Cranium B faced north when the excavators found it, upright in the collapsed fill of a chamber tomb, a gold band still curved where it had once wrapped her forehead. She had died between 35 and 40, with some teeth lost before death and an abscess that must have hurt. None of that is unusual for the Late Bronze Age. What is unusual is what she was wearing: a diadem stamped seven times with the face of a bull, horns curling around a sun disk, in a pose lifted almost directly from New Kingdom Egyptian temple art.
Bulls, in the symbolic vocabulary of the ancient eastern Mediterranean, belong to men. They signal virility, political force, the raw power of kings. Cranium B was a woman, and she wore the bull anyway, and she apparently wore it in life, not just in death. The gold shows wear.
This is one of eleven ornaments, nine diadems and two mouth-pieces, recovered from tombs at Hala Sultan Tekke, a Late Bronze Age port city on Cyprus’s southeastern coast. The excavation, led by Peter Fischer of the University of Gothenburg and published this year in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology,1 gives the objects their first full accounting: where they sat in the tombs, whose skulls they touched, and what visual language their makers were drawing on when they pressed bulls, ibexes, spirals, and rosettes into thin sheets of gold.
