A Kingdom for Fifty Talents: Copper and the City-Kingdoms of Cyprus

Some time around the middle of the fourth century BC, a Cypriot king named Pasikypros ran out of money. The story survives because Athenaeus, collecting anecdotes about spendthrifts, copied it out of Duris of Samos: Pasikypros was "compelled by his extravagance" to sell a fortified place to the king of Kition for fifty talents, "and along with the fortress went his kingdom too." He took the money and spent his old age at Amathus, on the south coast. In 332, after the siege of Tyre, Alexander the Great sent his allies home with presents, and among the gifts he gave Pnytagoras, king of Salamis, was that same place, which Pnytagoras had asked for [1].

Duris never names the place. The name comes from royal inscriptions at Kition, where the buyer, Pumayyaton (the Greeks heard it as Pygmalion), spends a short stretch of his reign styling himself king of Kition, Idalion and Tamassos [2]. Tamassos is the only Cypriot kingdom that ancient writers credit with great copper mines. "At Tamassos there are abundant mines of copper," Strabo wrote, "in which is found chalcanthite and also the rust of copper," useful in medicine [3]. The kingdom that sat on those mines changed hands twice within a generation, once for cash and once as a favour, and no ancient text mentions a battle over it.

Most specialists now agree that copper explains why Iron Age Cyprus was divided into a cluster of small kingdoms, and how they paid for themselves until the end of the fourth century BC. Tamassos shows where the explanation strains. The wealthiest kingdom had no copper at all; the two inland kingdoms with the richest mines behind them, Tamassos and Idalion, both ended up in the hands of a port; and after about 1100 BC the copper itself, once shipped, is very hard to find.

A ring of copper round the Troodos

The ore lies in a ring. The Troodos massif is an ophiolite, a slab of ancient ocean floor pushed up above the sea, and its copper sits in massive sulphide bodies within the Pillow Lavas that wrap around its foothills. Weathering left gossans over them, rust-coloured caps that "could be readily detected, even from a distance," and the ore beneath was friable enough to dig with simple tools [3]. The same deposits hold gold and silver, in concentrations so low and a form so invisible that Vasiliki Kassianidou judges it "highly unlikely that precious metals were ever extracted from the island in antiquity" [3]. Copper was what Cyprus had to sell. Its Bronze Age trade is told in Under a Kilogram; this chapter starts where that world ended, around 1100 BC.

Maria Iacovou's argument, now the dominant framework, is that the shape of the ore field shaped the politics. Had the copper been concentrated in one or two places, Cyprus might have become a single state. Spread around the mountain and close to the surface, it let many centres claim a share [4]. She names three "spatial ingredients" a viable polity needed: a hinterland to draw metal from, a coastal emporium to trade through, and enough farmland to feed its miners, sailors and officials. Lose one, and independence was at risk [4]. Kassianidou tested the geology against the list of capitals and found that all but three had copper ore within about fifteen kilometres. The exceptions were Salamis, Ledra and Chytroi [3].

The list is Assyrian. In 673 or 672 BC Esarhaddon recorded "ten kings of Iatnana of the middle of the sea" among the vassals who supplied his palace at Nineveh: Idalion, Chytroi, Salamis, Paphos, Soloi, Kourion, Tamassos and Ledra, plus a Qartihadasht, "New Town," which may be Kition or Amathus, and a Nuria nobody has placed with confidence [5]. In 707, a generation earlier, Sargon II had set up a stele at Kition recording the submission of seven kings of the land of Ia' [7]. When the kingdoms were abolished there were seven again, every one of them a port [4]. Iacovou herself has warned that "no honest scholar can claim precise knowledge of the number, let alone the names and the boundaries," of the kingdoms at any moment, a caution Kassianidou repeats [3]. The territories on modern maps are distances from mines.

Pit-props and a missing century

The Bronze Age industry ended badly. The inland ashlar centres near the ores were abandoned for good. At Kition-Kathari the workshops beside the temples were still working copper in the eleventh century, until an earthquake damaged them; afterwards "metalworking was no longer practised," and around 1000 BC the sacred area was deserted for a century and a half [6]. The oxhide ingot, the diagnostic shape of Cypriot copper abroad, goes out of use after the eleventh century, and from then on, Kassianidou writes, "we do not know what the Cypriot copper ingots looked like" [3].

The old story made this a dark age, ended in the ninth century when Phoenicians from Tyre settled at Kition and restarted the mines. The radiocarbon dates disagree. Charcoal from mining spoil at Agrokipia-Kriadhis, west of Tamassos, dates to 934–791 and 919–770 BC; a timber from the Kambia mines near Tamassos to 842–718; a timber from the galleries at Skouriotissa, in the territory of Soloi, to 828–748 [3]. Those galleries, recorded before opencast mining destroyed them, had niches for oil lamps, steps cut into the steep passages, and pine pit-props with native copper crystallised into the grain of the wood [9].

Kassianidou reads this as continuity. She calls the idea that the Phoenicians set Cypriot copper production in motion "old and outdated," and turns it around: they came in the ninth century "because copper production did not cease after the Late Bronze Age" [6]. For the timing she points to the Arabah, in today's southern Jordan and Israel, where copper production at Faynan and Timna peaked in the tenth century and ended in the ninth; its collapse, she suggests, sent Levantine buyers to the island [6].

Bernard Knapp, following James Muhly, finds the evidence for Cypriot copper production and trade between about 1100 and 750 BC "very limited," thickening only towards the end of that span [7]. Kassianidou places the mine dates, together with radiocarbon-dated ropes and baskets from Skouriotissa, in the first phase of the Cypro-Geometric period [6], but the published ranges centre on the ninth and eighth centuries, which leaves the eleventh and tenth thin. Field surveys around the mines find very little from the countryside before about 850 BC [19]. And the team that analysed fifty-four loaf-shaped ingots from the anchorage at Neve Yam, off the Carmel coast, found Faynan copper and concluded that Faynan "for a while, replaced Cyprus as a main player in this trade" [8]. Whether the eleventh and tenth centuries saw a pause, a contraction or only a gap in what survives is open, and so is the date of the kingdoms themselves: Iacovou sees territorial polities in the eleventh century, Thierry Petit in the ninth, David Rupp not until the eighth [7]. By the eighth century, on every account, copper was being mined on a growing scale and the kingdoms were there to profit.

A furnace in the palace

The endowments were unequal. Soloi was "perhaps the richest of all": Skouriotissa, Apliki and Mavrovouni, all within ten kilometres of the city, produced 85 percent of the copper Cyprus exported in modern times [3]. Marion had Limni and Kinousa, the island's second largest deposits, under five kilometres away, where a survey estimated some 36,000 tons of slag produced between the Archaic and Hellenistic periods. Amathus had the Kalavasos district, whose heap at Petra once held some 700,000 tons of slag, with dates from the Archaic period onward. Tamassos and Idalion had rich mines in the hills behind them; Kition, Kourion and Paphos had lesser ores at a distance [3].

On 26 July 1982 Walter Fasnacht noticed slag beside a road on Almyras, a hillock near Agia Varvara some twenty kilometres south of Nicosia. Excavation found the whole chain of work in one small place: an open pit of about twenty cubic metres, roasting pits, pairs of furnaces some forty centimetres across cut into the bedrock, and chambers hollowed into the soft rock where the workers slept and, to judge by the stones, ate olives [10]. The site was worked in three bursts, around 600, 400 and 150 BC, and its total output comes to roughly a ton of copper. In one of the chambers lay two clay figurines, one a seated musician probably holding a frame drum, and a small limestone ram [10].

The pottery at Almyras is Idalion's, and the copper presumably went there, but Peege reads the camp as the work of people who turned to smelting for a season when demand rose [10]. At the other end of the scale, the slag heap at Mitsero-Kokkinoyia, in the territory of Tamassos, stands up to ten metres high, built up between the seventh and fifth centuries BC, and Kassianidou notes that no Bronze Age deposit of that kind has been found on the island [6].

No ancient text says that a Cypriot king owned a mine, and Strabo, often cited for it, says nothing of the kind. The nearest contemporary statement concerns trees, which every smelt consumed: Theophrastus, writing as the last kings reigned, says that "in Cyprus the kings used to not cut the trees," because they husbanded them [19]. When Ptolemy I took the island he handed his governor "the revenues of the expelled kings," without saying where those revenues came from [5]. Iacovou's description of the Cypriot king as "the director general of his kingdom's metal industry" is a modern formula, and a persuasive one [4].

The archaeology points the same way. At Marion a sixth-century monumental building, possibly the palace, had a tuyère, the clay nozzle that carried air from the bellows into a furnace, still in place in one room, and it stood on the road east to the Limni mines; at the entrance of a sanctuary nearby, slag had been buried with a bull's skull [3]. The only royal syllabic inscription from the Marion region was found near the Limni mines [4]. In the palace sanctuary on the acropolis of Amathus, a furnace full of ash and slag stood in the same room as the venerated cult statue, a kouros [3]. The kings kept copper close, though Almyras is a reminder that a king need not have owned every furnace.

The richest kingdom had no copper

Salamis, on the east coast, had no ore anywhere in its territory, and was the wealthiest of the kingdoms. Its built tombs with chariot burials begin around 725–700 BC, its king Evelthon probably struck the first Cypriot coins, and it turns up in ancient literature, Iacovou counts, more often than all the other Cypriot states combined [4]. In 2002 she proposed that Salamis managed the export of Tamassos's copper from early on, and called it a "conjecture," resting on the absence of copper "anywhere within the geophysical environment of the Salaminian state" [3]. The model is Bronze Age Enkomi, a few kilometres away, which also lay farthest from the mines and, on Edgar Peltenburg's reading, secured copper more successfully than any rival. The river Pediaios runs from the Tamassos hills to the coast near Salamis, past Ledra, under modern Nicosia, and Iacovou argues that Salamis had made Ledra a way station on that route before 700 [4].

That relationship is undocumented until Alexander's gift of 332 put a mining district in Salaminian hands. What is documented is how the interior fared. Ledra and Chytroi, which had farmland and sat on the roads to the coast but had no copper of their own, drop out of the record as independent states after the Archaic period; Idalion fell to Kition around 450 BC; Tamassos kept a king until Pasikypros sold it [4]. The kingdoms with mines and harbours both, Soloi, Marion and Amathus, lasted until the end. What kept a Cypriot kingdom independent was a harbour; mines without one became a prize for whoever had it.

The siege of Idalion and the sale of Tamassos

The one annexation known in any detail starts on a bronze plaque about 21 by 14 centimetres, inscribed on both faces with the longest surviving text in the Cypriot syllabary: "When the Medes and the Kitians besieged the city of Idalion, in the year of Philokypros son of Onasagoras, King Stasikypros and the city of the Idalians called the physician Onasilos son of Onasikypros, and his brothers, to treat the people who were wounded in the battle, without payment" [11]. Their fee was reckoned at a talent of silver and paid in land, tax-free and for ever, and the plaque was set up in the temple of Athena "with oaths not to break these agreements forever" [11]. It is now in Paris, in the Cabinet des Médailles.

It dates somewhere between the 470s and about 450 BC, and the siege had failed, since Stasikypros was still king. Idalion fell soon afterwards. In the second half of the fifth century the kings of Kition begin to call themselves "king of Kition and Idalion," and Idalion's administrative building produced an archive of Phoenician economic texts on potsherds and gypsum plaques, Kitian bookkeeping, with slag and metal-stained crucibles in one room and a courtyard [3] [4]. Kassianidou, following Marguerite Yon, reads Kition's expansion as a drive "to gain possession of the copper mines" of its neighbours [3]. Iacovou offers what she calls "an unorthodox suggestion": that Kition and Idalion had always shared one economic territory, harbour and mines, and that a Phoenician dynasty at Kition claimed the whole back [4]. No text gives the motive.

Tamassos came next, by purchase, and Kitian influence arrived first. Two bilingual dedications from the sanctuary at Tamassos-Frangissa, in Phoenician and the Cypriot syllabary, are dated by the regnal years of Milkyaton, king of Kition and Idalion, to 375 and 362 BC [12]. The earlier is addressed to Reshef, rendered in Greek as Apollo Alasiotas: Apollo of Alashiya, the Bronze Age name for the copper island, still current in a mining district eight centuries on. Pumayyaton held Tamassos by the twenty-first year of his reign, 341 BC, and had lost it by his thirty-fourth [2]. Peter Stylianou suggested that Alexander took Tamassos, "rich in copper," from Pumayyaton because the Kitian king had been slow to abandon Persia and Tyre, Kition's mother city [5]. Pasikypros, meanwhile, was in retirement at Amathus.

The missing ingots

If the kingdoms lived on copper exports, their customers should have noticed. The Assyrians wrote nothing down. Sargon's seven kings brought gold, silver, objects of ebony and boxwood, "treasures of their land" [3]; "Astonishingly," Stylianou wrote, "copper is not mentioned" [5]. Esarhaddon's ten supplied timber and stone [7]. Perhaps Assyria had its copper elsewhere, or its scribes had stopped listing base metals [3]. Two tablets from Uruk, of 551 and 550 BC, record 600 and then 295 minas of copper "of Yamana" arriving from the west [13], but Yamana is the usual Babylonian word for Ionia, the Greek lands; the Assyrian name for Cyprus was Iadnana, and Cyprus is a plausible guess at most.

The best evidence is scrap. In the 1870s a Limassol wine merchant, Georgios Lanitis, bought from a scrap-metal dealer the flattened pieces of two bronze bowls, their edges curled as if bent back and forth until they snapped, and the Cabinet des Médailles bought them in 1877 for 900 francs [14]. Under the rims runs a finely engraved Phoenician dedication. The name of the dedicant is lost; what survives reads "governor of Qartihadasht, servant of Hiram, king of the Sidonians, gave this to Baal of Lebanon, his lord," then two words, b-r'št nḥšt, and a break [15]. Hiram is probably Hiram II of Tyre, which puts the bowls around 739–730 BC. "Lebanon" is the god's name; the bowls almost certainly came from the Limassol or Amathus area, and Hans Matthäus showed from their form, a hemispherical bowl with a faint ridge inside the rim, that they are a Cypriot type made on the island [14].

The two words mean either "the first yield of copper" or "the best bronze" [15]. On the first reading a Tyrian governor on Cyprus, at Kition or perhaps Amathus, was thanking his god for a mine's first output in the 730s. On the second he was giving a good bowl. No one has analysed the metal.

Lead-isotope analysis matches the lead in a metal object against the signatures of ore deposits, and for the Late Bronze Age it pointed again and again to Cyprus. For the early Iron Age the results so far point elsewhere. All eleven Geometric tripod cauldrons analysed from the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, cast between about 950 and 750 BC, were made of Faynan copper [16], and so were the Neve Yam ingots [8]. No Iron Age ingot with a Cypriot signature has been published from anywhere. The export of Cypriot copper in the age of the kingdoms is an inference from slag heaps, royal wealth and a few texts, and Kassianidou herself has written that "it is now high time to do the same for the Iron Age" as was done for the Bronze [6].

One text names a kingdom. In about 337/6 BC the Athenians specified the bronze dowels that were to join the column drums of the new porch of the Telesterion at Eleusis, the hall of the Mysteries. The metal was to be copper "from Marion," alloyed eleven parts to one of tin [3]. Somebody in Athens knew Marian copper by name and wanted it. A few years later the Argives set up a statue of Nikokreon, son of Pnytagoras and the last king of Salamis, in the sanctuary of Hera. Its epigram explains the honour: "on account of the bronze which I was sending to the festival of Hera as prizes for the young men" [3]. The Greek word, chalkos, serves for copper and bronze alike, and the wording implies gifts over several years; one recent study dates the statue to 315 BC [20].

Iron for edges, bronze for show

Some of the copper never left. Around 600 BC a warrior was buried under a tumulus at Salamis with his chariot and horses, and Tomb 3 sorts the two working metals of the age with unusual clarity [17]. Everything with an edge was iron: the 92-centimetre sword, the spearhead, the arrowheads in the quivers, the horses' bits. Everything meant to be seen was bronze: part of a round shield, the horses' blinkers, head-bands, breastplates, disc pendants and bells, and the standards on the yoke, nine-petalled flowers 54 centimetres high.

Iron could be forged but not cast, so every vessel, statuette and inscribed plaque had to be bronze. Kassianidou's model for the fifth and fourth centuries is a loop of war and demand, bronze for armour and warship rams: "The more copper they needed the more they had to fight. And the more they fought the more copper they needed" [6]. It is a good model, and no ancient source states it.

Temples took their share. At Kition the Phoenicians kept "a small workshop for the smelting of copper adjacent to the large temple of Astarte," in Vassos Karageorghis's words, "next to an altar." Half its Iron Age crucibles carry traces of tin, the mark of alloying and casting bronze; the smelting itself was done out in the hills, at camps like Almyras [6]. The Kition temple accounts, two months of payments written in ink on a gypsum plaque in the fifth or fourth century, list builders, barbers, bakers and sawyers, and name no coppersmith [21]. Three fourth-century gravestones from Marion were once read as naming coppersmiths, and Olivier Masson, the editor of the Cypriot syllabic inscriptions, doubted all three [3]. Even the bronze plaque from Idalion counted its money in silver.

Ptolemy, and the mines after the kings

Alexander's successors ended the kingdoms. In 312 BC Ptolemy I, contesting the island with Antigonus, had Pumayyaton of Kition executed, arrested the king of Lapethos, and razed Marion, moving its people to Paphos [5]. The city whose copper Athenian contractors had specified by name twenty-five years earlier was gone. Nikokreon of Salamis became Ptolemy's governor of the island and died the next year. At Paphos the king was forced to kill himself and the palace burned [5]. By 294 there were no kings left on Cyprus [5].

The mines carried on, and the giant slag heaps of the Troodos foothills are mostly later than the kingdoms. At Skouriotissa, Soloi's old mine, the smaller red heap dates to about 73–26 BC and the huge black heap to between about AD 321 and 521 [18]. In the first century BC an inscription from Old Paphos names the island's deputy governor, the antistrategos, who was also "over the mines" [22].

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In 12 BC Herod of Judaea gave Augustus three hundred talents, and Augustus, in the words of Josephus, "made him a present of half the revenue of the copper mines in Cyprus, and committed the care of the other half to him" [23]. It was a gift, revocable at the giver's pleasure, and it went back when Herod died [24]. More than three centuries after Alexander handed Pnytagoras a fortress he had asked for, the mines of Cyprus were once more a present.