Anglo-Hellenic League members toured the British Museum's Cypriot reserves, among limestone sanctuary sculpture that the public galleries never show.
Anglo-Hellenic League members toured the Cypriot reserve stores of the British Museum in Bloomsbury on Friday 31 January 2025. Museum staff led the small party for 90 minutes.
The Museum holds more than 10,000 Cypriot objects from over 40 cemeteries, shrines and settlements. They span 5,000 years, from the Neolithic to late antiquity.
Much of the collection came from one legacy. In 1892 Emma T. Turner left the Museum £2,000 to excavate in Cyprus, which funded campaigns at Amathus in 1893, Kourion in 1895 and Enkomi in 1896. The excavators’ notebooks still tell curators which tomb a piece came from.
Thomas Kiely, the Museum’s A.G. Leventis Curator for Ancient Cyprus since 2006, has spent much of his career reading those Victorian records back into the objects. He also runs the Cyprus Digitisation Project, an online catalogue of the whole collection funded by the same foundation.
The tour took members past the display cases and into the stores that catalogue serves. There they saw limestone votive sculpture from Cypriot sanctuaries, carved in the hybrid Greek, Phoenician and Egyptian idiom of the island’s Archaic art. Places were free and open to members only.