museum Committee for the return of those objects which were not of use to the Museum, but heard nothing more. The case of Mr. Gaffiero’s collection was similar, except that this case was brought to Court, when, the present Curator witnessing to having seen the collection on many occasions, Mr. Gaffiero was allowed to retain the collection.
8. The result of such raids was sometimes that other private collections were broken up in fear.
9. Mr. Gunnis demonstrated that he is not prepared thoroughly to co‑operate with the Department. As is known to the Government, he discovered in May 1935, a Neolithic site whose whereabouts he would not for some time disclose. He states that Mr. Casson, Oxford University and the British Museum, were anxious to investigate such a site. I am confidentially informed on the best authority that neither Mr. Casson nor either of the bodies mentioned had any such desire.
10. In October 1935, soon after his return to the Island, Mr. Gunnis visited a cave above Aghirda which had since been found by the Curator to contain Neolithic remains. Mr. Gunnis apparently took away after this visit, a number of objects such as stone implements. He reported nothing of his visit.
11. The purpose of Mr. Gunnis’ travelling allowance is not clear to me, nor whether any supervision of his expenditure is to be exercised by the Head of the Department through which it is paid. Though the Museum work is at present considerably more hampered by lack of funds than before the creation of the Department, I must presume that there are reasons unknown to me which justify this expenditure, but in the light of Mr. Gunnis’ behaviour in the past and his present reputation, and attitude to this Department, I would recommend that all possible care be taken to avoid ambiguity in his position and grounds for misconception of the nature of his connection with Antiquities.
(sgd) J. N. Hilten [sic]
Director of Antiquities
Confidential
THE BRITISH MUSEUM
9 November 1935
54My dear Jack,
Though I do not know Hilton, I know all about his appointment, which concerns me particularly here, and I was very much surprised when I heard that he was unsatisfactory to the point of dismissal. You would have to be frightfully bad for that, in any branch of the Civil Service, and Hilton had been approved by Hill, Peers, Ashmole and you, and was well qualified academically. Very unlikely, therefore, that he can have turned out so badly; and I suspected that something might be wrong somewhere else in Cyprus. This also concerns me, as touching Hilton’s successor, who would be either Radford (Office of Works) or Megaw (B.S.A.). Nothing can hurt Radford, but Megaw must not be allowed to leave Athens for a job from which he might get booted in a year. So I looked into it and found that other people had the same views about Hilton, and I believe it is likely that he will be offered an extension of his probationary period, which I hope he will accept, and stay there.
Meanwhile, it seems to me that he ought, for his own sake, to consider very carefully what he says about his subordinates, for in damning them he damns himself. You know whom I mean: I suppose this person is Hilton’s subordinate? The Director of a Service of Antiquities would be expected to direct the Director of the Museum and the various Inspectors. If his duties and responsibilities are not defined, they ought to be by now. Well, assuming that any of these people act improperly, it is surely Hilton’s business to correct them, or to report them to higher authority. It is also his business to know the truth about these tales: if he does not know them to be true, he ought not to repeat them; if he does, he ought to take official action. This seems to me to be the position now: if he stays in Cyprus, he will have to put the house in order himself. If you were to do what you had in mind (and what I just managed to stop Myres doing at the Archaeological Joint Committee the other day), Hilton would be in a very awkward position. I should think the Colonial Office would want to know why, if he was aware of malpractices, he took no official steps to stop them.
‘Malpractices’ reminds me that a Cypriote came to me here the other day with a tracing of an inscription. He said it was from a tombstone and that in the tomb was jewellery. If I would agree to buy the lot, he would smuggle it out. I told him he could hardly expect me to help his illegalities in Cyprus, and asked why he did not try to get permission to export it properly. ‘No’, he said, ‘for if I took it to the Museum, they would confiscate it and sell it for themselves’. This is the kind of thing that people believe in Cyprus, and it shows what comes of traffic in antiquities on the part of officers of the service, private or public. On the one side we have Sotheby’s catalogue; on the other, the sale of ‘duplicates’ at the Museum. This last may be useful, but it is dangerous in many ways, and ought to be strictly controlled. I do not know if it still goes on, it was notorious, and Hilton would be well advised to look into it himself, if it is his business. And if it is not his business, what is the Director of Antiquities meant to direct?
Yrs,
E. J. Forsdyke (signed)
Haut de page
Bibliographie
Abbreviations
ADC: Aide‑de‑Camp
CMC: Cyprus Museum Committee
CVAR: Centre of Visual Arts and Research, Severis Foundation
CO: Colonial Office (London)
FCO: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (London)
HMI: Henry Moore Institute (Leeds)
KCL: King’s College London, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives
SA: State Archives, Nicosia
TNA: The National Archives (Kew, UK)
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Pilides D. 2009. George Jeffery: his diaries and the ancient monuments of Cyprus, 2 vols. Nicosia.
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Stanley-Price N. 2001. “The Ottoman Law on Antiquities (1874) and the founding of the Cyprus Museum”. V. Tatton-Brown (ed.), Cyprus in the 19th Century AD: fact, fancy and fiction. Oxford, pp. 267‑275.
Stanley-Price N. 2023. “Intrigue and feud in colonial Cyprus: Professor Talbot Rice’s tendentious report (1936) on the new Antiquities Department”. Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 11, pp. 105‑118.
Stanley-Price N. 2024a. “Power and impunity in 1930s colonial Cyprus: Rupert Gunnis, the ‘uncrowned king’, and his sudden downfall”. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 52, pp. 464‑495. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2023.2287252.
Stanley-Price N. 2024b. “The road to Vounous: J.R.B. Stewart’s fateful first visit to Cyprus in 1935”. Mediterranean Archaeology 37, pp. 63‑71.
Stanley-Price N. 2025. “Colonial society and the dismissal of John Hilton, first Director of Antiquities in Cyprus”. T. Kiely, A. Reeve, L. Crewe (eds.), Empire and Excavation: critical perspectives on archaeology in British-period Cyprus, 1878–1960. Leiden, pp. 109‑125. DOI: 10.59641/h6k2e3f4g5.
Stanley-Price N. forthcoming. “Porphyrios Dikaios and the 1936 CISPP international congress in Oslo”. Convivium: An International Conference in honour of Prof. Emeritus Demetrios Michaelides on the occasion of his 75th birthday, Nicosia, 26‑28 October 2021. Oxford.
St. Laurent B., Taskömür H. 2013. “The Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem, 1890-1930: an alternative narrative”. Jerusalem Quarterly 55, pp. 6‑45.
Storrs R. 1937. Orientations. London.
Storrs R., O’Brien B. 1930. The handbook of Cyprus, ninth (Jubilee) issue with map. London.
Symons D. 1987. “Rupert Gunnis (1899–1965)”. CCEC 7, pp. 3‑10.
Tsirogiannis C. 2015. “Nekyia: duplicates and the antiquities market”. Journal of Art Crime 12, pp. 81‑88.
White A. 2007. “Rupert Gunnis and his Dictionary of British Sculptors”. Sculpture Journal 16, pp. 47‑73.
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Notes
Henry Moore Institute Archive, Leeds, Rupert Forbes Gunnis Archive, Inv. no. 2011.218, Boxes 18‑20, Diaries 1926–1939 (hereafter, Gunnis Diary), entry for 12 December 1926. Gunnis’s papers were donated in 2011 by his brother Nigel’s daughter, Lady Diana Farnham (1931–2021). On George Jeffery (1855-1935), see Pilides 2009 and, for his wife’s death, ibid., p. 222.
Pilides 2018.
Gunnis Diary, 23 December 1926; Cyprus Museum Committee (hereafter CMC), Minutes, 23 December 1926; Storrs 1937, pp. 576‑577.
Gunnis Diary, 20 March 1928; Stanley-Price 2024a.
His work in England predominates in biographical notices, of which the fullest is White 2007, despite the author apparently not having had access to the papers now at the Henry Moore Institute. See also Symons 1987 and Knox 2004. For a summary of his background and life before Cyprus, see White’s account and Stanley-Price 2024a.
Gunnis 1936.
White 2007, p. 72, n. 11 and fig. 12. Sir George Howard was a close friend of Gunnis.
Centre of Visual Arts and Research, Nicosia: https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ (accessed 12 November 2024).
White 2007, figs. 7, 8, 9 and 13 (see figs. 4‑5 below).
The five (only) photos of monuments in his Historic Cyprus are all credited to Mangoian Bros., however.
State Archives (henceforth, SA), Nicosia, SA1/1383/1914. The Antiquities Law, 1905. Proposed amendment, f 23, L. Pierides to Private Secretary, 28 March 1925; Gjerstad 1980, p. 12. For the modification of the Law, see http://www.cylaw.org/nomoi/arith/1927_1_006.pdf (accessed 13 November 2024).
All excavations carried out against the law are ‘illegal’. They are also considered ‘illicit’ if they contravene the prevailing social mores, but those mores may not be shared by those doing the digging. The term ‘illicit’ is used here with this reservation.
SA1/1383/1914. The Antiquities Law, 1905. Proposed amendment, f 25, G. Jeffery to Colonial Secretary, 15 November 1925.
Government of Cyprus, Antiquities Law, 4/1905: https://www.cylaw.org/nomoi/arith/1905_1_004.pdf (accessed 14 November 2024); Stanley-Price 2001. An English translation of the Ottoman Law of 1874 was made in 1883 and is archived at SA CM1/213.
Pilides 2009, p. 65. For the 1905 Law’s impact on monument preservation, see also Emerick 2003, chapter 4.
Pilides 2009, pp. 55‑56.
Pilides 2009, p. 57.
SA1/1429/14. The text of Farrell’s report is reproduced by Merrillees 2005, pp. 195‑198, from a copy in the former collection of C. D. Cobham.
Myres, Ohnefalsch-Richter 1899; The National Archives (TNA), London, Colonial Office, Cyprus, Original correspondence (henceforth: ‘CO’; all folio numbers are from the black numerical series), CO 67, 249/11, f 107, J. L. Myres, Memorandum on the present administration of antiquities in Cyprus. December 1910, Retrospect.
SA1/593/1912, G. Jeffery to Colonial Secretary, 20 March 1912.
SA1/1383/1914, ff 13‑19, J. L. Myres, Memorandum on the working of the present antiquity law in Cyprus, 22 April 1915.
Pilides 2009, pp. 68‑69 and pp. 642‑648; Pilides 2018, p. 9.
SA1/534/1912. Illicit excavations and dealing in antiquities. H. Goold-Adams to Colonial Secretary, memo, 11 February 1912.
Markides 1916, p. 3; Pilides 2018.
This power entrusted in the 1905 Law to the High Commissioner was devolved to Markides on taking up his post in 1912. In 1932 Dikaios was granted the same powers that Markides had had (Cyprus Gazette 27 May 1932, p. 334). In 1935 John Hilton as the incoming inaugural Director of Antiquities was also permitted to sign export permits (Cyprus Gazette 15 February 1935, p. 85).
SA1/959/1924/77, Colonial Secretary to Myres, 2 February 1924, reproduced in Papasavvas 2023, p. 203. It happened “only nine years after his appointment as Curator” (Pilides 2018, p. 9); he had been afflicted “for over six years” according to Miers, Markham 1932, pp. 81‑85, reproduced in Pilides 2009, p. 651. Also, see Olga Tufnell’s observations in 1929-1930 in Green, Henry 2021, pp. 120‑121 and 140.
SA1/1383/1914. The Antiquities Law, 1905. Proposed amendment, f 25, G. Jeffery to Colonial Secretary, 15 November 1925. The registration of private collections and dealers is too large a topic to be discussed here. For one such collection, see Merrillees 2014.
Markides 1916, p. 4.
White 2007, pp. 48‑49.
CO67 253/2, f 131, R. E. Stubbs, Governor, to P. Cunliffe-Lister, Secretary of State, 20 February 1933.
Georghallides 1985; Storrs 1937, pp. 576‑577.
R. Gunnis to his mother: https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/rupert-gunnis-adc-to-sir-ronal-storrs-wrote-to-his-mother-about-his-busy-days-just-before-christmas/ (accessed 15 November 2024).
Gunnis Diary, 7 July 1927, the text reproduced in fig. 2 here.
Pilides 2009, p. 68; also, Merrillees 2023.
Gunnis Diary, 14 October 1927, 15 October 1927, 16 October 1927, and 4 May 1928.
Gunnis Diary, 2 February 1927; CMC 29 January 1927. https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ for 2 February 1927. Miers, Markham 1932 commented on the trilingual labels (in Pilides 2009, p. 651).
White 2007, p. 51.
Ibid.
Pilides 2009, p. 225, n. 679.
Gunnis Diary, 4 and 5 February 1927 (the Serai), and 25 March and 29 March 1927 (the land of Christofides). https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ for 25 March and 29 March 1927.
Gunnis Diary, 5 February 1927; “that old idiot Jeffery”.
Gunnis Diary, 16 April 1927, and 6, 10 and 26 May 1927, 12 December 1928 (https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ for 12 December 1928).
Gunnis Diary, 31 May 1927. https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ for 31 May 1927.
Gunnis Diary, 25 March 1927 and CMC Minutes, 26 February 1927 (Episkopi); and Diary 6 June 1927 and CMC Minutes, 25 June 1927 (Polis).
Gunnis Diary, 16 December 1927; see Merrillees 2014, pp. 412‑414 for references to early work at Enkomi.
Gunnis, “Account of excavations carried out at Polis tes Chrysochou in Cyprus by Rupert Gunnis in June 1927”, HMI Inv. no. 2011.0218/M, Box 13, 10 pages; CMC Minutes, 25 June 1927. See also Smith 2012, pp. 34‑35, referring perhaps to a copy of the same report. In fact, if it was an excavation for the Museum Committee, all finds were Government property; only in the case of accidental finds would the Polis inhabitants have been entitled to a third share.
Houby-Nielsen 2016, pp. 107‑108. https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ for 15 February 1930. On Gunnis and the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, see too Symons 1987, pp. 3‑4.
Storrs 1937, p. 575; White 2007, p. 52 and fig. 7; Dikaios 1961, p. 111 and frontispiece. On his negotiations with villagers at Parekklesia to buy inscriptions, see https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/what-i-saw/rupert-gunnis-wrote-to-his-parents-in-1929/ (accessed 16 November 2024).
Gunnis Diary, 9 December 1927. https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ for 9 December 1927.
Gunnis Diary, 6 November 1927 (Lefka). https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ for 6 November 1927. The “intensive campaign” is mentioned in TNA FCO 141/2415, 8 March 1929, memo to Colonial Secretary.
The Colonial Secretary, Reginald Nicholson, was Acting Governor for some eight months from December 1928 during Storrs’s sick-leave and chose his own ADC. Gunnis, when not on leave, served instead as Private Secretary to the Office of the Attorney General; SA4/1088 Red 13; Stanley-Price 2024a, p. 468.
FCO 141/2415 [Cyprus: measures for prevention of smuggling of antiquities out of Cyprus], 1928‑29, memo from R. Nicholson, Acting Governor, to Attorney General, 6 March 1929. The informant was the artist Keith Henderson (1883-1982) who was spending a year in Cyprus funded by the Empire Marketing Board.
FCO 141/2415, Chief Commandant of Police to Colonial Secretary, confidential, 13 May 1929.
FCO 141/2415, M. Markides to Acting Colonial Secretary, 17 May, 20 May and 27 May 1929. Markides himself would visit the ports to inspect antiquities destined for export.
Pilides 2009, pp. 658‑659.
Stanley‑Price 2024a.
Merrillees 2023, pp. 36‑37.
G. Jeffery to the Commissioner of Nicosia, 15 July 1904; Pilides 2009, pp. 655‑656.
E.g. Tsirogiannis 2015, a useful review, citing earlier proposals for sales of ‘duplicates’ made by Paul Bator, John Merryman, Patrick O’Keefe and others.
Piacentini 2017. The Palestine Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem, which Storrs knew well, opened in 1921 and had a Sale-Room; St. Laurent, Taskömür 2013, p. 34.
Piacentini 2017, pp. 81‑83. For a stricter conduct of a partage, compare the Swedish Cyprus Expedition’s negotiations in Cyprus in 1931 (Gjerstad 1980, p. 172).
After 1925 and the declaration of Cyprus as a Crown Colony, the “Governor” instead of “High Commissioner”.
Galanakis 2012.
No District Museums had yet been founded.
Miers, Markham 1932, pp. 81‑85 in Pilides 2009, p. 651. For similar criticism, see also Sir George Hill, “Report of the condition of antiquities in Cyprus”, April 1934, p. 7 (SA1/728/1934, ff 2‑15), and Cyprus Mail, 17 April 1935.
CMC Minutes, 13 November 1911, quoted in Merrillees 2005, p. 210.
Dikaios 1961, p. x; Pilides 2009, pp. 69‑72 and pp. 646‑650.
SA CM1/25, “Sale and exchange of duplicates”, (1912 June to 1928 April), passim.
See note 1 above. Three weeks after losing his possessions in the fire at Government House in October 1931, Storrs wrote to a friend that “as a collector I am finished; as a governor only just begun …” (Georghallides 1985, p. 700, n. 1) but in his memoirs he downplayed its loss, claiming not to consider himself a collector since he “bought for the pride of the eye” (Storrs 1937, p. 601).
Cf. Storrs 1937, p. 575. The file SA CM1/25, Blue 156 contains a handwritten “List of duplicates”, of around 418 numbered items in total, dated March 1928, author unknown.
Gunnis Diary, 12 February 1927, 7 March 1927, 10 March 1927 (“Great sale to Americans, 100 at a time. Made £60”), and 23 January 1928. The photo in fig. 8 has a caption giving 10 March 1927 as Gunnis’s first cruise-ship visit but his diary records the first one on 12 February.
Gunnis Diary 27 July 1927; https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ for 27 July 1927.
Gunnis Diary, 16 March 1928; SA CM1/25, 4 July 1927, 4 September 1927.
As Honorary Assistant Curator from 1932, she was named Acting Inspector of Antiquities during Gunnis’s leaves of absence (e.g. from 11 to 23 November 1932; Cyprus Gazette 25 November 1932; CMC Minutes, 5 November 1932) and occasionally Acting Curator during Dikaios’s own leaves (e.g. in September 1934). But these were temporary, stand‑in appointments held briefly in addition to her usual duties as Assistant Curator. On her career, see Hirschfeld 2007.
Green, Henry 2021, p. 139, quoting a letter written by Olga Tufnell on 23 February 1930. By 1931 the average annual number of tourists landing for the day from cruise-ships was as high as 5,200 (Emerick 2003, p. 174 quoting SA1: 690/31).
Du Plat Taylor n.d., p. 15. A publication date of 1933 is suggested by a reference to the guide’s forthcoming publication in a letter dated 13 January 1933 (Pilides 2009, p. 420). Storrs, O’Brien 1930, p. 70, also mention the antiquities for sale there but Dikaios does not in his own Guide to the Museum (Dikaios 1961; first ed. 1947).
J. R. Hilton to his parents, 10 February 1935, KCL, HILTON K/PP94, Box 1.
P. Dikaios, Keeper, for Secretary of Museum Committee, to Colonial Secretary, 4 August 1931, in Pilides 2009, p. 654.
Government of Cyprus, Antiquities Law, 41/1935, Section 5, 4: https://www.cylaw.org/nomoi/arith/1935_1_041.pdf (accessed 17 November 2024). See also SA ANTQ1/759 Duplicate antiquities, sale of (1937 March – 1954 February).
Martelli 1938, p. 274.
Information kindly provided by Despina Pilides, former Curator of Antiquities, Cyprus Museum. The Salle de Ventes in Cairo was officially closed in 1979 although sales may have stopped a few years earlier (Piacentini 2017, p. 80).
Stanley-Price, forthcoming.
Roueché 2001; Stanley-Price 2025.
CO67 248/12, f. 81, Archaeological Joint Committee, London, 16 November 1932. The care of Cyprus monuments. On this meeting, see also Roueché 2001, p. 158.
CO67 249/11, f 153, W. H. Buckler to G. Hill, 24 January 1933, quoted by Roueché 2001, p. 159.
Miers, Markham 1932, pp. 81‑85 in Pilides 2009, p. 652.
Hill 1934, p. 8 (pagination is in reverse order of the pages), who provided no criteria for defining the status of duplicates, however. His Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, E. J. Forsdyke, used inverted commas when referring to ‘duplicates’ (see Appendix 2 here).
Hill 1934, p. 2; Stanley-Price 2024a.
CO67 249/11, f 80, P. Dikaios to J. L. Myres, 20 September 1933.
CO67 249/11, ff 95‑119. J. L. Myres to G. Clauson, 27 September 1933; CO67 253/1, ff 157–158, J. L. Myres to G. Clauson, 17 January 1934. A “raree‑show” was a peep‑show, often contained in a box. On missing, perhaps ‘scrapped’, documents at Government Record Offices, see the next note here and Stanley‑Price 2024a, Appendix B.
Machluzarides 1990, Appendix A. The document published by Machluzarides survives as a draft in Hilton’s private papers at KCL but, although referred to in other government correspondence, it is not apparently to be found in The National Archives or the Cyprus State Archives. For the credibility of the documents published by Machluzarides, see Stanley-Price 2024a, Appendix B.
Gunnis Diary, 12 May 1935; Hilton n.d., pp. 119‑120.
SA CM1/164, “Neolithic and other archaeological sites discovered in 1932-1933”, note to file by P. Dikaios, 13 June 1935; Gunnis 1936, p. 341; Dikaios 1936, p. 11; Stanley-Price 1979, pp. 145‑146, site P.35.
Gunnis Diary, 14 October 1935; https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/our-blog/history-today/ for 14 October 1935; Dikaios 1936, p. 12; Hilton n.d., pp. 120‑121; Stanley-Price 1979, p. 102, site K.2.
Stanley-Price 2023, p. 109; Stanley-Price 2024a. Even while Gunnis was Inspector of Antiquities, Dikaios had sole responsibility for excavation: “it does not form part of the Inspector’s duties to carry out excavations or clear tombs” (CMC Minutes, 5 November 1932). For Palmer’s instructions to announce in the Cyprus Gazette the cancellation of the post, without any mention of Gunnis’s name, see SA4/1088, Red 25, R. Palmer, handwritten note, 6 February 1936.
SA CM1/25, e.g., 21 pieces of glass on 26 January 1927, and a broken statuette on 6 June 1927.
CMC Minutes, 6 May 1932, in SA CM1/12A.
J. R. B. Stewart to A. J. B. Wace, 5 December 1935. See Stanley-Price 2024b.
Gunnis Diary, 15 December 1927; on Palma, see Merrillees 2014, pp. 412‑413 and on the engineer Gaffiero, see Schaar, Given, Theocharous 1995, p. 41.
CO 67 253/2, 10 August 1934, ff 115‑121, T. Mogabgab to Sir George Hill; text also transcribed in Hilton n.d., pp. 35‑38, and in an annotated and illustrated edition of the memoir (Hilton, in press).
CO67/264/8, f 80, Colonial Secretary to Acting Director Antiquities [P. Dikaios], 20 April 1936.
Stanley-Price 2023; Stanley-Price 2025.
Stanley-Price 2024a, Appendix A.
Stanley-Price 2023; Stanley-Price 2024a.
E. J. Forsdyke to “My dear Jack”, 9 November 1935, in KCL, HILTON K/PP94, Box 1.1. Professor J. D. Beazley at Oxford was known as “Jack” or “Jacky” by his family and close friends (Peter Stewart, personal communication), had known Hilton since his Oxford days and recommended him for the Cyprus post. For him and the other people mentioned by Forsdyke, see Stanley-Price 2025.
“Hilton fell out with Gunnis who told him what to do”; A. H. S. ‘Peter’ Megaw, Hilton’s successor as Director of Antiquities, interview with the author, 25 February 1995. On the “royal Gunnis” hardly being “subordinate” to him, see Hilton n.d., p. 65.
See Appendix 2. On how looters viewed the Museum, see also the anecdote recounted by Gjerstad 1980, pp. 76‑77. For continuing issues in illicit excavation in Cyprus, see Herscher 2001 and Deftereos 2008.
R. Gunnis to his mother, 8 February 1927, quoted by White 2007, p. 53.
Stanley-Price 2024b.
Green, Henry 2021, pp. 122‑123, 133‑134; Hilton n.d., and family correspondence (KCL, HILTON K/PP94, Box 1) referring to Taylor being “a little in love with him [Gunnis] perhaps – he takes her out a lot”. At her brother’s request, Gunnis chaperoned Judy Hilton as they travelled (also with Dikaios and Schaeffer) by boat from Cyprus to Trieste, after which she wrote to her brother, in jest, that “I’ve quite fallen for him” (Hilton n.d., p. 110).
Tsirogiannis 2015, p. 87.
See Dikaios’s complaints in CO67 249/11, f 80, P. Dikaios to J. L. Myres, 20 September 1933; Gunnis’s Diaries passim, and the report by Miers and Markham in Pilides 2009, p. 651; Stanley-Price 2024a.
O’Keefe 1997, pp. 66‑75.
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