The First Cyprus Treasure (Lambousa)

Lambousa, on the north coast of Cyprus a few miles west of Kyrenia, was a prosperous Byzantine town and bishopric. At the end of the nineteenth century its ruins near the monastery of the Acheiropoietos produced two hoards of early Byzantine silver within a few years of each other. The second, found in 1902, includes the famous David Plates now in New York and Nicosia. The first, smaller and less celebrated, went to the British Museum.

For a long time almost nothing was known about how the first treasure came to light. A letter in the state archive in Nicosia, written on 28 December 1898 by the British district commissioner of Kyrenia and discussed by Robert Merrillees in 2009, settled the question: a farmer had found it in 1897 while working a field near the monastery. The silver then passed to the French aristocrat Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Duc de Dino, who sold it to the British Museum in 1899.

The museum's 28 pieces are all silver. The finest is a bowl with a medallion of a young, beardless saint in a courtier's cloak with a cross-staff, probably Saint Sergius. A dish has a Latin cross inlaid in black niello at its centre. A small hexagonal vessel with three suspension rings, probably a censer for incense though perhaps a lamp, carries six medallion busts: Christ between Peter and Paul on one side, the Virgin between two saints on the other. Twenty-five pear-shaped spoons complete the group, eleven of them engraved with animals running along the bowl.

The pieces are datable to the reign because each larger item carries the control stamps used by Byzantine officials to certify silver. The dish was stamped under Tiberius II (578-582), the censer under Phocas (602-610) and the saint's bowl under Constans II, between 641 and 651. The group was therefore assembled over about seventy years, consistent with the plate of a church or monastery acquired gift by gift.

Why it was hidden is not recorded. The obvious context is the Arab raids on Cyprus of 649 and the 650s. The scholar O. M. Dalton, who first published the find, already suspected that it was incomplete: eleven spoons of a set of 36 seem to be missing, and Marlia Mundell Mango has suggested that three further silver plates from it were sold to the United States in the 1950s.

Small beside its famous sibling, the First Cyprus Treasure is still an important document of how silver was made, stamped and given in the early Byzantine world, and of the wealth of the Church in Cyprus on the eve of the Arab raids.