From the Late Cypriot Polities to the Iron Age “Kingdoms”: Understanding the Political Landscape of Cyprus from Within
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Résumés
In the last two decades the study of Iron Age Cyprus has made a gradual but decisive move away from externally-generated cycles of complexity and ethnic (“Hellenization” and equally “Phoenicianization”) narratives. Colonization constructs have begun to fade giving way to a “Cyprocentric” research methodology which considers the development of the island’s micro-states as a longue durée episode distinguished by settlement and landscape continuities, transformations and transition, rather than sharp breaks that separate the Late Bronze from the Iron Age.
This paper shows that the history of the island’s ancient States consists of the fluid regional histories of many polities: some of them remain archaeologically invisible and mysterious to this day ; a few others appear historically less elusive because they achieved a degree of longevity as Iron Age “kingdoms” to the end of the fourth century BC.
Dans les deux dernières décennies, l’étude de Chypre à l’âge du Fer s’est éloignée de manière graduelle mais décisive des narrations ethniques (« hellénisation » et également « phénicisation »). Les interprétations coloniales ont commencé à disparaître pour laisser progressivement place à une méthodologie de recherche « chyprocentrique », qui considère le développement des micro-États chypriotes comme un phénomène de longue durée, caractérisé par des continuités, des transformations et des périodes de transition au niveau des établissements et du paysage, plutôt que par des ruptures brutales qui sépareraient le Bronze Récent de l’âge du Fer.
Cet article montre que l’histoire des anciens États de l’île consiste en des histoires régionales fluides de plusieurs entités politiques : certaines d’entre elles restent archéologiquement invisibles et mystérieuses à ce jour ; d’autres apparaissent moins fuyantes du point de vue historique parce qu’elles ont atteint une certaine longévité comme « royaumes » de l’âge du Fer jusqu’à la fin du ive s. av. J.-C.
Texte intégral
A Conspicuous Island
1In May of 1954, following his first ever visit to Cyprus during the previous year, the ambassador of Greece to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq wrote to a much younger friend in Athens: “There is so much I would have to write to you about this idiosyncratic island (the epithet in Greek is ιδιότροπο) that has grabbed me by the roots”.1 The ambassador was none other than Giorgos Seferis, soon to become (in 1963) the Nobel Laureate poet of Greece; the young friend was Giorgos P. Savvides, to whom Seferis entrusted in 1955 the publication of his Cypriot poems.2 Since his first visit to the island in 1953,3 Seferis had been living under the spell of Cyprus and had been reading Cypriot sources of history, such as Neophytos the Recluse and Leontios Machairas.4 Evidently, the masterpieces of the Cypriot cycle, Enkomi and Salamis among them, which were initially published under the title Κύπρον, ου µ’ εθέσπισεν,5 were written in a very short period of time.
2No matter how unfitting it may seem as an introduction to a conference on Cypriot archaeology, I wish to maintain that few archaeologists (or historians, for that matter) have made Seferis’s diachronic voyage inside the identity of Cyprus; not because such a voyage requires a poet’s sensitivity but primarily because it requires a certain kind of freedom in the reception of a holistic experience: Seferis was not constrained by the academic straightjackets in which we are trained to work; he had not been conditioned to break up the history of a living island into a series of distinct and temporally specific episodes, each claimed to be the treasured property of a group of ‘specialists’ in prehistoric or classical archaeology. As we try to unlock and make sense of intangible messages contained in the tangible and visible material evidence, which happens to have survived from this or that temporal horizon, we need to keep in mind that chronos is continuous. Hence, the artificially defined time parcels we tend to call cultural or historical periods flow into each other. Exactly like us today, past societies of the mare nostrum had to face transitions and breaks, and manage crises that were generated by the collapse of commercial networks operating within the Mediterranean exchange system.
3Despite the prevailing tendency to rely upon generic descriptions and global interpretations of crises, in reality, even within an island environment as small as that of Cyprus, the reception of, and reaction to such episodes in the past had particular regional dimensions, which distinguished them even from the nature of the crisis experienced by their next door neighbours. Thus, in the context of the opening lecture, on “Transitions and breaks from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age”, which the conference organizers – also editors of the present volume – have asked me to approach from a methodological point of view, I suggest that we stay focused on the three words Seferis employed to describe his encounter with Cyprus (above): island, idiosyncratic, roots. If we distance ourselves from Cyprus’s cultural distinctiveness,6 we run the risk of examining not Cyprus’s transitions, but those of other Mediterranean, and most probably, continental regions.7 Almost to the end of the 20th century, scholarly reliance on urban destructions in the Levant or in the Mycenaean Peloponnese, in the context of which the material record of Cyprus was forcibly interpreted, resulted in a chain-effect of problematic narratives that did little justice to Cypriot studies.8
Roots : an Island Identity Imprinted in the Landscape
4Despite the fact that in recent years, Cypriot archaeology has moved from site-specific to landscape-wide projects,9 which have confirmed the Cypriot landscape’s strong identity and relation to the societies that have been inhabiting it, one still comes across a number of scholars who think that Cypriot landscapes require comparison with distant models in order to be invested with meaning. Consciously or not, some scholars continue to uphold the negative after-effects of colonialism: “Cyprus has had no continuous history of its own”, states Hill in the preface to his most influential History of Cyprus,10 where he also claims that the island is invested with historical meaning only when it is colonized or conquered.11 Admittedly, in a quasi-historical, and often fictional series of invasion and colonization episodes, where Sea People were followed by Mycenaeans, they by Phoenicians, and then came the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Persians before the Ptolemies and the Romans, there was no room left for the history of the Cypriots. Despite the fact that some of these intruders, e.g. the Sea People, are creatures of a rich imagination, while a couple of others, like the Assyrians and the Egyptians, never actually set foot on the island, to this day there are scholars who remain (maybe not all that consciously) under the influence of colonial history, whose purpose was to deny Cyprus its identity,12 and I am not referring to ethnic identities.
5Not knowing Greek, the primary language in which Cyprus’s local histories have been written since the early Middle Ages (e.g. Neophytos the Recluse), some scholars may be unaware of the extent to which this handicaps their research on Cyprus. If one cannot read (and ‘feel’) the Chronological History of Kyprianos13 or the Kypriaka of Athanasios Sakellarios, which is, in fact, the corner stone of Cypriot studies,14 how does one acquire an understanding, a holistic experience, of the island’s conspicuously complex identity? Refusal, however, to take into consideration history written by locals in a local language has been observed in many colonial situations.15 In the case of Cyprus, one of the first scholars to analyze the detrimental role of imperial archaeology and its manipulation of the Cypriot identity was Michael Given.16 Another critique, with a wider archaeological perspective, is found in the unpublished thesis of Thomas Kiely.17 An unbiased and detailed analysis of how Cyprus was treated in the historical studies of the 19th and 20th centuries, which also considers the inevitable development of anti-colonial reactions, has been published by Anna Cannavò.18
A Resilient Toponymic History
6Besides written history, historical cartography is another field where one encounters the strong imprint of Cyprus’s identity. The amazing resilience, which the island’s toponymic history has shown since antiquity, is a rare phenomenon, and it requires appreciation in the context of settlement continuities and settlement relocations. The geographical loci of almost all the primary centres of the first millennium BC were never lost;19 they were marked on printed maps of the Ptolemaic tradition – i.e. maps based on the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy – which, following the invention of printing, were published in different European languages and were widely diffused from the 16th century.20 In the late 19th century, the ancient toponyms were incorporated in nautical charts (fig. 1) and land maps of Cyprus, which were the result of hydrographic (1849) and trigonometrical (1878-1883) surveys conducted respectively by Captain Thomas Graves (fig. 2) and Lieutenant (at the time) H. H. Kitchener (fig. 3).21 The British cartographic corpus of Cyprus22 is the most valuable historical record bestowed by Great Britain to its eastern Mediterranean island colony.
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10Identifying the ancient geography alongside the mediaeval on the first map that was printed with toponyms in Greek in 1890 – its purpose was to accompany the Kypriaka of Sakellarios (fig. 4) – is an enlightening experience;23 it ought to make us think that a structured analysis of these two sets of toponyms can elucidate our understanding of the island’s pre-modern political economies. It is suggested that from prehistory to the 19th century AD, the island had known only two main economic systems: the ancient was related to the long distance trade of copper and the development of a ship-building industry.24 It relied, therefore, on resource exploitation logistics, which gave rise to a specific pattern of interdependent settlements that spread from the Troodos foothills to the coast within each economic region. Cypriot archaeology has shown that this regional economic geography began to take shape towards the end of the Middle Cypriot, before the middle of the second millennium BC. In the second century AD, when Claudius Ptolemy listed the coordinates of the inland and coastal sites of Cyprus, the settlement structure of the regional economic landscapes was almost two millennia old. The ancient economy, which was based on the island’s mineral assets and its renowned ship building expertise, began to be gradually abandoned by the island’s foreign overlords in Late Antiquity.25 The feudal estate economic system, which was the basis of the mediaeval economy, enriched the map of Cyprus with toponyms that date from the Byzantine, the Frankish, the Venetian and the Ottoman periods.26
11When, shortly before the end of the 19th century, H. H. Kitchener conducted “the first full triangulated survey and mapping of the island”27 and produced the map which has since served (with minor adjustments) as the official land registry, he saw no need to introduce new toponyms: the mountains, the rivers, the valleys and the coasts of Cyprus were not nameless. Neither the colonial administration, nor the local communities had at any time tried to eliminate or replace either the ancient or the mediaeval toponymic layer. Cypriot toponyms, therefore, are primarily of Greek, Latin (French and Italian) or Ottoman origin. Hence, the cadastral maps record the name of every locality as was traditionally known to local communities and as these have been passed on from one generation to the next. The formal recording of site locations identified during surveys is based on these local toponyms,28 which give an archaeological site a perfectly defined spatial dimension on the cadastral maps of the island.
12In her seminal monograph, Anna Satraki points to some amazing examples which underline that the Cypriot landscape, far from being empty of memory, is a memory depot.29 In a section entitled “the continuous memory of the Cypriot kingdoms”, she reminds us that, to this day, the valley of the kingdom of Soloi is known as such: koilada tis Solias; and that Nikoklea, the village to the west of the sanctuary of the Paphian Goddess, preserves the name of the last king of Ancient Paphos, Nikokles (fig. 5).30 Concerning the institutions of a Cypriot polity, the most impressive and meaningful survival is found in the name of the village of Alambra, which is situated close to the village of Dali (site of ancient Idalion): Alambriatika is recorded as a territory of the kingdom of Idalion on the famous bronze tablet issued in the Greek syllabary by the basileus and the polis of Idalion in the fifth century BC.31
13The fact that the Cypriot landscape is packed with layers of history preserved since antiquity means that Cyprus had managed to absorb episodes of crisis with a minimum of losses and discontinuities. One who had the sensitivity and the language skills to appreciate this phenomenon – he was, in fact, immediately struck by it when he visited Cyprus – was Seferis. He saw that there was no vacuum in the island’s geography, and he conveyed this experience in a brilliant dialogue preserved in his unfinished Cypriot novel, Varnavas Kalostefanos. The subject of the dialogue is the name of the northern mountain range, which looms large from Nicosia, where the hero (the author) has just arrived; he asks the mountain’s name and is surprised to find out from his host that, no, it did not have to be given a name, ‘like Mount Nelson or something like it’;32 it possessed a most descriptive and appropriate name: Pentadaktylos, “the five-fingered” mountain.
Cypriot “Kingdoms” and the “Great Divide”
14Historical cartography is not a detour from our theme on breaks and transitions; it is contained in the methodological scheme that we need to develop in order to study the Iron Age polities, for which we use the inappropriate term “Cypriot kingdoms”.33 The first millennium BC polis-states of Cyprus were the second generation heirs of an economic system whose original development had given rise to social complexity and urbanism since MCIII/LCI,34 alternatively since the transition from the Prehistoric to the Protohistoric Bronze Age of Cyprus.35 It is futile to pretend that the Iron Age polities of Cyprus were founded on an almost empty map, which from the 12th century to the end of the Cypro-Geometric period (i.e. circa the middle or the end of the 8th century BC), was dotted only with the sites of pre-urban village communities, widely spread across the island, as some scholars seem to maintain.36 It is, nonetheless, of vital importance to comprehend the conditions under which this notion was developed: it is a prime example of a misconception which arose because breaks suffered by other Mediterranean regions were assumed to apply also to the Cypriot polities. Nobody would deny that the end of the second millennium BC, and especially the 13th-12th centuries, was a period of turmoil and population movements caused by the dissolution of the Late Bronze Age economic system; but it was also more than that: it was an era of decisive transformations;37 leaving behind the interregional economic system of the Late Bronze Age – and the Empires that had sustained it – it introduced a new pattern of entrepreneurial trading, the mobility of which kept the better part of the Mediterranean closely connected.38
15This transitional horizon was until recently imbued with the effects of the so-called “Great Divide” between Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeologies. In the Mediterranean the division was contained in a single mega-narrative, according to which all destructions were the result of an invincible coalition of Sea Peoples, who had destroyed New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittite empire, the Mycenaean kingdoms and many other states in their wake. In the case of Cyprus, this transitional horizon was a priori equated with a Cypriot Dark Age that was established following the (imaginary) destructions of its Late Cypriot settlements. Everything that had happened to the palatial culture of the Aegean and to the city-states of the Levant had to have happened to polities such as Enkomi and Kition in Cyprus, despite the fact that, at the time, a great many of the relevant sites had not been adequately excavated or studied. Ironically, the Cypriot destructions scenario has been strongly propagated by scholars working in neighbouring areas, who expected the Cypriot settlements to provide more extensive evidence as to the role of Mycenaean Sea Peoples, who then stayed on in Palestine and Cyprus and became the Philistines and the Greek ‘colonisers’ respectively.39 The summary of Lipiński’s latest book shows that these notions have not yet been abandoned; as it is stated, “[t]he volume contains studies dealing with Mediterranean history in the first millennium B.C., based mainly on epigraphic data. Chapter I concerns the Philistines and the kingdom of ‘terra firma’, established by ‘Sea Peoples’ on the Lower and Middle Orontes and in the Aleppo area, showing their Mycenaean background”.40
16It is not that long ago that this mega-narrative began to be put aside so that each Mediterranean region, and even micro-region, could be studied “from within”, on the basis of its own archaeological record. Dozens of individual settlement histories have since begun to surface, and they reveal how each region reacted to the collapse of the Age of Internationalism.41 If one wishes to measure the gradual development of a more sound and region-specific argument regarding individual responses to that particular horizon, one should compare the papers published in Mediterranean Peoples in Transition. Thirteenth to Early Tenth Centuries BCE,42 to the papers (some by the same authors) in The Philistines and other «Sea peoples»43 and, thirdly, the relevant chapters in the new volume of the Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant.44 In short, destructions and their aftermath are now differentiated from destruction-free abandonments, and “colonization” episodes, attributed to specific ethnic groups, are no longer the focal point of interpretations.
Settlement Histories and Regional Patterning in LCIIIA
17Returning to the case of Cyprus, we need to acknowledge the detrimental role of the “colonization” model: almost to the end of the 20th century, a great deal of effort was invested in making the evidence comply with a Mycenaean colonization narrative, in order to explain a very different episode: Cyprus’s eventual Hellenization. Hence, an episode wrongly defined as colonization was promoted as the initiator of the cultural process of Hellenization; it required Mycenaean “colonists” to take over the island at a specific point in time, which was defined as the end of LCIIC (circa the end of the 13th century). This “clean break” between LCIIC and LCIIIA (between the 13th and the 12th century) was prudently questioned in the 1980s by Barbara Kling45 and more effectively by Susan Sherratt46 on the basis of the Cypriot ceramic record. Nevertheless, it took some time before the “clean break” was abandoned because the chain-effect of all kinds of assumptions, which were treated as if they were facts, had imposed a kind of archaeological blindness. Even when the archaeological data began to question the destruction scenario, and when the “Mycenaean colonization” began to look suspect in the absence of a distinct Aegean cultural package anywhere on the island (let alone in newly-founded settlements), it was some time before we could begin to express our trust in the continuities and the gradual transformations of Cypriot culture. The most significant and meaningful of these continuities is the long-term survival of the local Cypriot script, better known as Cypro-Minoan.47 Besides dispelling the notion of a return to an urban-less Dark Age environment, its adoption by a new linguistic group during the era of transformations allows us to approach the osmosis which, first in the region of Paphos, must have taken place between the indigenous literate society and the Greek-speaking newcomers.48
18If, before the 12th century BC, Alashiya (Cyprus) had developed into a truly centralized state with a single state economy, it is more than likely that the collapse of the state would have affected the entire island. In the last two decades, however, the combined results of excavations, landscape studies and especially long-range survey projects, have begun to acknowledge the region-specific responses of the Cypriot polities to the LCIIC-LCIIIA transition horizon: they ranged from total economic failure to polity enhancement, a fact which suggests that their economies were not tightly interdependent. System collapse and abandonment is identified at Kalavasos, trade enhancement and relocation in the case of Enkomi-Salamis, and sudden economic prominence in the monumental undertakings of Kition and Paphos.49 We have not yet identified the different regional episodes in the rest of the island.50 We can be fairly certain, however, that in the 12th century, when the Vasilikos, the Maroni and the upper Kouris river valley went into depression, the economic success of Enkomi, Kition and Paphos was unprecedented. When Sherratt states that “Cypriot urban small-scale commercial traders” were the primary agents of 12th century BC trade and that they “linked up the east and central Mediterranean in an unprecedentedly direct manner”,51 she is assessing data associated with these gateways, especially Enkomi and Kition.52
The Day aAfter in the Collapsed Regions
19What of the day after in the economic regions which failed to survive? Ashlar-built complexes at Agios Dimitrios, Vournes and Palaiotaverna, with industrial and storage facilities dating to the later 14th and early 13th centuries, were evacuated at the end of the 13th or early in the 12th century. The extensive urban settlements around each of these monumental and, apparently, also administrative secular buildings were also abandoned, but evidence of enemy action has not been identified in any of them. Why, then, were these impressive and solid buildings never put to use again? The surveys conducted in the Vasilikos53 and the Maroni valleys54 (an analogous survey in the Kouris valley has not yet been conducted) have failed to identify the establishment of small rural communities that could have developed after the economic collapse. In fact, evidence of the 12th, 11th, 10th and even part of the 9th centuries seems to be missing from these valleys or is so scanty as to be of little significance. So, what happened to their populations? To the extent that this absence of visibility can be trusted, it allows me to put forward an interpretation that dispels the belief in the development of a Dark Age survival economy: the response of the local inhabitants to the economic failure of their district was not to return to an agro-pastoral way of life. People in the depleted areas did not react by founding isolated villages; they did not move away from specialized work in the chaine opératoire of a complex economic system to non-specialized functions in the context of simple sustenance farming.
20Contemporary, 12th century BC, evidence from the main coastal polities of Enkomi, Kition and Paphos suggests that they may have attracted, and absorbed to their benefit, a percentage of the specialized groups from the collapsed regions. In LCIIIA these three urban harbours entered a new era of economic prominence and initiated new partnerships in a Mediterranean world that was no longer controlled by superpowers. The last of the Cypriot ingots, which were exported as far west as Sardinia, were shipped from these gateways.55 I would, therefore, suggest that internal migrants were employed as a specialized labour force within the structured economic systems of the admittedly fewer but, quite likely, industrially more productive and territorially more extensive LCIIIA polities.56
21It is also of vital significance to observe that from the 12th century BC to this day, no urban nucleus ever again developed around Alassa, Kalavasos or Maroni. Their collapse and abandonment were early episodes in Cyprus’s age of transformations but they generated a process of long term significance: the definition of Cyprus’ political geography, and, following the abolition of the “kingdoms” at the end of the fourth century BC, to an urban geography, which lasted to the end of antiquity. In the context of these transformations, population groups from the Vasilikos and the Maroni valleys became the founders of their region’s new gateway at Amathous;57 groups from the Kouris river valley established the gateway of Kourion, which may not have been all that new: it is more likely that, following the abandonment of Alassa, a new status was given to the Late Cypriot site of Episkopi-Bamboula, which was situated on the banks of the river, near a now invisible lagoon. Like the Pediaios lagoon of Enkomi and the Diarizos lagoon of Paphos, it has silted in. As I have noted elsewhere, coastal changes have distanced the Late Cypriot anchorages of the east and south coasts (the same seems to have happened in the Morphou bay to the west) from their original coastal position.58
From Gateways to Early Iron Age Micro-States
22The evaluation of the LCIIIA material evidence from Enkomi, Kition and Paphos reveals industrial intensification. These settlements are, in fact, credited with a technological breakthrough: the production of carburized iron, i.e. steel,59 which allowed Cyprus to pioneer the trade of iron tools and implements in the Mediterranean.60 Researchers have also focused on the close association of the metal industry with the sanctuaries of the three harbour towns, and have recognized in the spatial proximity of sanctuaries and ports of export the decisive managerial role of the former.61 Architectural monumentality was not new to Enkomi, where a unique (in Cyprus) town planning was elaborated with the construction of ashlar-built edifices. It was, however, new to Kition and Paphos, where it was expressed in the construction of the island’s first monumental sacred temene that shared the same planning concept. The successful implementation of these two massive construction projects in LCIIC-LCIIIA suggest that Kition and Paphos had developed centralized administrative mechanisms.62 Taken together, the above developments suggest that Enkomi, Kition and Paphos became controlling authorities in the context of a new age, and in response to a new economic system. No matter how one wishes to define these authorities – principalities, kingdoms, chiefdoms, city-states, or simply institutionalized merchant networks – my contention is that there was never a time when Cyprus was without any regional managing structures.63 There are, however, fluctuations in the available data per region and per site, especially as regards the transition from LCIIIA to LCIIIB/CGI. During this crucial intersection a couple of major port authorities closed down but not because of economic failure and not before they had established their successors (below).
23A number of episodes beg to be accommodated in the crucial time zone of LCIIIA-LCIIIB/CGI. The most important concerns a break caused by natural processes. Material evidence from the excavations of Hala Sultan Tekke shows that it was still populated in the 12th century.64 Nevertheless, the final closure of the lagoon, which Hala Sutan Tekke had been using as its harbour, has also been dated to the late 12th – early 11th century horizon.65 Consequently, the abandonment of this major Late Cypriot trading centre may have had little to do with the international crisis; it happened gradually as a result of the loss of its port facilities. It is quite likely that in seeking a solution to the problem, the merchant groups of Hala Sultan Tekke invested in the development of an alternative gateway at Kition from as early as LCIIC-LCIIIA. If the replacement of Hala Sultan Tekke by Kition as the region’s main harbour and administrative centre resulted from the need to relocate its port facilities, then the same problem must have led to the transfer from Enkomi to Salamis.66 These events should not be seen as strictly linear; the lagoons of Hala Sultan Tekke and Enkomi, which had been ports of call since the MCIII-LCI horizon, i.e. about half a millennium earlier, did not become useless overnight, nor were the alternative harbours constructed only after the old lagoons had become totally blocked.67
24We should, therefore, consider the move from Enkomi (Old Salamis) to (New) Salamis as an internal affair, not all that different from the move from Hala Sultan Tekke to Kition, which also led to the former’s abandonment. The establishment of anchoring facilities at Salamis would have preceded the transfer of the urban nucleus. The last vestiges of life in Enkomi suggest that the transfer must have been completed sometime in the later 11th century.68 What needs to be stressed at this point is that this process was far more complex than foundation myths allow us to imagine. It is naïve, to say the least, to think that the foundation horizon of Salamis started from zero and that the agents were newcomers from beyond the sea that had landed on the coast of Salamis. In fact, newcomers had already arrived and had settled in Enkomi69 and in other LC sites in LCIIIA.70 The primary agents behind the establishment of Salamis would have been the merchant families of Enkomi, who represented its heterarchical management structure:71 first, they moved their business closer to the new harbour, and before long they also moved their households. Because of the sudden secession of field research in 1974 (the year of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus), we know very little about the early horizon of urban life in the new coastal landscape of Salamis,72 but we can be fairly certain that it did not require the elite insignia of the old world order; nor did the Salamis merchants need to employ diplomatic correspondence in their dealings with overseas partners or feign loyalty to an Alashiyan king.73
Devolution and Resource Fragmentation
25The breakdown suffered by a number of regional economic systems may have led, in the first place, to fewer and stronger LCIIIA polities but this was not a lasting political arrangement. As of the 12th century the establishment of an entrepreneurial trading system in the Mediterranean promoted devolution. If we take at face value the Assyrian royal records of the early seventh century BC,74 in the next centuries Cyprus was divided into as many as ten polities. At least four of those which can be securely identified on the prism of Esarhaddon75 were situated inland, where they had, apparently, taken control of copper procurement areas (e.g. Idalion and Tamassos) and routes to the coast (e.g. Ledra and Chytroi).
26Thus, as of LCIIIB, the huge eastern territory that had been Enkomi’s grand state would have been coveted by the growing dynamics of internal contenders, which we may identify as Ledra and Tamassos. Likewise, following the sudden and violent abandonment of Pyla-Kokkinokremmos, we should consider it likely that the ascendancy of Idalion, on the northern edge of the Mathiatis ore body, would have deprived Kition of the richest cupriferous zone in its territory.76 It may be insignificant, but while the first of the Cypriot kingdoms on Esarhaddon’s “king list” is Idalion, Kition is not listed, at least by that name;77 it has for long been assumed that it is listed under another name, Qartihadasti,78 but this assumption has been contested.79
27Hence, it is unlikely that, after LCIIIA, Enkomi/Salamis or Kition would have remained the strong territorial authorities they had been in the 12th century. For some time in the Early Iron Age, Salamis and Kition would have struggled to retain their primacy: they were the major harbours of the east and south-east coast but their power base had been weakened.80 As of the 8th century, when the entrepreneurial system began to be replaced by institutionalised trading networks, most likely in response to the demands placed by the Assyrian empire upon the Mediterranean coastal polities of the Levant and Asia Minor,81 Salamis and Kition began to reclaim their status as capitals of polis-states; gradually the internal polities were brought under their authority. Salamis had an impressively early success, which is made evident as of the end of the 8th century with the construction of the built tombs and the establishment of extra-urban sanctuaries, with which it demarcated its growing territory from the coast through the Mesaoria, past Ledra, and all the way to the region of Tamassos from where copper was procured.82 Kition, on the other hand, as has been shown by Fourrier’s impressively detailed analysis, was hardly larger than an urban harbour until the end of the 6th century BC. The absence of extra-urban sanctuaries, in particular,83 suggests that Kition ‘before the incorporation of the land of Idalion into its own territory’84 in the 5th century, did not possess a viable economic territory.
28The above may provide a preliminary explanation of the complexity and continuing transformation of the geopolitical regions in the eastern half of the island, but it does not fit the western half. The economic regions of Amathous, Kourion, Paphos, Marion and Soloi did not have to confront the rise of internal polities (with the possible exception of Chytroi for which, however, there is close to zero archaeological or epigraphical data): the distance between their hinterland, from where copper as well as timber for shipbuilding was procured, and the coastal region where the ports of export were situated, was limited and easier to control. Unlike the polities situated within the flat expanse of the Mesaoria, where about 50% of the extra-urban sanctuaries were established,85 their individual territories were to some extent demarcated by natural borders (e.g. the river Kouris between Amathous and Kourion). Still, though they were not split into an inland and a coastal economic periphery, they did infringe on each other’s resource areas. In fact, as I have suggested elsewhere,86 the rather haphazard history of Kourion as an independent polity in the Cypro-Classical period may be due to the pressure exercised by its western neighbor: Paphos. The establishment of extra-urban sanctuaries in high altitude mountain locations within the (south, south-west) Troodos forest, hence close to the copper procurement areas of Amathous, Kourion, Paphos and Marion,87 could be interpreted as a strategy developed in the name of the protection (from their neighbours) and safe transport of their primary resources. As regards Soloi, the well-known extra-urban sanctuary of Agia Irini was apparently established on the polity’s northern borders; it must have demarcated the territory of Soloi from that of Lapithos.88
29Based on the above, it is worth considering that the development of the Early Iron Age political geography of the western polities of Cyprus which, unlike the eastern, did not suffer internal fragmentation, can explain the impressive affluence of their coastal centres in the CG period. To this day, the most extensive chamber tomb cemeteries of the period have been located at Amathous89 and Paphos.90 Kourion91 and Marion have also provided many early CG tombs;92 the information from Soloi is still limited but there is some burial evidence dating to LCIIIB and CGI.93 In the case of Salamis and Kition, we continue to blame the absence of early CG community burial sites on problems of archaeological visibility; still, to this day, we can only speak of a scatter of early CG tombs94 that are no match for Amathous or Paphos.
Cypriot Scripts, New Languages and a Geo-Linguistic Political Pattern
30A trickle of inscriptional evidence from the CG period reveals that people who used the Cypriot syllabary to inscribe a Greek dialect,95 and still other people who used the Semitic alphabet to inscribe a Canaanite/Phoenician dialect,96 were already part of the Early Iron Age multilingual demography of Cyprus. Traditionally we have been referring to the former as Greeks and to the latter as Phoenicians. The presence of these two different linguistic groups is not traceable in any other way – not in tomb types, nor in mortuary practices, or in other distinct cultural traits.97 Contrary to traditional views that until recently explained the introduction of a Greek and a Semitic language group on the island as the result of two distinct colonization movements, their establishment did not occur under conditions of colonization. “The word [colonialism] is commonly associated with intrusion, conquest, domination and the economic exploitation of the indigenous population”, writes Aubet, also stressing that besides “the presence of one or more groups of foreigners in a region far from the colonizer’s place of origin”, colonialism requires “the existence of asymmetrical socio-economic relations between the colonizer and the colonized”.98
31In Cyprus, despite resource and landscape fragmentation, the establishment of two new linguistic groups on the island did not result in visible asymmetrical relations but in a thoroughly homogeneous cultural environment: the CG koine. LCIIIB and early CG tombs reveal a mobile society that had access to local metallic resources, and even to a modest quantity of imported gold; it sustained specialized craftsmen, and it distinguished its elite members primarily through the deposition of metal objects, such as weaponry and feasting equipment, especially obeloi.99 It was a society involved in the free-lance trade system of the early Iron Age, and its particularly close contacts with the Levantine coast100 have given rise to the term “Cypro-Levantine commercial koine”.101
32The Greek language of ancient Cyprus was the antiquated Arcado-Cypriot dialect, which was preserved in Cyprus because that was the dialect spoken by the newcomers (immigrants) when they settled on the island presumably shortly after the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces. A similar preservation of Late Bronze Age Semitic dialectal forms that were no longer in use in the Iron Age states of the Levant allows us to suggest that the infiltration of Canaanites into Cyprus was also a 12th century episode; as a matter of fact, the influx must have reached its peak with the destruction of Ugarit.102 Teixidor was probably among the first to suspect that a resident Semitic-speaking population had been living in Cyprus since the Late Bronze Age, but at the time he had a limited number of inscriptions with which to work.103 Today, this is more than a suspicion: the study of the Phoenician economic accounts – often referred to as the Idalion archive – by Maria Giulia Amadasi and José Ángel Zamora, though still in a preliminary stage, has revealed that the scribes retained the Bronze Age name of the island, apparently because their forefathers had come to Cyprus when it was still known as Alashiya. It has also been observed that oil was stored in containers identified with the word KWT, which has not been attested in the Iron Age, but is known from Late Bronze Age Ugaritic.104 Amadasi has previously noted that the gods Anat and Resheph (equated with Athena and Apollo, respectively), whose names are epigraphically attested in Idalion and Tamassos in the Cypro-Classical period, are not encountered in Phoenicia in the first millennium:105 they are deities of the Late Bronze Age Canaanite world.
33In the Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical eras, when the textual records increase and allow us to acquire a more concise view of the use of the different scripts in at least some of the Cypriot polities, we become aware of the development of a geo-linguistic pattern: the Arcado-Cypriot and its syllabic scribal tool were established as the political signature of the kingdom of Paphos from the end of the 8th century BC;106 exclusive use of the syllabary by political authorities is also attested in Kourion and Marion.107 The use of the Phoenician alphabet, which was the scribal system of the Semitic language, was an eastern phenomenon, and Kition was its unequivocal political centre.108
34Between “Greek” Kourion and “Phoenician” Kition, however, we find the newly established polity of Amathous, whose rulers employed the Cypriot syllabary to express an unreadable and indecipherable autochthonous language, for which scholars use the term Eteocypriot.109 How did a dynamic “Eteocypriot” dynasty become wedged between a Phoenician and a Greek political authority? The answer will elude us unless we take into account the decisive events of Cyprus’s era of transformations, which shaped the settlement restructuring of the first millennium BC. In the 12th century, external immigrants (whom we will later identify as Greeks and Phoenicians because of their linguistic identity) would have sought to be absorbed by the thriving ports of Paphos, Enkomi and Kition; they had no reason to go into the depleted valleys of the Vasilikos and the Maroni.110 Thus, because of the economic collapse the valleys remained in the 12th century BC a landscape of indigenous populations. It was this autochthonous stock that became the founders of Amathous in the 11th century BC.
Cypro-Archaic Territorialization
35This south coast linguistic patterning constitutes a Cypriot phenomenon, and the decisive question is how we explain, not simply the survival among laymen, but the political upgrade of the three different languages after three centuries of a CG koine, during which the different linguistic groups of the island had shared the same material culture.111 One of the three should have prevailed, and should have silenced the others; instead, all three were now used as signatures of authority: the basileis of Paphos and Kourion inscribed only in syllabic Greek; the rulers of Amathous in syllabic Eteocypriot; and the mlk of Kition in alphabetic Phoenician.112 This brings me to the last part of my intervention: the theme of territorialization, which has been aptly described by Fourrier as the process that led “from fluid boundaries to the political, economic, and cultural organization of the countryside and its control by a centralized authority”.113 Territorialization is synonymous with the Cypro-Archaic period, and the Cypro-Archaic is the horizon that saw the end to resource fragmentation and entrepreneurialism.
36How was territorialization embedded in the landscape? Primarily, through the establishment of extra-urban sanctuaries; these “remarkable organizational instruments”114 held together a Cypriot politico-economic territory and promoted its ruler’s agenda and ideology.115 The visible increase of Cypriot literacy as of the end of the 8th century BC is a phenomenon contemporary with the proliferation of the extra-urban sanctuaries. More importantly, however, this was not laymen or craftsmen literacy: Cypro-Archaic inscriptions are primarily royal inscriptions.116 The use of a chosen script by the rulers of the Cypriot micro-states was an intentional, politically meaningful practice: scripts and languages were actively manipulated117 by the royal dynasties in the process of consolidating their territories through the development of a shared regional identity. The strategy was an integral component of the territorialization process.
37Why was territorialization accelerated at this point in time? Because the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire – the first Iron Age “superpower” to exercise authority over the continent and the eastern Mediterranean since the collapse of the Late Bronze Age empires – was the catalyst, which forced the many different mini-states around the eastern Mediterranean shores to develop structured and institutionalized trading patterns. In fact, in 707 BC, under Sargon II, the Cypriots rushed to secure an official acceptance in this “common market”, which was apparently comprised of many different commercial networks both on terra firma and per mare. By doing so, the Cypriot rulers were adopting a new economic system, which required better defined and more productive peripheries that would minimize resource fragmentation. Granted that the Cypriot political peripheries were structured in relation to a primary centre,118 we can see the end result of the territorialization process in the number and the location of the island’s primary centres at the end of the fourth century BC: if there were ten in the early Cypro-Archaic period, there were only seven when Ptolemy Soter decided to terminate them: Salamis, Kition, Amathous, Paphos, Marion, Soloi and Lapithos. In the eastern part, all four of the internal polities were absorbed in the territories of coastal managing centres; in the western part Kourion seems to have been absorbed by Paphos. All seven of the Cypriot polis-states were governed from port sites.
Notes de bas de page
1 My emphasis; free translation from Kostiou 1991, p. 27.
2 Kostiou 1991, p. 19.
3 Pieris 1985, p. 179.
4 Kostiou 1991, p. 28-29; Beaton 2003, p. 471.
5 Keeley 1997, p. 77, n. 10.
6 Peltenburg 1996, p. 27; Knapp 2015, p. 25.
7 Iacovou 2007a, p. 461.
8 Iacovou 2013a, p. 587.
9 E.g. Given, Knapp 2003.
10 Hill 1940.
11 Consult Cannavò 2011, p. 27; Cannavò 2012, p. 445.
12 Iacovou 2014a, p. 103-105.
13 Papadopoulos 1971.
14 Papadopoulos 1991.
15 Van Dommelen 1998
16 Given 1998.
17 Kiely 2005.
18 Cannavò 2011; Cannavò 2012.
19 Iacovou 2004.
20 Stylianou, Stylianou 1980, p. 1-4 and 6.
21 Ibid., p. 150, fig. 194; p. 156, fig. 205.
22 Gole 1996, p. 107-129; Shirley 2001.
23 Stylianou, Stylianou 1980, p. 151; Papanikola-Bakirtzis, Iacovou 1998, p. 322 no 227.
24 Iacovou 2014b, p. 168.
25 Ibid., p. 169.
26 Grivaud 1998.
27 Shirley 2001.
28 Catling 1962; Cadogan 2004.
29 Satraki 2012.
30 Ibid., p. 30-33.
31 Masson 1983, no 217, face A ligne 8; Hatzopoulos, Georgiadou 2013; Hatzopoulos 2014.
32 Free translation from Deligiannaki 2007, p. 180.
33 Iacovou 2013b, p. 16 and 36.
34 Satraki 2012, p. 98-102.
35 Knapp 2013b, p. 344-348.
36 E.g. Rupp 1987; Petit 2013.
37 Killebrew 2014, p. 597.
38 Galaty et al. 2009.
39 Dothan, Dothan 1992, p. 162.
40 Lipiński 2015.
41 Killebrew 2014, p. 595.
42 Gitin, Mazar, Stern 1998.
43 Killebrew, Lehman 2013.
44 Killebrew, Steiner 2014.
45 Kling 1989a.
46 Sherratt 1991.
47 Morpurgo-Davies, Olivier 2012, p. 113.
48 Iacovou 2013c, p. 135-138.
49 Iacovou 2012a, p. 218.
50 But see Webb 1999, p. 21-29, 53 and 285-287; Iacovou 2012a, p. 216-217, fig. 1-3.
51 Sherratt 2009, p. 98.
52 Sherratt 1998; Georgiou 2011; Georgiou 2015.
53 Todd 2013.
54 Manning et al. 1994.
55 Lo Schiavo 2009; Kassianidou 2013, p. 69.
56 Iacovou 2012a, p. 207 and 215.
57 Iacovou 2012a, p. 220-221; Iacovou 2013b, p. 28-29.
58 Iacovou 2012b, p. 63.
59 Pickles, Peltenburg 1998.
60 Sherratt 1994a; Sherratt 2000, p. 82.
61 Cf. for Kition, Webb 1999, p. 302; for Paphos, Iacovou 2012b, p. 64-66.
62 Webb 1999, p. 292.
63 Iacovou 2013b, p. 39.
64 Åström 1986; Åström 1996.
65 Åström 1996; Gifford 1978; Devillers, Brown, Morhange 2015.
66 Iacovou 2013b, p. 26.
67 Devillers 2008.
68 Papantoniou 2012a, p. 298.
69 Iacovou 2012a, p. 211.
70 Åström 1998a.
71 Keswani 1996.
72 Yon 1999.
73 Peltenburg, Iacovou 2012, p. 356.
74 Saporetti 1976.
75 Luckenbill 1926-1927, vol. 1, p. 265-266.
76 Iacovou 2013b, p. 23, fig. 4; Kassianidou 2013, p. 64, fig. 9.
77 Satraki 2013, p. 126, n. 15.
78 Yon 2004b; Fourrier 2014, p. 72.
79 Hermary 1996; Iacovou 2013b, p. 27.
80 Iacovou 2013b, p. 32.
81 Muhly 2009.
82 Iacovou 2013b, p. 32-33.
83 Fourrier 2007a, p. 58-61; Fourrier 2013, p. 114.
84 Fourrier 2013, p. 117.
85 Counts 2004; Satraki 2012, p. 354.
86 Iacovou 2013b, p. 28.
87 Satraki 2012, p. 352-353; see map in Fourrier 2013, p. 108.
88 Fourrier 2007a, p. 89-92; Papantoniou 2012a, p. 300.
89 Hermary 1999.
90 Karageorghis 1983a; Karageorghis, Raptou 2014.
91 Benson 1973; Christou 1994; Buitron-Oliver 1999.
92 Childs, Smith, Padgett 2012.
93 Karageorghis 1973a, p. 662; Papantoniou 2012a, p. 297.
94 Yon 1971; Georgiou G. 2003, p. 158.
95 Morpurgo-Davies, Olivier 2012.
96 Sznycer 1980.
97 With respect to Kition, see especially Fourrier 2014, p. 50.
98 Aubet 2013, p. 41.
99 Myres 1910, p. 107, pl. 29; McFadden 1954; Karageorghis 1983a, p. 60-61, pl. 88.
100 Gilboa 2014, p. 636-638.
101 Kiely 2005, p. 335.
102 Bell 2012, p. 186.
103 Teixidor 1975, p. 123.
104 Hadjicosti 2017 ; Amadasi Guzzo.
105 Amadasi Guzzo 2007.
106 Iacovou 2013c.
107 On Cypro-Syllabic as well as Phoenician legends observed on the coinage of Marion, see Destrooper-Georgiades 2001; Satraki 2012, p. 322.
108 On the use of the Phoenician alphabet in Lapithos, consult Masson, Sznycer 1972, p. 97; Destrooper 2011; Steele 2013, p. 221.
109 Egetmeyer 2009.
110 Iacovou 2012a, p. 220-221.
111 Iacovou 2013c.
112 See a listing of all “royal” inscriptions from Cyprus in Satraki 2012, p. 391-418.
113 Fourrier 2013, p. 104.
114 Fourrier 2011, p. 130-131.
115 Satraki 2013.
116 Ibid., p. 127.
117 Wallace 2010, p. 372.
118 Satraki 2012, p. 333.
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