A–Z Index

CulturesThe Persian Empire, which held the Cypriot city-kingdoms as tribute-paying client states from c. 545 or 525 BCE until 332 BCE.

PotteryA closed jar with two opposed handles, made in Cyprus in belly-handled and vertical-handled painted series and as a basket-handled transport jar.

Antiquities TradeHow Cypriot antiquities left the island lawfully under successive export regimes, what changed with the 1974 occupation, and what collectors can own today.

StatuesThe limestone votive statues and statuettes dedicated in Cypriot sanctuaries of the Cypro-Archaic period, many in Egyptianizing dress.

ArchitectureThe built environment of ancient Cyprus, from Neolithic round houses to Bronze Age rectilinear villages, ashlar buildings and Iron Age sanctuaries.

Weapons and ArmourThe iron and bronze weapons, armour and chariots of Cyprus from the first iron daggers of c. 1100–1050 BCE to the end of the city-kingdoms around 310 BCE.

PotteryA vertical chain of chevrons ending in a point, painted as a small stock ornament on Cypriot White Painted and Bichrome jugs of the Iron Age.

StatuesHand-built Base Ring ware pouring vessels in the form of a bull, made in Late Bronze Age Cyprus and found in tombs, settlements and sanctuaries.

StatuesHandmade Base Ring ware terracotta figurines of nude women from Late Bronze Age Cyprus, found in tombs and houses and often linked to Astarte.

PotteryThe thin-walled, hand-made Late Bronze Age pottery of Cyprus with dark lustrous surfaces imitating metal, widely exported as jugs and juglets.

PotteryNot a standard Cypriot vessel class, "basket" names the arched basket handle, vessels that carry it, the kalathos and a few openwork bowls.

PotteryBichrome Red is the Cypriot Iron Age wheel-made ware with black and added white paint on a red slip, the sister ware of Black-on-Red.

PotteryBichrome is Cypriot pottery painted in black and red on a light surface, first a Late Bronze Age export ware and later a long-lived Iron Age class.

EnvironmentThe birds of ancient Cyprus, known from hunted bones at the earliest sites and from birds modelled, painted and carved in Bronze and Iron Age art.

PotteryBlack-on-Red is a Cypriot Iron Age wheel-made fine ware with black geometric decoration on a burnished red slip, widely exported from about 900 BCE.

PotterySmall, narrow-necked closed containers for valuable liquids, from Red Polished bottles to Late Bronze Age spindle bottles and Iron Age barrel jugs.

PotteryThe open vessel deeper than a plate and without a pouring neck, the one Cypriot pottery shape made without a break from the Neolithic to the Iron Age.

Mortuary PracticesRock-cut chambers entered by a dromos and reopened for successive burials were the standard Cypriot grave from the Philia phase to the end of the Bronze Age.

ChronologyThe period c. 3900–2500 BCE of circular villages, Red-on-White pottery, picrolite cruciform figures and the island's first small-scale copper working.

ChronologyThe sequence of periods used for ancient Cyprus from the Epipalaeolithic to the Roman period, and the pottery, stratigraphy and radiocarbon behind it.

PotteryConcentric circles, disks, spirals and pendent semicircles, the leading geometric motif of Cypriot Iron Age painted pottery and of Gjerstad's Western style.

EnvironmentWhat the island's own records show about sea level, coasts, rainfall and forests in Cyprus from the first farmers to the Hellenistic period.

Daily LifeWhat Cypriots wore from the Neolithic to the Cypro-Classical period, reconstructed from figurines, statues, textile tools and metal fasteners.

Antiquities TradeThe law, provenance checks and market that govern owning and buying Cypriot antiquities outside Cyprus as of 2026.

PotteryThe red-slipped pottery of the Cypriot Ceramic Neolithic whose slip was scraped with a comb-like tool while wet to expose pale bands, c. 4500–3900 BCE.

PotteryComposite, multiple and ring vessels built by multiplying or joining ordinary shapes, mostly Early and Middle Bronze Age Red Polished tomb pieces.

Tools and TechnologiesThe mining, smelting and casting of the Troodos sulphide ores, from hammered Chalcolithic native copper to Late Bronze Age oxhide ingots and Archaic slag heaps.

StatuesSmall stylised human figures with outstretched arms and bent legs, carved mostly in picrolite in Chalcolithic Cyprus and often worn as pendants.

ChronologyThe age of the Cypriot city-kingdoms, c. 750–475 BCE, under Assyrian, Egyptian and Persian overlordship, with rural sanctuaries and regional pottery styles.

ChronologyThe last phase of the Cypriot city-kingdoms, c. 480–310 BCE, under loose Persian overlordship, ending when Ptolemy I abolished the kings.

ChronologyThe Early Iron Age of Cyprus, c. 1050–750 BCE, of new dromos tombs, early ironworking, the Cypriot Syllabary and the debated origins of the city-kingdoms.

ChronologyPleistocene Cyprus, an oceanic island of dwarf hippos, dwarf elephants, a genet and an endemic mouse, and its first human visitors at Akrotiri-Aetokremnos.

PotteryA small vessel with a single handle set high above its body, made to be lowered into a larger container and lifted out full.

PotteryThe flat two-handled plate, absent from the Bronze Age repertoire, that appears in advanced Cypro-Geometric I and carries its main decoration on the underside.

PotteryDrab Polished is a hard-fired Bronze Age ware of western and south-western Cyprus, often with a blue-grey core, and a technological forerunner of Base Ring.

ChronologyThe period c. 2500–1950 BCE, from the Philia phase through Early Cypriot I–III, of rectilinear villages, Red Polished pottery and chamber-tomb cemeteries.

EnvironmentThe earthquakes proposed for ancient Cyprus, from disputed Bronze Age destructions to the 4th-century CE shocks that left Kourion in ruins.

CulturesAncient Egypt, Cyprus's partner in copper, pottery and prestige goods from the Middle Kingdom to the Ptolemies, who annexed the island.

EnvironmentThe natural setting of ancient Cyprus, covering its climate, coasts and forests, the earthquakes that struck its towns, and its birds.

Tools and TechnologiesA glazed quartz-paste material found on Cyprus as beads, vessels and amulets from the Chalcolithic onward, though no local workshop has been identified.

PotteryA small, often flattened narrow-necked container for valuable liquids, made in Cyprus from the Chalcolithic onward and widely exported in the Iron Age.

Daily LifeWhat Cypriots grew, herded, hunted, cooked and drank from the first Neolithic villages to the end of the Cypro-Archaic period.

Daily LifeHow Cypriots stored grain, oil and wine, from Chalcolithic pits and household jars to the great pithos halls of the Late Bronze Age towns.

Weapons and ArmourThe walls, forts and enclosures Cypriots built in a few distinct episodes, from Aceramic Khirokitia to the city walls of the Iron Age kingdoms.

PotteryA layout of Cypriot Iron Age vase painting in which a single figure or motif is set on the bare, unframed body of a jug, usually opposite the handle.

PotteryThe change in Cypriot fine pottery between c. 1300 and 950 BCE, from handmade Base Ring and White Slip to wheelmade White Painted and Bichrome.

Daily LifeHow Cypriots sat, slept and stored goods from the Neolithic to the Archaic kingdoms, known almost entirely from built benches, clay models, seals and royal tombs.

Tools and TechnologiesGlass vessels found on Cyprus from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman period, mostly from tombs, with local workshops argued but never excavated.

Tools and TechnologiesThe metals other than copper used by Cypriot smiths from the Philia facies to the 12th century BCE, including arsenic, tin, gold, electrum, silver, lead and iron.

ChronologyThe Ptolemaic period in Cyprus, c. 310–31 BCE, when the city-kingdoms were abolished and the island was governed as one province from Nea Paphos.

StatuesA Cypriot limestone sculptural type of a god wearing a lion skin and often brandishing a club, fusing the Greek Herakles with the Phoenician Melqart.

CulturesThe Late Bronze Age Anatolian empire that claimed Alashiya as a tributary but left almost no material trace on Cyprus.

StatuesTerracotta figurines of a mounted rider, dedicated in sanctuaries and placed in tombs across Iron Age Cyprus, most abundantly in the Cypro-Archaic period.

StatuesThe overlapping systems that classify Cypriot figurines and statues, from Winkelmann's N and C numbers to Karageorghis's Coroplastic Art and Gjerstad's styles.

PotteryLarge storage and transport containers of Cyprus, from Bronze Age pithoi and imported Canaanite jars to the island's own Iron Age transport amphoras.

JewelryThe personal ornaments of ancient Cyprus, from Chalcolithic picrolite pendants to Late Bronze Age goldwork and the jewellery of the city-kingdoms.

PotteryThe Iron Age Cypriot pouring jug or oinochoe, a painted wheelmade vessel for liquids made in regional workshops and widely exported around the Mediterranean.

ChronologyThe Late Cypriot period, c. 1650–1050 BCE, when copper exports made Cyprus an urban, literate trading power before the crisis around 1200 BCE.

PotteryLattice (a net of crossed lines) and chequers (alternating dark and light squares) used to fill triangles, lozenges, bands and panels on Cypriot pottery.

Antiquities TradeThe succession of Ottoman, colonial and Republic laws under which Cypriot antiquities lawfully left the island until licensed export ended in 1996.

Antiquities TradeThe removal of icons, frescoes, mosaics and antiquities from the occupied north of Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974, and the recoveries that followed.

PotteryThe lotus flower and lotus-and-bud frieze, the chief plant motif of Cypriot Iron Age painted pottery, of Egyptian and Phoenician derivation.

PotteryA cross of four triangles meeting at their points, painted on the bases of Cypriot bowls and dishes and inside concentric circles on jugs.

Daily LifeDisease, drugs, doctors and healing cults in ancient Cyprus, from Neolithic skeletons to the physician Onasilos of Idalion in the early fifth century BCE.

ChronologyThe Middle Cypriot period, c. 1950–1650 BCE, of multi-roomed village houses, White Painted pottery, growing copper production and the first overseas trade.

CulturesThe palatial Bronze Age civilization of Crete, which took Cypriot copper and passed writing to Cyprus in the early Late Bronze Age.

PotteryThe recurring patterns and figures painted, incised or modelled on Cypriot pottery, from Neolithic combing to the Cypro-Archaic free-field style.

Daily LifeLyres, double pipes, frame drums, cymbals and clay rattles in Cyprus from the Late Bronze Age to the Cypro-Classical period, known mostly from terracotta musicians.

PotteryMycenaean pottery, mostly made in the north-east Peloponnese, was the largest body of imported fine ware in Late Bronze Age Cyprus, and Cypriot potters copied some of its shapes.

CulturesThe palatial Late Bronze Age societies of mainland Greece, whose pottery flooded Cypriot coastal towns in the 14th and 13th centuries BCE.

CulturesCyprus's relations with Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, the Aegean and the Near Eastern empires, from the Chalcolithic to the Cypro-Archaic period.

CulturesThe Mesopotamian empire to which the Cypriot kings submitted around 709 BCE, ruling them indirectly as tribute-paying clients.

Mortuary PracticesBurial on Cyprus from the first farming villages to the eve of the Bronze Age, mostly contracted bodies in pits beneath or beside houses.

StatuesThe small, mostly stone and rarely sexed human figures of Neolithic Cyprus, and the early use of picrolite that precedes the Chalcolithic cruciforms.

ChronologyThe period c. 9000–3900 BCE in which farmers from the mainland settled Cyprus, built villages of circular houses, and later adopted pottery.

StatuesThe painting of Cypriot limestone sculpture with red, black, yellow, green and blue, of which usually only traces now survive.

CulturesThe 12th-century BCE newcomers to the southern Levantine coast, whose Aegean-style pottery, hearths and houses derive most directly from Cyprus.

CulturesThe Iron Age city-states of the Levantine coast, whose traders and settlers made Kition a Phoenician kingdom and shared a hybrid culture with Cyprus.

PotteryThe undecorated, pale-surfaced pottery of Middle and Late Bronze Age Cyprus, made by hand and later wheel-shaped, the first Cypriot ware formed with the wheel.

StatuesFlat, rectangular, stylised human figures, mostly in incised Red Polished clay, made in Cyprus from Early Cypriot IIIA to Middle Cypriot II.

PotteryTrees, date palms, branches and the goat-and-tree or sacred-tree composition on Cypriot pottery and related media, from the Late Bronze Age to the Cypro-Archaic period.

Daily LifeThe methods and published estimates for how many people lived in ancient Cyprus, from Neolithic Khirokitia to the Classical kingdoms, where every figure is a model.

Tools and TechnologiesHow Cypriot potters fired their wares, mostly in open fires and pits until the Late Bronze Age, when the first kilns and the potter's wheel appear.

PotteryThe pottery made and used in Cyprus from the Ceramic Neolithic onward, the island's most abundant artifact class and the basis of its chronology.

PotteryThe classification of Cypriot pottery by vessel form rather than ware, grouped into ten shape families from bowls and jugs to composite vessels.

PotteryThe wheel-thrown, matt-painted pottery of Late Cypriot IIIB, c. 1125–1050 BCE, which merged earlier Aegean-style wares and led into Iron Age White Painted I.

PotteryThe hand-made, red-slipped and polished pottery of the Philia facies, strikingly uniform across Cyprus at the opening of the Bronze Age.

PotteryRed Polished is the hand-made, red-slipped and burnished pottery that dominated Cyprus in the Early and Middle Bronze Age.

StatuesRed Polished ware animal figurines, animal protomes applied to vessels, and animal-shaped askoi of Early and Middle Bronze Age Cyprus, mostly from tombs.

PotteryRed-on-White is the hand-built painted pottery of Chalcolithic Cyprus, with red geometric patterns on a pale marl or slipped ground.

StatuesSmall Cypriot votive models of dancers on a shared base circling a piper, lyre player or tree, made in clay and later in limestone.

ChronologyCyprus as a Roman province from 58 BCE to the fourth century CE, governed from Nea Paphos, mined for copper, and finally wrecked by earthquakes.

Tools and TechnologiesThe evidence for boats and seafaring around Cyprus from the first crossings to the Classical period, from anchors, models and graffiti to wrecks and shipsheds.

StatuesHand-modelled terracotta votaries and musicians of Iron Age Cyprus, built up from a columnar lump of clay with a pinched beak nose and pellet features.

Mortuary PracticesHow the people of ancient Cyprus buried and remembered their dead, from graves beneath Neolithic houses to rock-cut chamber tombs and Iron Age royal tombs.

Tools and TechnologiesThe tools of spinning, weaving and dyeing in ancient Cyprus, from Neolithic bone needles to the terracotta whorls and loom weights of the Bronze Age.

StatuesThe statues and figurines of ancient Cyprus, in stone, clay and metal, from Neolithic pebble figures to Hellenistic and Roman limestone votives.

StatuesA rare class of about fourteen Bronze Age Cypriot plank figures carved in gypsum, chalk or limestone, most of them without a recorded find-spot.

PotteryAny vessel with deliberate perforations that let liquid through and hold solids back, from Base Ring strainer jars to Iron Age strainer jugs and bronze strainers.

Daily LifeHow ordinary Cypriots farmed, herded, cooked, built houses and made pots, tools and cloth from the Neolithic to the Cypro-Archaic period.

PotteryA cross with arms bent at right angles, a frequent painted ornament on Cypriot Iron Age pottery whose meaning is still debated.

StatuesSmall limestone votive statues of crouching young children, dedicated in Cypriot sanctuaries from the mid-5th century BCE into the Hellenistic period.

Tools and TechnologiesThe crafts and technologies of ancient Cyprus, from Neolithic stone and bone toolkits through copper metallurgy and the potter's wheel to early iron.

PotteryGroups of parallel painted lines laid obliquely so that they cross one another, the defining motif of the Middle Bronze Age White Painted Cross Line Style.

PotteryDeep, conical, black-topped Red Polished bowls of Early Cypriot I–II, and their elaborate protome-rimmed form, known mostly from the tombs of Vounous.

PotteryThe families of Cypriot pottery, grouped by clay, surface finish and decoration, from Neolithic Combed ware to Iron Age Black-on-Red.

CulturesThe Syrian port kingdom of Ugarit and the wider Levantine coast, Cyprus's closest Bronze Age trading partners across the water.

Daily LifeEveryday life in the unwalled farming villages of Philia and Early Cypriot Cyprus, known best from the excavated settlements of Marki-Alonia and Sotira-Kaminoudhia.

Daily LifeRural life in Late Cypriot Cyprus outside the towns, pieced together from a few excavated farming, mining, storage and pottery-making sites.

Daily LifeEveryday life in Middle Cypriot villages, where households farmed, herded and made their own pots, copper tools and thread in courtyard compounds.

Mortuary PracticesBellapais-Vounous is a north-coast cemetery of rock-cut chamber tombs whose figured Red Polished grave goods define Early Bronze Age burial in Cyprus.

PotteryWavy lines ending in a hook or spiral, found on Mycenaean imports at Enkomi, Cypro-Archaic White Painted IV juglets and Bichrome plates.

PotteryA continuous line swinging in rounded curves, incised or painted on Cypriot pottery from Early Bronze Age Red Polished to Cypro-Archaic amphorae.

Weapons and ArmourThe weapons, armour and fortifications of ancient Cyprus, from Neolithic projectile points to the iron swords and war imagery of the Iron Age kingdoms.

Weapons and ArmourThe copper and bronze weapons of Bronze Age Cyprus, from Philia hook-tang spearheads and riveted daggers to the Naue II swords and greaves of Enkomi.

PotteryThe hand-made, pale-slipped Bronze Age pottery of Cyprus painted with dark matt geometric motifs, flourishing in the Middle Bronze Age as WP I to VI.

PotteryThe locally made, wheel-thrown, matt-painted pottery of Aegean inspiration that became the standard Cypriot tableware in Late Cypriot IIC and IIIA.

PotteryThe hand-made Late Bronze Age tableware with a thick white slip and dark painted decoration, mostly hemispherical bowls, widely exported from Cyprus.

Daily LifeThe scripts of ancient Cyprus, from undeciphered Cypro-Minoan to the Cypriot Syllabary, Eteocypriot, Phoenician and the Greek alphabet, and who used them.

PotteryA continuous line changing direction at sharp angles, incised or painted on Cypriot pottery from Early Bronze Age Red Polished to Cypro-Archaic handles.