The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-047 - museum specimen

Cypriot

Cyprus (Bronze Age) - Near East

Function not recorded

Cypriot bull-roarer ‘Bullroarer’, Pitt Rivers Museum (acc. 1914.53.9).
Cypriot bull-roarer ‘Bullroarer’, Pitt Rivers Museum (acc. 1914.53.9). © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1914.53.9) Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

One of five wooden bull-roarers collected in Cyprus by the anthropologist Leonard Halford Dudley Buxton, who came to the island in 1913 to excavate the Bronze Age tombs of Lapithos under John Myres and the Cyprus Museum's curator, Menelaos Markides. Alongside the digging he gathered everyday objects from the villages — hand-loom gear like spindles and loom-treadles, a friction-drum, a sheep-bell, wooden toys — and these five noisemakers from Akanthou, Lapethos, Enkomi, and Karabas, which he presented to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1914. The museum's record lists them but says nothing of how they were used.

5 wooden "bull-roarers", Akanthou, Lapethos, Enkomi, and Karabas

Report of the Pitt Rivers Museum for 1914 (objects presented by H. L. Dudley Buxton)
Object
Bull-roarer of the Cypriot, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1914.53.9).
Function
Not recorded.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
1914.53.9

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