The Cypriot collection at the Ure Museum consists of approximately 100 objects, which are distributed throughout the Museum in thematic displays on myth & religion, household, techinque & decoration, etc. The Cypriot holdings include a number of bequests, donations and loans that have been recently published in the 2015 Corpus of Cypriote Antiquities Vol. 23.
A sizeable collection of these antiquities (objects with accession numbers beginning in 13.10) were among the earliest bequests to University CollegeReading, as it was known, in 1913. This was the collection of Ellen Barry, whe had acquired the objects in the 1880s, while accompanying her husband, Dr. F.W. Barry to Cyprus, where he served as Quarantine Superintendent and Sanitary Commissioner for the Island, between 1880 and 1882, when major excavations were ongoing in Salamis.
The Palmer family also donated several objects to the collection of the Reading Museum, although they were initially recorded in their archives as Greek or Roman antiquities (e.g. REDMG:1958.39.1). Later on, a family member amended the records to state that the objects were Cypriot and collected on Cyprus.
After the Barry collection, further Cypriot objects found their way to the Ure Museum, such as a limestone head, which was earlier in the British Museum (14.9.119). Many of the Ure Museum figures and some lamps (objects beginning in 47.2) were formerly in the possession of Gore Skipworth who claimed they had come from “old tombs in Cyprus”.
Among the Museum’s Cypriot vessels are two of its most recent acquisitions. In 1981, Mr H. Childs presented a Black-on-Red ware jug (81.9.1) in memory of his father, Dr W.M. Childs, who was the frist Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading. The Base Ring ware flask (2004.10.1) formerly in the collection of Dr R. Crowhurst, was given to the Ure Museum in 2004 by the Chichester District Museum. Like much of the collection, however, both vessels are unprovenanced.