Excavation at the site of the so-called Hellenistic House in Nea Paphos in 2012 and 2013 was focused on the main courtyard (1) and the southern portico (R.3). The architecture collapsed in an earthquake in the 2nd century AD. Blocks and architectural elements formed an oblong tumble extending across the courtyard, apparently already not in their original position save for some entablature blocks of the eastern peristyle, and two acroteria with symbols of Dioskouroi, a pilos with a superimposed star, and at least two column shafts belonging to the southern peristyle. The cistern under the southeastern part of the courtyard had two successive well-heads, one (the later one) uncovered earlier, the other 2.02 m to the northwest, the top of which collapsed into the cistern. The disturbed fill from the courtyard surface included a mold for sling bullets with decoration in the form of a scorpion in relief and fragments of “Nabatean” capitals belonging to a variant showing schematic volutes.
Excavation below the ancient ground surface of the main courtyard (1) of the “Hellenistic” House in Nea Paphos proved its construction to be later than the beginning of the 2nd century AD. A large rectangular basin and a smaller circular one were found under the western part of the courtyard and east of it. The larger basin had two phases, the first phase being more than a meter deeper than the second one. Strata under the floors of corridor A and room B were shown to belong to the Late Classical and incipient Hellenistic periods. Exploration also continued of a cistern in the southeastern part of the courtyard and of a well in the northeastern corner of the corridor. The building sequence of the porticoes in the main courtyard was investigated in a probe dug in the southwestern corner of the court, whereas the relation between the large reception hall with mosaic floor (10) and the so-called Roman House was tested in a trench dug in corridor 29. Further fragments of “Nabatean” capitals and other decorated blocks were found in pits that had been cut in the courtyard surface in antiquity. Finally, minor excavation at the southwestern corner of the House of Aion revealed a sequence of floors against the southern elevation of a building uncovered under the late Roman street B.
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