Ancient CyprusAncient Cyprus

Period · c. 2500–1050 BC

Bronze Age Cyprus

In the Bronze Age Cyprus went from farming villages without towns or chiefs to coastal towns of dressed stone whose king wrote to the pharaoh as his brother. The story runs from the newcomers of the Philia phase and the family tombs of Vounous and Lapithos, through the mines and forts of the Middle Bronze Age, to the copper trade of Alashiya and the crisis around 1200 BC.

Rooms with walls of squared limestone blocks in the excavated town of Enkomi
Rooms built of squared limestone blocks in the excavated Late Bronze Age town of Enkomi, on the east coast of Cyprus. Photo: Jerrye and Roy Klotz MD, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, resized.
Contents

About 2450 BC, in villages in the west and centre of Cyprus, people began to set round-bottomed pots on horseshoe-shaped clay stands beside small hearths and boil their food. These Philia cooking pots are the earliest vessels made in Cyprus for boiling liquids over a fire, and they arrived with a whole new way of life: cattle and the plough, the loom, rectangular houses and cast copper [1, pp. 28–29; 2, pp. 170–174]. Eleven centuries later the island had towns of dressed stone at Enkomi and Kition, wrote in a script of its own and shipped copper in slab-shaped ingots of 25 kg and more, and its king wrote to the pharaoh of Egypt as his brother [3; 4].

The Bronze Age of Cyprus runs from about 2500 to 1050 BC, after the Chalcolithic, and this page follows it in the three parts Einar Gjerstad drew in 1926: Early, Middle and Late Cypriot [5]. For the first two, almost all the evidence comes from tombs and a few excavated villages, and Bernard Knapp finds that "none of the material correlates of a stratified complex society" appear together on the island before about 1700 BC [6, p. 20]. Towns, writing, temples and a king came only in the third part.

Some threads run through all three: a village at Marki founded by a few dozen people and abandoned five centuries later, the cemeteries of the north coast, and copper, from the first moulds of the village smiths to the ingots on the seabed off Turkey. The places named here can be found on the interactive map, and the history overview sets the period in the longer story.

The Bronze Age at a glance

The Bronze Age at a glance: phases

Events

  • Marki-Alonia founded, c. 2400 BC
  • Sotira-Kaminoudhia village, 2400–2200 BC
  • Vounous Bowl buried, c. 2100 BC
  • Copper smelted at Aletri, 2000–1850 BC
  • Alashiya in Mari texts, c. 1760 BC
  • Forts on the central plain, 1700–1600 BC
  • Enkomi founded, c. 1650 BC
  • Amarna letters, c. 1350 BC
  • Uluburun ship sinks, c. 1300 BC
  • Ugarit destroyed, c. 1190 BC
  • Enkomi gives way to Salamis, c. 1050 BC
Dates are calibrated and approximate, and scholars draw the phase boundaries in slightly different places; the start of the Late Cypriot falls about 1680 or 1650 BC. [7; 8, p. 17]

The Early Bronze Age: newcomers, cattle and family tombs

Early in 1931 the police at Kyrenia sent the Cyprus Museum a batch of Red Polished pots "collected on the site of Vounous". The museum's curator, Porphyrios Dikaios, went out to the low hill north-east of Bellapais and "saw that extensive looting was being carried out" [9, p. 1]. Villagers were emptying the tombs for pots to sell and, above all, for gold. Tomb robbers had worked the hill before. When Dikaios's men cleared Tomb 22 they found a large clay bowl crowded with little figures, in pieces scattered over the chamber floor. Dikaios thought robbers, "probably a long time ago", had found it "not to their taste, which was for gold", and smashed it [9, p. 118 n. 1].

A coastal slope below the Kyrenia range, looking north towards the sea
The slope below the Kyrenia range, looking north from Bellapais towards the sea. The Vounous cemetery lies on this ground; the tombs are not in view.Photo: ZaironCC BY-SA 4.0

Restored, the bowl became the most discussed object of the Cypriot Early Bronze Age, and it returns later in this part. For most of the following century nearly everything known about the period came out of graves like Tomb 22, reached first by looters and then by archaeologists. The villages where the dead had lived were dug only from the 1980s, and they tell a quieter story of farming families, cattle and courtyards, with no towns, no temples and no chiefs anyone has been able to find [10, pp. 354, 356].

The Philia phase and the newcomers from Anatolia

In 1942 and 1943 Dikaios opened four chamber tombs near the village of Philia, in the Ovgos valley on the western edge of the central plain, and a fifth in 1951 [1, pp. 4, 9–11]. Their pottery was unlike anything he knew, and he placed his "Philia culture" before the first phase of the Early Bronze Age. James Stewart, who wrote the standard classification of Early Cypriot pottery, disagreed: to him Philia was a regional variant of Early Cypriot I that "died out almost without a trace" [11, pp. 210–211, 270]. Excavation settled the argument in Dikaios's favour. At Marki-Alonia Philia deposits lie under Early Cypriot I ones, and at Sotira-Kaminoudhia Philia tombs and later tombs sit side by side "with no intermingling of ceramic types" [10, pp. 354–355; 12, p. 502].

Jennifer Webb and David Frankel found 19 Philia sites with usable data in 1999, all in the west, south-west and centre of the island and most of them cemeteries; many lie close to the copper ores of the northern Troodos foothills or on the routes down to the coast [1, pp. 7–13]. What turns up on them arrives together, as a set. The pottery, Red Polished (Philia) ware, is handmade, fine, soft and uniform across the island, yet it was made of local clay at each site: one learned recipe, followed everywhere [1, pp. 14–17]. Potters pushed handles through the wall of the pot, made bases as separate discs and filled their incisions with lime, and they made the first true cooking pots on Cyprus, "the earliest known vessels used for boiling liquids over a fire" [1, pp. 14, 17–18, 28–29].

Map of Cyprus

Early Bronze Age sites in the story

  • Philia phase sites
  • Villages of the centre and south
  • North-coast cemeteries
  • Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

Sites on this map

  1. 1Philia-Laksia tou Kasinou (approx.)
  2. 2Vasilia-Kafkallia (approx.)
  3. 3Nicosia-Ayia Paraskevi (approx.)
  4. 4Kissonerga
  5. 5Marki-Alonia
  6. 6Sotira-Kaminoudhia
  7. 7Psematismenos-Trelloukkas (approx.)
  8. 8Politiko-Troullia (approx.)
  9. 9Bellapais Vounous
  10. 10Karmi-Palealona (approx.)
  11. 11Lapithos
  12. 12Dhenia
Philia-Laksia tou Kasinou is the cemetery in the Ovgos valley that gave the phase its name. Politiko-Troullia, in the foothills south-west of Nicosia, is the village whose radiocarbon dates close this part.Modern coastline (OpenStreetMap) and relief (Copernicus DEM). Tap or hover a site for its name and page.

The pots were set on horseshoe-shaped clay hobs at small hearths against the wall, "very similar to types well known from third-millennium Anatolia and the northern Levant", in place of the large central hearth of the Chalcolithic round house [2, pp. 170–171]. Houses became rectangular, with several rooms of mould-made mudbrick on stone footings. Clay spindle whorls and loom weights appear with no Chalcolithic forerunners, and so do cattle, donkeys and cast copper [2, pp. 173–177].

Left: a Red Polished (Philia) jug from Philia, about 2500–2300 BC, lent by the Cyprus Museum to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Right: a Red Polished bottle with linked concentric circles in the Drakopoulos collection, about 2300–2000 BC, of the ware the Philia potters introduced.

Where all this came from has been argued for a century. The early answers were refugees or invaders. Dikaios saw newcomers whose meeting with the islanders produced "an aesthetic miracle", and Gjerstad called the start of the Bronze Age "an epoch-making era of foreign character" [13, p. 29]. Webb and Frankel's modern version is more careful: "an initial intrusion into Cyprus of autonomous groups from Anatolia; the development of a distinct, identifiable Philia cultural system; the acculturation of both migrant and indigenous populations" [1, p. 3]. They picture extended family groups crossing from south-western Anatolia around 2500 BC, in a single movement, with everything after it developing on the island [1, pp. 38–39, 42–43].

Frankel's strongest argument rests on everyday habits. Pots and pins can be traded or copied; the motor habits learned in childhood travel only with the people who learned them. The wear on Philia whorls shows they sat at the bottom of the spindle, the low-whorl spinning of Anatolia and the Aegean, where spinners in the Levant and Egypt used high whorls, and "spinners trained in the use of low-whorl spindles have difficulty in handling high-whorl spindles, and vice-versa" [2, p. 173]. Add a new way of cooking, a new way of making bricks and new ways of attaching handles, and the change looks like people arriving with their own routines [2, pp. 169–179].

Others explained the change from inside Cyprus: Stewart, Stuart Swiny, Knapp and Sturt Manning looked to internal processes, a demand for copper and "prestige fashion" [1, p. 4]. Diane Bolger showed that Philia pots were made of local clays and kept several Chalcolithic surface techniques [13]. Knapp now accepts that "the co-presence of Cypriotes and foreigners is a necessary precondition" for the new practices, but he prefers to speak of hybridization, since no Philia object is an exact Anatolian copy [14, pp. 125, 131]. Machteld Mellink, writing from the Anatolian side, agreed that "few of the Philia pitchers and none of the later variants are literal copies of Anatolian prototypes, let alone imports" [15, p. 173]. Webb, reviewing Knapp, judged that their positions "now appear to be in relatively close step" [16]. Most archaeologists now accept that some people crossed from Anatolia and mixed with the islanders; how many, and what to call it, is still argued.

The crossing from Cape Andreas to the Cilician coast is about 70 to 100 km of open sea, which for Frankel was "a significant barrier to either casual or continuous contact" [2, p. 168]. Contact came before the newcomers: Cypriot pottery of the late Chalcolithic was already reaching Tarsus in Cilicia [15, pp. 167–172]. After the crossing the links with Anatolia seem to have lapsed. The tankards, tall two-handled drinking cups and wheel-made dishes that appear at Tarsus in the next phase of its Early Bronze Age are, in Mellink's words, "totally absent from the Philia repertoire" [15, p. 173]. The bones cannot yet settle the question, since no ancient DNA or isotope study has been made on a Philia or Early Cypriot skeleton; a study of living Greek Cypriots finds a male lineage consistent with Bronze Age arrivals from western Anatolia, reasoning backwards from modern DNA [17].

Cattle, the plough and the loom

Cattle had been missing from Cyprus for thousands of years. The report on Sotira-Kaminoudhia says they were "reintroduced for the first time since the earliest Aceramic Neolithic phase" [12, p. 7]. Marki-Alonia has the largest sample of animal bones from any Bronze Age site on the island, over 3,000 identified fragments. Sheep and goats leave the most bones, but cattle, being so much bigger, gave most of the meat, and fallow deer, hunted throughout, gave much of the rest [18, pp. 263, 271].

Worn and deformed toe bones of oxen at Marki suggest the animals pulled loads [18, p. 271]. For Knapp, "the introduction of the plough, an increase in the size and number of implements for grinding grain, and the likelihood that cattle (at least from Marki Alonia) served as draught animals all suggest that the people of PreBA Cyprus enjoyed a diet that increasingly relied on cereal crops" [6, p. 27]. Donkeys arrived as pack animals, and a goat with screw-shaped horns at Marki looks like a new breed [19, pp. 217–222]. Marki's fields grew barley and emmer wheat, chickpeas and lentils, and people ate figs, almonds, pistachios, olives and grapes [20]. At Sotira the olive and vine remains were "too few ... to suggest large-scale storage or processing" [12, p. 450].

A red clay model of a board on legs carrying two pairs of yoked oxen pulling ploughs, with small human figures behind them
The ploughing model from Vounous: two pairs of yoked oxen draw ploughs, each followed by a ploughman, on a board 41 cm long. Red Polished ware, about 2100–2000 BC. Cyprus Museum, Nicosia.Photo: Molly, Cyprus Museum, NicosiaCC BY-SA 4.0Wikimedia Commons

Milk and wool are harder. Archaeologists often group cattle, ploughs, milk and wool together as a "secondary products revolution", a term coined by Andrew Sherratt in 1981 and applied to Cyprus by Knapp and others [21]. The case for dairying rests on spouted bowls that resemble earlier ones, and Louise Steel points out that "it remains to be demonstrated that milk was a novel element of the diet" [22, p. 152]. Wool is inferred from the new whorls and loom weights. Cattle were also wealth on the hoof, a store of value against bad harvests [23].

Two spindle whorls in the Drakopoulos collection, Early to Middle Cypriot, about 2000–1725 BC: one Red Polished with incised lattice and dotted bands, one with herringbone bands. Whorls like these weighted the spindle; the clay whorl arrived in Cyprus with the Philia phase.

Spinning and weaving can be tried by hand in the game Making Cloth, and the tools are described in the compendium's page on spindle whorls and textile tools.

Village life had its pastimes. Limestone slabs with rows of hollows are common on Bronze Age sites, and boards for senet, the Egyptian game of three rows of ten, appear late in the third millennium at Sotira-Kaminoudhia and Marki. Both senet and the spiral game mehen came from Egypt, most likely through the northern Levant [24, pp. 89–90]. One room at Sotira, Unit 10, held seven gaming stones, a cattle skull with the face cut away, perhaps to be worn, and the sherds of up to 93 small Red Polished bowls; Swiny suggests feasting, "perhaps ritualistic" [25, pp. 46–47].

Courtyard houses at Marki and Sotira

Early Cypriot villages were built of mudbrick and rubble, and what survives of them is low wall stumps that early excavators passed over in favour of tombs. In 1962 Hector Catling's survey even proposed "short-term, shifting occupation". Excavation has overturned that: "settlements with multiple chronological components were the norm. At Marki, occupation lasted for some 500 years, from the Philia facies to MC II" [10, p. 356].

Marki-Alonia lies in the central plain about 15 km south of Nicosia, between the Alykos river and the Troodos foothills. Frankel and Webb of La Trobe University excavated it from 1990 to 2000 and uncovered some 1,500 m², "by far the largest exposure of any site of the period in Cyprus" [26, p. 763; 27]. They divided its life into nine phases, each "a palimpsest of perhaps three generations", and followed 33 households through them [28, p. 290].

The houses were of "mould-made mud-bricks laid on lower courses of stone", with stone footings often preserved to over a metre [26, p. 763], under flat roofs of timber, rushes and mud [29, p. 493]. A household lived in a compound: a walled courtyard entered by a single door, with two or three rooms at the back. Screen walls hid the hearths from the doorway; hearths had plaster fenders and stood against low benches, and there were ovens, bins built against the walls, sunken stands for pots and querns for grinding grain [10, pp. 357–358].

Plan · c. 2400 to 1930 BC

One plot at Marki-Alonia

Marki-Alonia, Compound 6 and its neighbours

EC III: c. 2130 to 2070 BC

05 m
Scale bar: 5 metres.N

Choose a number on the plan, or a name below, to read what was found there and how well it is known.

Key

  • Excavated
  • Strong inference
  • Roofed floor
  • Court or yard
  • Fitting
  • Below the cut, or ruined
  • Neighbour
Wall lines after Frankel and Webb 2006, figs 7 to 13, redrawn and digitised to within about 0.3 m. The Philia plan is the yard of Compounds 3 and 4 that came before Compound 6 on this ground. North up. Open the full reconstruction

The sequence lets us watch neighbours over centuries. In the Philia phase "a few dozen people" lived here, their yards marked out lightly by pens and sheds, and big shared ovens suggest related households working together [10, p. 358; 28, p. 291]. From Early Cypriot I stone walls closed the courtyards on three sides. Compounds 6 and 7 shared "a substantial common wall" with "no direct access between them", and kept that boundary for three or four centuries [28, pp. 293, 300]. Each rebuilding put new walls "directly on surviving wall-stumps or offset a half-wall width to one side" [28, p. 289]. By the end of the Early Bronze Age the courtyards were fully enclosed with narrow entrances and lanes ran between them, "requiring considerable re-negotiation of spatial boundaries and ... property rights" [28, p. 294]. Across all this, Webb finds no compound "sufficiently larger or better built than others to suggest systemic differences in household function or in the wealth and status of the occupants" [10, p. 358].

Frankel and Webb estimate that Marki began with 40 to 50 settlers and grew to some 400 people by the early Middle Bronze Age, in households of "seven to ten people" [30, p. 123]. Most adults whose bones survive died in their twenties or thirties, and a woman who reached puberty at 16 and died by 35 "would seldom have lived to see a first-born daughter give birth" [30, p. 121]. The village kept growing after this part ends; its peak and its abandonment belong to the Middle Bronze Age.

Reconstruction · Building · Philia to Middle Cypriot I

The Marki House Through Five Centuries

c. 2400–1800 BC

One house plot at Marki-Alonia rebuilt phase by phase, from the first Philia yard to the walled compound of the Middle Bronze Age.

Formats: Measured drawings · 3D model · Build sequence · Guided tour

Sotira-Kaminoudhia, in the hills above the Kouris valley in the south, was built differently. Dikaios dug one of its tombs in 1947; Stuart Swiny found the place again in 1978 and excavated the village from 1981 to 1986 for the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute with the University of Minnesota-Duluth, publishing it in 2003 [12, pp. 3–5]. Its houses were clusters of rectangular rooms joined by "long, narrow alleyways", with rectangular hearths, low benches, plastered bins and "high monolithic thresholds, complete with pivot holes" for the doors [12, p. 5]. "No sun-dried mudbrick was used in wall construction": the walls were stone throughout, and some stood at least 2 m high [25, pp. 11, 56, 59].

Ten radiocarbon dates, the first from any Early Bronze Age settlement in Cyprus, give "a radiometric chronology of ca. 2400–2174 B.C.E." [12, p. 7; 31]. The village was abandoned about 2200 BC and never lived in again [25, pp. 53, 66]. Some rooms had burned, and a young woman lay in Unit 22. Swiny and the geologist George Rapp proposed an earthquake and fire, which Rapp calls "possible" [32, p. 466]. Webb noted that 80% of the registered vessels were incomplete, "making the overall case for catastrophic abandonment difficult to sustain" [33, p. 375], and Frankel read the woman as a burial made in a ruined house [34].

Reconstruction · Building · Early Cypriot III

A Stone House at Sotira-Kaminoudhia

c. 2300–2200 BC

A stone house at Sotira-Kaminoudhia, about 2300–2200 BC, with its hearth, benches, bins and pivoted door.

Formats: Measured drawings · 3D model · Build sequence · Guided tour

No excavated Early Bronze Age site has fortifications, monuments, temples, palaces, writing or central stores [10, pp. 354, 358–359]. Knapp sees "open communities that were stable, internally well integrated and most likely interdependent" [6, p. 27]. Not everyone reads the villages as equal: Manning saw would-be leaders, "aggrandizers", building up followings [35], and Steven Falconer and Patricia Fall find modest differences between households at Politiko-Troullia [36]. The usual compromise splits the island by region: plain villages in the centre and south, competitive display in the cemeteries of the north coast [37]. More on houses and daily routines is in the compendium's Early Bronze Age village life.

Family tombs on the north coast

Dikaios had "very small" funds for Vounous. Private donations, his own among them, paid for the first seasons, and all the while "news was, however, coming regularly that the villagers had resumed looting" [9, pp. 1, 3]. He cleared Tombs 1 to 48 in 1931 and 1932 (his report has plates drawn by Piet de Jong). Claude Schaeffer, later the excavator of Ugarit and Enkomi, dug Tombs 49 to 79 with him in 1933 for the French national museums, and James and Eleanor Stewart dug Tombs 80 to 164 for the British School at Athens in 1937 and 1938 [9, p. 3; 38; 39]. The village whose dead these were has never been found [9, pp. 4–5].

West along the coast, the cemetery of Lapithos at Vrysi tou Barba was dug by John Myres and Menelaos Markides from 1913, by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition in 1927, by the University of Pennsylvania in 1931 and by the Department of Antiquities in 1954 and 1968–69. Of its 136 known tombs only about a fifth had been properly published by 2019 [40, pp. 247–251]; Webb has since published the tombs of 1913 and 1917 [41; 42]. Since 1974 Vounous, Lapithos and the other north-coast cemeteries lie in the area outside the control of the Republic of Cyprus, where they cannot be re-excavated, and Vounous has suffered "repeated bouts of looting" [43, p. 166].

Black-and-white photo of a man seated in the dark mouth of a rock-cut tomb, writing in a notebook
Photo: John Lindros, Swedish Cyprus Expedition, MedelhavsmuseetCC0Wikimedia Commons
Black-and-white photo looking down into a rock-cut chamber whose floor is covered with pottery vessels
Photo: John Lindros, Swedish Cyprus Expedition, MedelhavsmuseetCC0Wikimedia Commons
Lapithos in 1927. Left: Erik Sjöqvist of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition recording Tomb 306 at Vrysi tou Barba. Right: Tomb 702 as the expedition found it, its floor crowded with pots.

A tomb was a rock-cut chamber reached by a sloping passage, the dromos, through a low doorway closed with a slab wedged by small stones [9, pp. 5, 96–97]. Tombs were prepared in advance: Vounous Tomb 10 had its door slab in place and its dromos filled, with nobody inside, and the dromos of a used tomb was filled again after each burial and dug out for the next [9, p. 102]. Early tombs at Vounous mostly had one chamber, later ones often two or more [44, p. 56]. Three tombs of the earlier cemetery had façades carved to look like wooden doorways, with posts and a lintel [39, pp. 152–163], and at Karmi-Palealona a near life-size human figure is carved in relief on a dromos wall, the only such figure known from Early Bronze Age Cyprus [45]. The largest tombs are at Lapithos, with up to four or five chambers off one dromos [46, pp. 39–40]. At Vasilia, also on the north coast, five tombs of the Philia phase already had rectangular chambers, niches and plastered passages up to 8 m long [11, pp. 288–289; 1, p. 8].

Reconstruction · Tomb · Early Cypriot II–III

A Family Tomb at Vounous, c. 2100 BC

c. 2150–2000 BC

A family tomb at Vounous about 2100 BC: the dromos, the slab door and the chamber with its burials and Red Polished vessels.

Formats: Measured drawings · 3D model · Build sequence · Guided tour

This was a break with the past. Chalcolithic Cypriots buried their dead, many of them children, in pits in and around the houses; now adults went to cemeteries set apart, in tombs that were reused and filled with pottery and metal [44, pp. 54, 96–98]. The Chalcolithic cemeteries at Souskiou were a local precedent, and Priscilla Keswani calls the result "an evolving fusion of mainland and local practices" [44, p. 96].

Funerals involved cattle. Bones of cattle, sheep and goats were found in about a third of the Vounous tombs, and Tombs 13 and 36 held large parts of an ox or calf [9, pp. 30, 72–76; 44, p. 82]. Skulls and feet were present too, so the animals were killed at the cemetery; slaughtering a grown draught ox "bears witness to sustained levels of economic surplus" [47]. The feasting itself happened outside, since the Lapithos chambers stand only about 1.1 m high [44, p. 194]. The dead were buried dressed, with scraps of cloth surviving on daggers, and a body in Vounous Tomb 17 held a small bowl in its right hand [9, p. 99]. Bones were handled again later: in Tomb 164A two skeletons lay without their skulls, which had been set in front of them "as symmetrical as the corpses" [39, pp. 226–227]. Children are rare, about 6% of the Vounous burials [44, p. 52].

Red Polished of the kinds placed in the north-coast tombs. From left: a double-necked jug with two modelled birds, about 2300–2000 BC, and a black-topped tulip bowl with an incised spiral-armed cross, about 2300–2000 BC, both in the Drakopoulos collection; a deep bowl with bulls' heads on the rim and a tulip bowl, both from Vounous, in the British Museum.

Keswani's Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus (2004) put these tombs at the centre of the period. In a society without towns or palaces, she argues, mortuary ritual was "the principal arena" in which people made and remade their social relations and their ancestors [44, p. 26]. Spending rose generation after generation: at Vounous the average chamber grew from 3.7 m² to 8.3 m², and the number of pots per burial rose steadily [48, p. 371]. The rise was broad, since "a large number of kin groups were expending more over time", and the differences between tombs look "graded and continuous rather than discrete or stepped" [48, pp. 383–384]. Hook-tanged weapons grew to as much as 66 cm, too big to haft or wield easily, and where metal was short a clay model of a dagger in its sheath went into the grave instead [48, p. 385; 44, p. 65]. With ploughs and herds, land became something to inherit, and an ancestral tomb may have anchored a family's claim to it [44, p. 56]. Webb and Frankel point out that this display belongs to the north coast: at Marki, Sotira and Psematismenos tombs are simpler and the pottery plainer [47; 37]. The double-necked bird jug has an article of its own, and the compendium covers burial at Vounous and tulip bowls.

Reconstruction · Tomb · Philia to Early Cypriot I–II

A Sealed Chamber Tomb at Sotira-Kaminoudhia, c. 2250 BC

c. 2400–2200 BC

A sealed chamber tomb at Sotira-Kaminoudhia, in the plainer southern tradition.

Formats: Measured drawings · 3D model · Build sequence · Guided tour

The lead on the north coast moved over time. Webb traces it from Vasilia in the Philia phase to Vounous in Early Cypriot I–II and then to Lapithos, which "was located close to a protected bay and better placed than Vounoi (Vounous) to take advantage of a resurgence of seaborne trade" [49, pp. 131–132]. Lapithos's rise runs on into the Middle Bronze Age.

The Vounous Bowl, the ploughing model and the plank figures

The bowl from Tomb 22 is a shallow Red Polished bowl about 37 cm across, its wall 8 cm high, with the spout turned into a doorway under a raised lintel [9, pp. 118–119; 50, p. 149]. Inside the enclosure about nineteen people go about their business. On the far wall three figures in relief, which "appear to have horns", join hands; a figure kneels before them. Others sit on benches, one holds an infant in a cradle, four cattle stand penned by the door with figures watching them, a group stands in a rough circle, and a large figure in a round headdress sits on a high four-legged chair. Outside, a small figure is "trying to climb over the wall" to see what is happening within [9, pp. 118–119]. It is "considerably restored, but the composition is by no means conjectural" [50, p. 149]. The rest of Tomb 22 was ordinary: pots, two knives, a scraper and a whetstone [9, pp. 50–52].

Readings of the bowl have changed with the decades. Dikaios saw a sanctuary of the "Mother Goddess, associated with the Snake God and the Divine Bull" [9, pp. 119–125], and Stewart concluded that Vounous "was either a leading religious centre or the population was unusually religious" [11, pp. 292–293]. Frankel and Angela Tamvaki read a funeral [51]. Desmond Morris saw village life, and noticed that the "snakes" have no heads and may be the loose ends of ropes [52, pp. 281–285]. Manning read the enthroned figure as an "aggrandizer" on display [35, pp. 45–46], and Edgar Peltenburg the whole scene as a picture of a new order of rank [53, pp. 159–162]. Steel argues that it was made to be looked into and shown, and that it gives form to the relationships of age and sex within the community [54]. Sex is shown on only about seven figures, all male, and the infant-holder has no breasts [50, p. 148; 55, p. 135]. No Early Bronze Age sanctuary building has ever been excavated, so the bowl cannot be checked against a real one [44].

The ploughing model came to light through the police. Between the 1931 and 1932 seasons they caught villagers from Kazaphani looting at Vounous, a fragment of the model was among the confiscated sherds, and Dikaios used the arresting policeman as his guide to the tomb [9, pp. 127–128]. On a board on five legs two pairs of yoked oxen draw ploughs, each followed by a ploughman, while two figures carry a trough and a pack animal is led along [9, pp. 127–129]. Vassos Karageorghis, who catalogued all these clay models, judged that "no religious or ritual interpretation may be assigned to this scene. It is an agrarian scene depicting ploughing and involving members of a family" [50, p. 151]. The same scholars sorted the models into sacred and secular, which shows how much the "sanctuary" label on the bowl rests on judgement. Other scenes show people grinding, kneading and baking round the rims of bowls, and Morris found the whole repertoire "relentlessly secular ... no huntsmen, warriors, priests or kings" [52, p. 280]. More are gathered in the compendium's page on clay models.

Two Early Bronze Age clay models in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia. Left: a bowl on legs with figures standing round its rim. Right: a panel topped with three bulls' heads, with a small figure and a jar standing before it.

In the last century of the period, from about 2100 BC, a new kind of human figure appears: the plank figure, a flat slab of Red Polished clay with a relief nose, pierced ears, headbands, necklaces and patterned clothing incised and filled with white. Some have breasts or hold an infant in a cradle, and some have two or three necks [56; 57]. They are the first free-standing human images in Cyprus since the Chalcolithic, and they were made until the Middle Cypriot II period [58; 56]. Daisy Knox counts about 208 [56, p. 152]. Half of the free-standing figures in an earlier corpus come from Lapithos, and the many-necked ones only from Lapithos and Dhenia [57, p. 200], though Knox's larger count finds them in settlements as well as tombs [56, p. 150]. They have been read as a great goddess, fertility charms, ancestors and emblems of a family or group; Lauren Talalay and Tracey Cullen argue that the ambiguity of their sex was deliberate [57]. The cradles on them were real: a few Vounous skulls show possible traces of the flattening that a cradleboard leaves on an infant's head [59, p. 8].

Plank figures of about 2000–1800 BC. Left and centre: a two-necked and a three-necked plank figure in the Drakopoulos collection. Right: a two-headed plank figure from Lapithos, Cyprus Museum, on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A flat rectangular terracotta figurine in reddish clay, with a small cradle held against its body
Plank figure of a woman holding an infant in a cradle, from Lapithos Tomb 313B. Red Polished ware, about 2000–1800 BC, height 29.5 cm. Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm.Photo: Ove Kaneberg, Medelhavsmuseet, resizedCC BY 4.0Wikimedia Commons

The two- and three-necked figures in the Drakopoulos collection are discussed in Three necks, or one neck and two locks?.

Copper for the dead, and an island that looked inward

Chalcolithic Cypriots had hammered a few small ornaments from native copper. With the Philia phase copper was cast for the first time, in open moulds [60]. The new metalwork came as a kit: spiral earrings or hair rings with flattened ends, toggle pins for fastening clothes, tweezers, knives and daggers, hook-tanged weapons, flat axes, awls, razors and heavy arm-rings now often read as ingots in the shape of rings [1, pp. 31–33]. The metal was usually arsenical copper, with up to about 3% arsenic added on purpose to harden it; true tin bronze is rare until about 2000 BC [60; 61, pp. 71–72].

The earliest stone casting mould on the island was found at Marki, built into a wall of the Philia phase. It is a mould for flat axes with perforated butts, a shape that probably also served as an ingot, and it suggests metal was already being cast into standard shapes for exchange [27, pp. 215–217; 60]. No smelting site, furnace or slag heap of the Early Bronze Age has been found; settlements show only melting and casting [60]. The line from these village smiths to the shiploads of copper ingots that made Cyprus famous runs through the next two parts.

Early Bronze Age copper. Left: a tangless dagger from Vounous, British Museum. Right: a solid copper ring weighing about 150 g, from Tomb 1 at Vasilia, Ashmolean Museum; heavy rings like this are now often read as ingots.

Nearly all of this metal went into the ground with the dead. The Vounous tombs held 113 daggers and knives and 45 hook-tanged weapons, the Lapithos tombs 122 and 84, while no excavated settlement has produced more than two daggers and none has produced a hook-tanged weapon [60]. Lapithos alone yielded over 1,740 metal objects from 122 tombs [49, pp. 132–133]. There is no copper ore on the north coast, so the metal was carried over the Kyrenia range from the Troodos [43, p. 166]. Keswani suggests that burying metal created the demand that drove its production [44, p. 82]. The compendium's copper metallurgy page follows the craft through all three parts.

Contact with the outside world was thin. Lead-isotope analysis matches a tin-bronze spearhead and a sword from the Philia tombs at Vasilia to ores in the Taurus mountains; they may be "the first objects of direct Anatolian origin to be identified in Cyprus" [62, pp. 265, 271]. After the Philia phase imports almost stop: Knapp counts about 25 imported objects in some 400 years, "the equivalent of 0.6 of an object per year" [6, p. 28]. Among them are a jar from the Levant in Vounous Tomb 164B [63] and a Minoan bridge-spouted jar from Lapithos, which Ellen Herscher calls "the earliest import to Cyprus from the Aegean" [64]. Going the other way, Red Polished vessels reached a votive deposit at Byblos [65] and one Red Polished amphora reached the palace at Knossos [66]. Steel describes an island "largely isolated from the surrounding cultures of the East Mediterranean", and adds that this was "seemingly a matter of choice" [22, p. 179].

The Early Bronze Age ended without a break. White Painted pottery, the hallmark of the next period, already appears at Vounous at the very end of Early Cypriot III, and excavators often write "EC III–MC I" for the overlap [67, p. 31]. Early Cypriot III saw many new villages, with 44 known sites of Early Cypriot I–II against 345 of Early Cypriot III to Middle Cypriot II [10, p. 356]. At Politiko-Troullia, in the copper-bearing foothills south-west of Nicosia, the creek below the village cut down into its bed, eating at the western houses and lowering the water table that fed the village well. The villagers gave up the well and rebuilt further upslope, and radiocarbon dates place the move slightly after 2000 BC, most probably between 1997 and 1962 BC. Falconer and his colleagues suggest it may belong with a wetter, cooler spell proposed for the southern Levant at about that time [8, p. 12].

The Middle Bronze Age: painted pottery, copper mines and forts

In 1961 James Stewart opened a small tomb at Karmi-Palealona, on the north coast between Vounous and Lapithos. Tomb 11 was a single chamber about 1.4 by 1.0 m, used once, for one man buried with his legs drawn up tight. With him were his weapons, a faience bead, six local pots and a small painted cup made in Crete, a Kamares cup of the kind used in the first Minoan palaces [44, pp. 73, 91, 94; 22, p. 161]. Stewart called it the tomb of the seafarer: he pictured a local man who had gone down to the coast and "took service with one of the vessels trading between the Syrian ports and the Aegean", bringing the cup and the bead home as keepsakes [68, p. 204]. The cup is still "the only Aegean item from Cyprus which can be safely attributed to the Minoan Old Palace period" [69, p. 160].

When Webb, Frankel and their colleagues restudied the skeleton for the full publication of Stewart's Karmi cemeteries in 2009, the seafarer turned out to have been over sixty, with "a congenital defect that would have impeded mobility from birth" [45, pp. 246–247]. He was probably no sailor. The cup may have reached him through a chain of exchanges, and Steel classes finds like it as "one-offs" [70, p. 144]. The little tomb holds most of what this part is about: graves are still the bulk of the evidence, the island's reach overseas was real but modest, and scholars disagree about what a rich burial says about the person in it.

Map of Cyprus

Middle Bronze Age sites in the story

  • Villages and copper workshops
  • Cemeteries
  • Forts and new towns
  • Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

Sites on this map

  1. 1Marki-Alonia
  2. 2Alambra
  3. 3Politiko-Troullia (approx.)
  4. 4Ambelikou-Aletri
  5. 5Kalopsidha (approx.)
  6. 6Episkopi-Phaneromeni (approx.)
  7. 7Lapithos
  8. 8Karmi-Palealona (approx.)
  9. 9Dhenia
  10. 10Nicosia-Ayia Paraskevi (approx.)
  11. 11Korovia-Nitovikla
  12. 12Agios Sozomenos
  13. 13Enkomi
Sites of the Middle Cypriot period and the turn to the Late, c. 2000–1600 BC. The Ayios Sozomenos pin stands for the forts of the plateau (Dhali-Kafkallia, Barsak, Nikolidhes).Modern coastline (OpenStreetMap) and relief (Copernicus DEM). Tap or hover a site for its name and page.

White Painted pottery and the dates of the Middle Bronze Age

No event marks the start of the Middle Bronze Age. Vassos Karageorghis explained that its beginning is hard to date because "it is not characterized by any major cultural innovations. Scholars usually define it by the appearance of a specific type of pottery known as White Painted II" [71, p. 56]. Its three phases, Middle Cypriot I to III, are pottery phases of roughly a century each, and the first White Painted pots had already appeared at Vounous at the very end of the Early Bronze Age [71, p. 56].

White Painted potters covered a pale, fine clay with bands, lattices, wavy lines, triangles and chequers in dark matt paint, laid on with a brush. For Desmond Morris the matt surface and painted lines put it "in an entirely separate category" from the incised Red Polished that came before [52, p. 27]. Each region painted in its own way: "The White Painted pottery of Kalopsidha, the 'capital' of the east, is linear, while that of Lapethos, the capital of the west, is geometric" [71, p. 61]. The south hardly used White Painted at all, which is why Hector Catling's survey of 1955–1959 dated southern sites with Red Polished pottery to the Early Bronze Age and concluded that the south and west had emptied in the Middle; excavation at Episkopi-Phaneromeni showed that the "Early" pottery there was Middle Cypriot [72, pp. 79–80]. In the villages Red Polished stayed the everyday pottery.

White Painted pottery in the Drakopoulos collection. From left: a White Painted II jug with a cut-away neck and lattice panels, about 2000–1800 BC; a White Painted III–IV juglet with a cut-away neck and an amphora with lozenge chains, both about 1850–1650 BC; and a White Painted double bowl with a tall loop handle, about 1850–1650 BC.

The sequence was built by Paul Åström, whose Lund doctoral thesis of 1957, The Middle Cypriote Bronze Age, became volume IV.1B of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's publication in 1972. He worked from the tomb groups of Lapithos and from Kalopsidha in the east [73]. His calendar dates rested on a handful of links with Crete and Egypt and have since been replaced. In 1994 the absolute chronology of the whole prehistoric Bronze Age rested on only 16 radiocarbon dates [67, p. 31]; Sturt Manning's model of 2013 used 351 and puts the start of the Late Cypriot at about 1680 or 1650 BC [7].

The end of the period is dated best of all, from abroad. Small Cypriot juglets turn up in dated layers in Egypt, the Levant and Anatolia, and Robert Merrillees uses them to set Middle Cypriot III at about 1750–1650 BC [74, p. 7]. The divisions within the period are estimates, and the table gives the usual ones.

The Middle Cypriot phases

  1. Middle Cypriot Ic. 2000–1900/1850 BC

    White Painted II appears in the north; villages at Marki, Alambra and Politiko-Troullia; copper mined and smelted at Ambelikou-Aletri; Vounous declines as Lapithos grows.

  2. Middle Cypriot IIc. 1900/1850–1750 BC

    Regional painted styles in the north, east and Karpas; Marki and Alambra abandoned; a boom in tomb-building at Deneia; copper weapons pile up in the Lapithos tombs.

  3. Middle Cypriot IIIc. 1750–1650 BC

    Eastern juglets reach the Levant, the Nile Delta and central Anatolia; forts on the Karpas and the central plain; Levantine weapons and belts in tombs; the courtyard house at Kalopsidha.

  4. Late Cypriot IA (transition)c. 1650–1550 BC

    The potter's wheel and the first Proto-White Slip and Proto-Base Ring pottery; Enkomi's first buildings; most forts built or used in this century; Episkopi-Phaneromeni burned.

The boundaries between Middle Cypriot I, II and III are estimates from pottery; Middle Cypriot III is the best dated, from Cypriot juglets found abroad.

Villages of the interior: Marki, Alambra and Politiko-Troullia

Marki-Alonia, founded by a few dozen people in the Philia phase, reached its largest size at the turn of the Early and Middle Bronze Age, with some 400 people [30]. A survey of the looted cemeteries around it counted 786 tombs and probable tombs within 800 m of the village, and Frankel and Webb estimate that between 96 and 256 adults lived there at any one time [30; 44, pp. 54–55]. Each household replaced only five to twelve pots a year, too few to keep every family's hands in practice, so the excavators argue that a few part-time potters made pottery for everyone [30]. The village was abandoned early in the Middle Bronze Age, after some five centuries, in open country with no wall and no sign of violence. The Cyprus Museum's account suggests "soil degradation", with people "moving into larger communities" [69, p. 55]. The Marki reconstruction ends with this last phase.

About 8 km away, Alambra was dug by John Coleman for Cornell University between 1974 and 1985. Its village of stone and mudbrick was built about 1900 BC, lived in for about a century and abandoned peacefully [75, p. 375]. Seven houses stood in a row sharing their walls, built, used and left with little sign of rebuilding [76]. Coleman found "no clear indicators of wealth or status differences" between them [75, p. 77]. The ridge lies exactly where the chalk of the plain meets the pillow lavas of the Troodos, with copper ores close by [75, p. 2], and one Alambra tomb paired a hook-tanged weapon with a flat axe, a Levantine custom for important men [75, p. 186].

At Politiko-Troullia, near the later city of Tamassos, Steven Falconer and Patricia Fall have dug since 2004 into a village of household compounds round large open courtyards. Copper was worked inside the village: they found crucibles, slag, a stone mould for knives and axes and tongs [36]. The excavators see a "diversified agrarian economy" that encouraged differences between households and groups of households; Knapp reads it as another farming village [36; 6].

Daily work happened close to the floor. Hearths, benches and bins stood only 15–20 cm high, so "many domestic activities must therefore have been carried out by people kneeling or crouching" [77]. Few people lived past forty, and Webb notes that these villages had "relatively small numbers of older women and, more specifically, few grandmothers" [77; 30]. More on homes, food and work is in the compendium's Middle Bronze Age village life.

Red Polished stayed the everyday ware. Left: a Red Polished jug with incised chevron collars and a juglet with a high-swung handle, about 2000–1850 BC, in the Drakopoulos collection. Right: a clay cradle with an infant from Nicosia-Ayia Paraskevi and a plank-shaped figure from a tomb at Alambra, Middle Cypriot, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Houses and tombs tell different stories about the same people, and the contrast runs through every modern account of the period.

EvidenceHouses (Marki, Alambra)Tombs (Lapithos)
Size50–100 m², none markedly larger than the rest [30]Chamber 322A over 20 m², the largest at Lapithos [44, p. 60]
MetalMarki: 32 metal items weighing 81.5 g in all, most of them needles [78, p. 117]Tomb 313: 134 copper-based objects [44, p. 60]
SpreadNo differences of wealth or status at Alambra [75, p. 77]64% of all metal grave goods in nine chambers [22, p. 162]

Copper from the Troodos foothills: Ambelikou-Aletri

In 1942 modern mining adits near Ambelikou, in the north-western foothills of the Troodos, broke into ancient workings, and Dikaios went to rescue what he could. His finds lay unpublished until Webb and Frankel brought them out in 2013 [78, pp. 12, 110]. Ambelikou-Aletri is still "the only mining and smelting site known from this period" [78, p. 113]. Dikaios had dated it to the Early Bronze Age; the restudy puts it in Middle Cypriot I to early II, "within the late C20th or/and early C19th BC" [78, p. 14].

A deep open-pit mine with terraced yellow and rust-coloured walls and a pool of turquoise water at the bottom
The modern open-pit copper mine at Skouriotissa in the northern Troodos foothills. Ambelikou-Aletri lies about 6.5 km to the north-west, in the same copper-bearing hills.Photo: User:MeanStreetsPublic domainWikimedia Commons

The miners worked with stone axes and ring-shaped hammers, left in the ancient shafts. Cypriot ores sit in a "friable sandy matrix that in many places can be easily excavated with simple tools", and the Aletri ore body was small, about 16,000 tons at 1% copper, which is why later miners left it alone [78, p. 113]. A fragment of furnace lining with copper and slag stuck to it gives "firm evidence for furnace smelting in Cyprus several centuries earlier than" any other site [78, p. 113]. A shallow crucible with a pinched spout, about 300 cm³, was used to melt copper under charcoal with a manganese flux, a practice otherwise unknown until Late Roman times, and the ash of a stone-lined casting hearth held lamb bones burnt again and again [78, p. 116].

The most telling object is a clay mould with wedge-shaped hollows on both faces, "unique in Cyprus and possibly in the eastern Mediterranean", which Webb and Frankel argue was for casting ingots in the shape of axes [78, p. 116]. Only two finished metal objects, a needle and a scrap of blade, were found on the whole site, so Aletri made metal to send away [78, pp. 116–117]. Its pottery links it most closely to Lapithos, and the ingots probably went there, by sea round Cape Kormakiti or over the hills [78, p. 120]. The whole village of Marki, by comparison, left 81.5 g of metal [78, p. 117].

The same people made pottery. An open kiln of about 7 m² still held 39 matching jugs with cut-away mouths, fired as one batch, the only potter's installation known from the prehistoric Bronze Age in Cyprus [78, pp. 116–119]. Spindle whorls and loom weights show that men and women lived and worked at Aletri, which makes it a permanent community; Webb and Frankel call it a "mobilised local industry" [78, pp. 96–97, 120–121]. Similar small workshops ran at Alambra, Politiko-Troullia, Kalopsidha and elsewhere near the ores, "multiple small-scale, dispersed centres" that Webb and Frankel see as a "response to renewed external demand" [78, p. 122]. Their output was small: the large Late Bronze Age slag heaps and the shiploads of ingots were still centuries away.

Middle Cypriot metalwork. From left: a copper hook-tanged weapon and a bronze dagger blade, both British Museum; a bronze razor, Middle Cypriot II, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The great cemeteries: Lapithos, Karmi and Deneia

Lapithos was the richest place on the island in the Middle Bronze Age, and the copper of the foothills ended up in its tombs. In the Early Cypriot II–III chambers about 40% held metal; at the turn of the Early and Middle Bronze Age 74%; in the Middle Cypriot chambers 96% [44, pp. 82–85]. The wealth was concentrated: Steel counts 34 of 97 tombs with no metal at all, and 64% of all the metal grave goods in just nine chambers [22, p. 162].

Swedish Tomb 313 held 134 copper-based objects, including ten hook-tanged weapons [44, pp. 60, 85]. In chamber A fifteen people lay "very carefully arranged" in niches and in a circle on the floor, most likely gathered up and reburied together in one or two ceremonies [79, p. 87; 44, p. 60]. Tomb 322, the largest at Lapithos, had five chambers off a dromos about 8 m long; its chamber A, over 20 m² [44, p. 60], held eight copper axes, gold, silver, faience and a lump of iron [44, p. 85]. The overlong hook-tanged weapons of the Early Cypriot tombs kept coming, up to 66 cm, and Keswani reads them as one family outbidding another [44, pp. 85, 92; 80, pp. 68–69].

Reconstruction · Tomb · Middle Cypriot I

Lapithos-Vrysi tou Barba, Tomb 313: A Middle Cypriot Chamber Tomb with Four Chambers

c. 2000–1850 BC

Tomb 313 at Lapithos-Vrysi tou Barba, about 2000–1850 BC: the chambers, the arranged burials and the copper laid with them.

Formats: Measured drawings · 3D model · Build sequence · Guided tour

Inland, west of Nicosia, the tombs of Dhenia (Deneia) cover about 6 ha of plateau. A survey in 2003 recorded 1,286 tomb shafts, most of them looted, and the original number was probably two or three times higher [81]. At least 764 tombs were cut in the Middle Bronze Age, and Webb estimates the people buried there in that time at 9,000 to 20,000; "even the lowest figure ... implies a major influx of people in Middle Cypriot I" [82, p. 174]. The settlement has never been found. Deneia's potters made their own style, with heavy relief decoration and endlessly varied incised bowls, which Webb reads as a "conscious construction of community identity" [82, pp. 174–176]. Then, "in late Middle Cypriot III, an equally abrupt retraction of settlement led to the abandonment of partly constructed tombs" [82, p. 174].

In the Drakopoulos collection. From left: a Red Polished one-handled jar in the Deneia style, about 2100–1800 BC; a Red Polished askos with two heads, one a bull's, about 2100–1850 BC; a necklace of globular faience beads of a Middle Cypriot type, about 2000–1650 BC.

Faience beads like these, a glazed quartz paste made abroad, were among the few imported luxuries in Middle Cypriot tombs; the necklace is the subject of its own article, and the two-headed askos of another.

What the rich tombs mean is argued. Manning and Peltenburg saw a hereditary elite taking shape [44, pp. 91–93]. Keswani's reading is now standard: almost every intact tomb had grave goods, the richest hold larger quantities of the same kinds of objects, and no house stands out, so status belonged to kin groups competing at funerals, above all at the staged reburials, with feasts of cattle, sheep and goat [44, pp. 89–98]. Steel describes "small egalitarian communities with only occasional concentrations of wealth" [22, p. 162]. Collective burials like Lapithos 313A were once read as victims of war or plague; the modern reading, still an inference, is ancestors gathered and reburied [44, p. 65].

Juglets abroad and copper of Alashiya

Small Cypriot jugs began to travel in the Middle Bronze Age. Most are White Painted juglets of the eastern styles, painted with groups of vertical lines and wavy bands (the Pendent Line style) or crossed lines (Cross Line), probably made at Kalopsidha and other sites in the east. At Tell el-Dab'a in the Nile Delta, the Hyksos capital Avaris, Pendent Line juglets first appear just before Stratum F, about 1720 BC on the excavator Manfred Bietak's dates, and reach their peak about 1630–1600 BC; potters there made local copies [74, pp. 4–5]. A single juglet in the Assyrian merchants' quarter at Kültepe in central Anatolia is, for Merrillees, "chronologically the single most important occurrence" [74, p. 6]. What the juglets held is unknown, probably perfumed oil; Patricia Gerstenblith called the reason for their export "a mystery" [83, p. 90].

Cypriot pottery abroad

Middle Cypriot juglets abroad

Find-spots (6)Show the list
  1. 1Tell el-Dab'a (Avaris)Egypt
    • White Painted (Middle Cypriot). Large quantities of Middle Cypriot pottery in a well-stratified town; Merrillees gave Pendent Line Style a span there of about 1725 to 1575 BC. Lesson 4
  2. 2Tell ArqaLebanon
    • White Painted (Middle Cypriot). Pendent Line jugs, 27 painted in red and 18 in black. Lesson 4
  3. 3SidonLebanon
    • White Painted (Middle Cypriot). Pendent Line and Cross Line jugs and bottles in Middle Bronze Age tombs and towns. Lesson 4
  4. 4SareptaLebanon
    • White Painted (Middle Cypriot). Pendent Line and Cross Line jugs and bottles in Middle Bronze Age tombs and towns. Lesson 4
  5. 5MegiddoIsrael
    • White Painted (Middle Cypriot). Pendent Line and Cross Line jugs and bottles in Middle Bronze Age tombs and towns. Lesson 4
  6. 6Kültepe (Kanesh)Turkey
    • White Painted (Middle Cypriot). A single incomplete juglet in a level no later than 1796, 1740 or 1676 BC: the most important occurrence abroad for dating. Lesson 4
Where Middle Cypriot White Painted pottery has been found around the eastern Mediterranean. The map shows pottery only: copper, cloth and other goods that may have travelled leave no such trail. The first Cypriot ware to travel in quantity: White Painted juglets of Middle Cypriot III, found along the Levantine coast and in Egypt.Modern coastline and rivers from Natural Earth. Lines from Cyprus show where pots ended up, not the routes they took.

From Middle Cypriot III things began to come in. Tombs and houses hold Tell el-Yahudiyeh juglets from Egypt and the Levant, Canaanite transport jars, scarabs and cylinder seals, shaft-hole axes, bronze belts and balance weights [84; 6]. Lindy Crewe points out that the Canaanite jars cluster in settlements far from the copper sources, which makes Cypriots active partners in the exchange [84].

The first texts that may name Cyprus belong to these centuries. At Mari on the middle Euphrates, in the reign of Zimri-Lim in the 18th century BC, "all references to Alashiya deal with the import of metals", copper or bronze; one records 34⅔ minas of Alashiyan bronze, and the scribes distinguished "copper", "mountain copper" and "refined, quality copper" [14, p. 328]. A text from Alalakh in Syria records silver from Alashiya, and a Babylonian tablet of about 1745 BC lists 12 minas of copper "from Alashiya and Dilmun" [14, p. 329]. The huge archive of the Assyrian merchants at Kültepe never mentions Alashiya at all [85, pp. 53, 105]. That Alashiya was Cyprus is proven only for the 14th century, when the clay of letters sent from Alashiya was traced to the southern Troodos [86, pp. 233, 248–252]. For the 18th century it is "a land the scribes called Alashiya, most probably Cyprus", and Steel judged in 2004 that "at present it is impossible to demonstrate conclusively that Alashiya and Cyprus (or part thereof) were one and the same" [22, p. 220]. The compendium's page on Ugarit and the Levant follows the eastern connections further.

Forts and new towns at the end of the Middle Bronze Age

About 21 fortified sites appear in the north, centre and east of the island around the turn of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, most of them never excavated [69, p. 56]. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition dug one in 1929 at Korovia-Nitovikla, on a plateau about 25 m above the beach on the south side of the Karpas peninsula. It was an enclosure of about 40 by 35 m, walled with large unmortared rubble, with rooms built into the north wall, two square towers, a single gate about 2 m wide in the north-east corner reached by a 5 m passage, an inner courtyard and a well cut in the rock [87, p. 141].

Black and white photograph of a low rounded mound covered in scrub, with rubble masonry showing on its crest
Photo: John Lindros, Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Medelhavsmuseet (SMVK C01369)CC0Wikimedia Commons
Black and white photograph of the stone-built entrance of the Nitovikla fort
Photo: John Lindros, Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Medelhavsmuseet (SMVK C01372)CC0Wikimedia Commons
The fort at Nitovikla during the Swedish excavation of 1929. Left: the mound from the north-west, with rubble masonry on its crest. Right: the entrance.

On the Ayios Sozomenos plateau about 13 km south of Nicosia stand several more: a fortified settlement at Dhali-Kafkallia, a double wall and rock-cut ditch at Barsak, and the large fort at Nikolidhes, used in the early Late Bronze Age. Michel Fortin observes that they sit "exactly between the island's main flat plain and a 27 km wide strip of igneous rocks rich in copper ore" [88].

The older explanation was danger from outside. Mid-20th-century scholars put the forts together with more weapons in tombs, collective burials and burned houses and saw raiders from overseas, Hyksos or Hurrians; Merrillees later called this habit of thought the "invasion syndrome" [6]. Many forts are inland, though, and the newer readings look inside Cyprus. Peltenburg suggested they guarded the copper routes from the Troodos to the east coast [6]. Monahan and Spigelman stress the "tremendous variability in size, materials, architectural forms", and argue that people left old villages for new fortified ones in "a sharp break from previous lifeways", with the forts helping to create new political relations [89, pp. 144–147]. The whole phenomenon is now squeezed into "at most one hundred years" around the turn of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, since several "Middle Cypriot" forts turned out to be early Late Cypriot [89, p. 145]. The compendium's fortifications page and the architecture course's lesson on walls and war go further.

Tombs of these decades hold Levantine-style gear: maceheads, bronze belts and narrow shaft-hole axes [6]. Archaeologists now prefer to call them burials with weapons, which leaves open whether the dead had ever fought. In the east, at Kalopsidha, Einar Gjerstad excavated in 1924 a house of ten or eleven rooms round three sides of a courtyard [71, p. 59], and Åström dug there again in 1959 [90]; Frankel and Webb doubt that Gjerstad's house was one building [91, p. 54]. Crewe sees Kalopsidha as a gateway community with privileged access to imports [6]. On the south coast near Kourion, the settlement at Episkopi-Phaneromeni had houses on either side of a street, at least one with an upper storey, and it was destroyed by fire at the end of Late Cypriot IA, one of several destructions of those decades [92; 72, p. 81].

Towns were now founded at or near the coast: Enkomi, Hala Sultan Tekke, Episkopi-Bamboula, Palaepaphos and Morphou-Toumba tou Skourou [6]. At Enkomi a thick-walled building that its excavator called the Fortress, with a dog-leg entrance, was fitted with installations for working copper from the start, and it produced the earliest known inscription in the Cypriot script [93, pp. 76–77]. Dikaios dated its first wall to Middle Cypriot III; Crewe's restudy of the pottery puts the first occupation in Late Cypriot IA, about 1650–1550 BC [93]. In the same decades the potter's wheel reached Cyprus, apparently with potters from the Levant, along with the first Proto-White Slip and Proto-Base Ring pottery [93, pp. 46, 48]. Deneia's half-cut tombs and the fading of Lapithos are the other side of Enkomi's rise [82, p. 174; 6].

The Late Bronze Age: copper towns and the kingdom of Alashiya

About 1350 BC a clay tablet written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the age, reached the pharaoh's court at Amarna in Egypt. Its sender was the king of Alashiya, and he wrote as an equal, calling the pharaoh "my brother". He sent 500 of copper, the unit unwritten (Moran supplies "talents"), and asked the pharaoh not to mind that it was so little. A plague was in his land, and it had kept the pharaoh's own messenger in Cyprus for three years. In return he asked for silver "in very great quantities", an ox (probably a figure of one), two jars of sweet oil and one of the "experts in vulture augury", diviners who read the flight of birds [4, pp. 107–108].

the hand of Nergal is now in my country; he has slain all the men of my country, and there is not a (single) copper-worker

The king of Alashiya to the pharaohAmarna letter EA 35, about 1350 BC. Translation W. L. Moran. [4, p. 107]

The god Moran translates as Nergal, the Mesopotamian god of plague and the underworld, may stand for the West Semitic Resheph or for a Cypriot god of pestilence [4, p. 108]. In 2003 a team of petrographers cut thin sections from the Alashiya letters at Amarna and found that their clay came from the southern foothills of the Troodos mountains [86, pp. 245–250]. These are the earliest letters known to have been sent from Cyprus, and most of them concern copper. Since the chalk mould at Marki and the mine at Ambelikou, copper had become what the island was known for abroad.

Map of Cyprus

Late Bronze Age sites in the story

  • Harbour towns
  • Inland centres, copper and cult
  • Sites of the years around 1200 BC
  • Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

Sites on this map

  1. 1Enkomi
  2. 2Kition
  3. 3Hala Sultan Tekke
  4. 4Maroni
  5. 5Episkopi-Bamboula
  6. 6Palaepaphos (Kouklia)
  7. 7Morphou-Toumba tou Skourou
  8. 8Alassa
  9. 9Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios
  10. 10Politiko-Phorades (approx.)
  11. 11Apliki-Karamallos (approx.)
  12. 12Myrtou-Pigadhes
  13. 13Maa-Palaeokastro
  14. 14Pyla-Kokkinokremos
  15. 15Sinda
  16. 16Salamis
Towns, copper sites and sanctuaries of the Late Cypriot period, c. 1650–1050 BC. Salamis, the successor of Enkomi, belongs to the Iron Age.Modern coastline (OpenStreetMap) and relief (Copernicus DEM). Tap or hover a site for its name and page.

From inland villages to harbour towns

The towns founded on or near the coast at the end of the Middle Bronze Age grew into the centres of the Late. Ora Negbi called urbanisation "the most prominent innovation of the Middle/Late Cypriot Bronze Age transition", the "outcome of overseas demand for Cypriot copper" [94, p. 1]. Towns rose first at Morphou-Toumba tou Skourou in the north-west and at Enkomi on the east coast, and only later along the south coast; weights on Near Eastern standards were already in use in Late Cypriot I [44, p. 84]. Enkomi, founded about 1650 BC, lasted more than 500 years [93, p. 75].

Cyprus has no king list, so its calendar dates come from radiocarbon and from Cypriot pots found in dated contexts abroad. Merrillees warned that the history of the Cypriot Bronze Age "must for the time being be recreated almost entirely from the nontextual archaeological remains of the period" [95, p. 47]. Archaeologists divide the period by pottery into Late Cypriot I, II and III, each with subphases; Bernard Knapp prefers the label Protohistoric Bronze Age [6], and this page keeps to the pottery names.

The Late Cypriot phases

  1. Late Cypriot IA–IBc. 1650–1450 BC

    Coastal towns founded at Enkomi and Toumba tou Skourou; forts; White Slip and Base Ring pottery; the earliest Cypro-Minoan tablet at Enkomi.

  2. Late Cypriot IIA–IIBc. 1450–1300 BC

    White Slip and Base Ring at their height and widely exported; Mycenaean pottery imported in quantity; the Amarna letters; the Uluburun ship sinks.

  3. Late Cypriot IICc. 1300–1200 BC

    The ashlar buildings of Enkomi, Kition, Kalavasos, Maroni and Alassa; copper production at its height; Hittite claims over Alashiya.

  4. Late Cypriot IIIAc. 1200–1100 BC

    Some towns abandoned, others rebuilt; Maa and Pyla; Aegean-style pottery made in Cyprus; the first iron knives; the Ingot God.

  5. Late Cypriot IIIBc. 1100–1050 BC

    Proto-White Painted pottery; Enkomi gives way to Salamis; new cemeteries outside the towns.

Phase dates are approximate; radiocarbon puts the start of the Late Cypriot at about 1680 or 1650 BC.

Two new fine wares mark the period. White Slip is handmade, hard-fired and coated in a thick white slip painted in dark brown or black; its best-known shape is the hemispherical bowl with a wishbone handle. Mervyn Popham divided it into stages from Proto White Slip through White Slip I, with its fine patterns, to the ladder and lozenge patterns of White Slip II [96, pp. 432–443]. Base Ring, named for the ring base on nearly every vessel, is thin-walled and dark, with relief bands or painted white lines that seem to copy metal vessels [97]. Its small jugs with long necks were once thought to carry opium, a theory Merrillees proposed in 1962; residue analysis of juglets from Tel Beth-Shemesh found plant oils, and most probably held scented oil [98; 99]. The pottery course's lesson Handmade by choice in the Late Bronze Age shows how both were made.

Late Cypriot fine wares in the Drakopoulos collection, about 1450–1200 BC. From left: a White Slip II bowl with a wishbone handle; a Base Ring II jug with white-painted lattice bands; a Base Ring II juglet with white-painted bands; a Base Ring II double juglet.

Copper: mines, furnaces and oxhide ingots

The copper lies in the Troodos, a slab of ocean floor about 90 million years old pushed up by the collision of the African and Eurasian plates [100, p. 13]. Its sulphide ore bodies are "almost exclusively restricted to the Troodos pillow lavas", in districts such as Skouriotissa, Mitsero, Tamassos, Kalavasos and Limni [101, p. 84]. The metal later took the island's name: Latin aes cyprium, "Cyprian copper", became cuprum, a Roman development first attested in Pliny [102, pp. 26–27].

At Politiko-Phorades in the northern foothills, Knapp and Vasiliki Kassianidou excavated a smelting site of about 1700–1500 BC: over 3.5 tonnes of slag, almost 6,000 fragments of furnace and some twenty tuyères, the clay nozzles through which air was blown into the fire [103, p. 562]. Ore was crushed and roasted, smelted to an intermediate called matte, smelted again to black copper and refined [103]. Nobody lived at Phorades; Knapp calls it a "community without a locus", worked in season by people housed in nearby villages [103, pp. 563–570]. At Apliki-Karamallos, near the north-western ores, Joan du Plat Taylor rescued a miners' settlement of the 13th and early 12th centuries in 1938 and 1939, just before opencast mining destroyed it [104]. The scale had grown far beyond the one crucible and two scraps of metal of Middle Bronze Age Ambelikou.

The trademark of the trade was the oxhide ingot, a flat slab of copper with four projecting corners like a stretched hide. Most complete examples weigh about 24 to 30 kg, close to a talent, and they were cast in open moulds of sand or clay used once, which is why moulds hardly survive [3]. In Cyprus pieces have been found at eight sites, though only three complete ingots, all thought to come from Enkomi; abroad they turn up in Crete, Sardinia, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt and as far east as Babylonia [105]. Lead-isotope analysis matches many to Cypriot ores, and Noël Gale and Zofia Stos-Gale argued that the later ingots came from the Apliki ore field [101, p. 118]. Paul Budd and his colleagues doubted that the method could trace metal that had been mixed and recycled [106], and the argument over individual ingots goes on.

A flat copper ingot with four projecting corners, mounted on a stand in a dark museum case
Photo: ZunkirCC BY-SA 4.0Wikimedia Commons
Aerial view of the ruins of Enkomi, rows of rectangular buildings separated by straight streets
Photo: Cypern20, resizedCC BY-SA 4.0Wikimedia Commons
Left: an oxhide-shaped copper ingot from the Uluburun shipwreck off the south coast of Turkey, about 1300 BC, Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology. Right: the Late Bronze Age town of Enkomi from the air, its streets laid out on a grid.

The trade itself was found on the seabed. In 1982 a sponge diver found a wreck off Uluburun, near Kaş in southern Turkey, and George Bass and Cemal Pulak of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology excavated the wreck in eleven campaigns from 1984 to 1994. The ship sank about 1300 BC carrying some 10 tonnes of copper in 354 oxhide ingots and many smaller ones, about a tonne of tin, ingots of coloured glass, about 150 Canaanite jars, many filled with terebinth resin, logs of African blackwood, an elephant tusk and hippopotamus teeth, a gold scarab of Nefertiti, two wooden writing boards, and nine large Cypriot storage jars packed with new Cypriot White Slip and Base Ring pottery [107; 108]. Copper and tin stood at about ten to one, the recipe for bronze; the tin came partly from Central Asia [108; 109]. The ship was probably Levantine, with Cyprus one of its stops [107]. About 1200 BC a smaller boat sank off Cape Gelidonya with some 34 oxhide ingots, baskets of broken bronze tools for recasting and a smith's hammers and anvil; Bass, who dug it in 1960, argued it was Syro-Canaanite or Cypriot [110].

Two copper oxhide ingots: one in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia, and one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Alashiya in the letters of Egypt, Ugarit and Hatti

Scholars have known Alashiya for more than a century as a copper-rich kingdom with a king, and argued for most of that time about where it was. Merrillees suggested Cilicia or north-west Syria [86, p. 233]. In 2003 Yuval Goren, Shlomo Bunimovitz, Israel Finkelstein and Nadav Na'aman examined the clay of four Alashiya letters from Amarna and one from Ugarit. It came from the southern and south-eastern edges of the Troodos, quite unlike the clay of the tablets from Enkomi, and the closest single match for two of them lies just above Alassa [86, pp. 245–250]. Their best candidates for the seat of the letters are Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios and Alassa [86, pp. 251–252]. Knapp takes the identification with Cyprus as "demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt", while warning that the clay does not prove the letters were written at Alassa or Kalavasos themselves [111, pp. 249–250]. The study itself and the article The search for Alashiya tell the story in full.

Eight letters between Alashiya and Egypt survive from Amarna, seven from the king and one from his governor, translated in Moran's edition [4, pp. 104–113]; five mention copper [111, p. 250]. In one the king sends 100 talents of copper and asks for an ebony bed trimmed with gold, a chariot, two horses and linen [4, p. 106]. In another he denies that his people joined raiders, complaining that "men of Lukki, year by year, seize villages in my own country" [4, p. 111]. In a third he vouches for his merchants and asks that "no one making a claim in your name is to approach my merchants or my ship", in effect a request to pass free of the pharaoh's dues; the governor's letter lists copper, ivory, boxwood and a beam for a ship [4, pp. 112–113]. Earlier, the annals of Thutmose III record "tribute" from the prince of Asiya, usually taken to be Alashiya: in the king's 34th year, 108½ ingots of copper and some 200 kg more in other forms [111, p. 251].

A rectangular clay tablet covered in lines of cuneiform writing, standing in a museum case
Amarna letter EA 35, the plague letter quoted at the start of this part, written in Akkadian and found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, about 1350 BC. British Museum, ME 29788.Photo: Osama Shukir Muhammed AminCC BY-SA 4.0Wikimedia Commons

The letters from Ugarit, the great port on the Syrian coast, show the same kingdom in the 13th century. King Kushmeshusha of Alashiya sent Niqmaddu III of Ugarit 33 copper ingots as a greeting gift and called him "my son"; 29 men from Alashiya and their families lived at Ugarit [14, pp. 311, 318–319, 351–352]. From Hatti come darker claims. The Hittite king Tudhaliya IV boasted that he seized the king of Alashiya with his wives and children and "made it tributary on the spot", and his successor Suppiluliuma II that "the ships of Alasiya met me in the sea three times for battle" [112, p. 77; 14, p. 352]. No trace of Hittite rule has been found on the island.

How the island was governed is still open. Knapp holds that "a single, internationally recognized king ... ruled Cyprus" [14, pp. 357, 361–362]. Keswani sees "heterarchical polities", each with "a multiplicity of institutions and elite groups" and none clearly in charge [113, p. 217]. Peltenburg and Maria Iacovou suggest a core Alashiyan territory in the south and south-east, with other groups outside it [114]. The clay at least rules out one old assumption: the letters were not written at Enkomi, so Enkomi cannot simply be called the capital of Alashiya [86, pp. 249–250].

Cyprus had its own script by then. Cypro-Minoan, a syllabary of about ninety signs derived in part from the Linear A of Crete, was in use from the 16th to the 11th century BC. The earliest text, a tablet found by Dikaios in 1955 in the Fortress at Enkomi, dates to Late Cypriot IB [115]. Most surviving texts come from Enkomi, many of them small clay balls about 2 cm across inscribed with three to five signs [116, p. 128]. The whole corpus is too small to decipher, and its language is unknown [117]. The compendium's page on writing and literacy and the article on the languages of Bronze Age Cyprus go further.

Rectangular clay tablet covered in lines of small incised signs
A clay tablet with a long Cypro-Minoan text, excavated by Claude Schaeffer at Enkomi in 1953. Musée du Louvre, AM 2336.Photo: JastrowPublic domainWikimedia Commons
Cypro-Minoan inscribed clay balls from Enkomi: one in the British Museum, a group in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia.

The towns of the 13th century: Enkomi, Kition, Kalavasos, Maroni and Alassa

The British Museum dug tombs at Enkomi in 1896; one of them, Tomb 66, has an article of its own. Claude Schaeffer's French mission, from 1934, showed that the tombs lay inside a town, and Dikaios excavated it from 1948 to 1958 (his report). In the 13th century a wall of huge stones enclosed about 16 ha, with a gate in each side and streets on a grid; the dead were buried in chamber tombs under the houses and streets [118; 44]. British Museum Tomb 93 held about 1,430 g of gold, including an Egyptian royal broad collar, the most gold found in any Cypriot tomb [119, p. 47]. The architecture course's lesson on ashlar and the first towns explains the building methods.

Large rectangular limestone blocks lying along a wall line in the ruins
Squared limestone blocks beside rubble walling in the ruins of Enkomi.Photo: O.MustafinCC0Wikimedia Commons

Kition, under modern Larnaca, came to light in 1957 when a tomb was found by accident, and Karageorghis excavated it from 1959. It was founded as a harbour town in the 13th century. At Kathari a wall of huge stones ran beside a street 3 m wide, with wheel ruts still visible when it was dug, and Temple 1, about 33.6 by 22 m, was faced with dressed ashlar blocks up to 3 m long, the same masonry as at Enkomi and Ugarit [120, pp. 23, 63–67]. Some 147 stone anchors were found in the temple complexes, and nineteen ships are scratched on the south wall of Temple 1 [121, pp. 147, 273].

Inland, at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios in the Vasilikos valley, Alison South excavated a town with a great ashlar building, Building X. Its Pithos Hall, the largest room, was filled with more than fifty storage jars up to 2 m tall, with room for some 33,500 litres, and chemical tests show that many of them held olive oil. Five clay cylinders inscribed in Cypro-Minoan were found in the building, which Kevin Fisher reads as the town's administrative centre [122, pp. 182–183]. Beside it, Tomb 11 had never been robbed: it held women and young children with their gold jewellery and imported vessels [123].

Reconstruction · Tomb · Late Cypriot IIA

Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios Tomb 11: An Intact Late Cypriot Chamber Tomb Under the Town

c. 1400–1375 BC

Tomb 11 at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, about 1400–1375 BC: an unrobbed chamber under the town with women, children, gold and imported vessels.

Formats: Measured drawings · 3D model · Build sequence · Guided tour

At Maroni-Vournes on the south coast Gerald Cadogan's Ashlar Building gives evidence "of storage, weaving, writing, and metalworking" [14, p. 233]. At Alassa, in the Kouris valley, Sophocles Hadjisavvas excavated Building II, the largest and most elaborate building of its period known on Cyprus [122, p. 184], with a storeroom of great jars set on stone slabs like those of Kalavasos [94, p. 14]. On the Larnaca Salt Lake, Åström from 1971 and Peter Fischer from 2010 have dug Hala Sultan Tekke, which Fischer calls "a Late Bronze Age trade metropolis" [124].

Plan · Late Cypriot IIC to IIIA, c. 1340 to 1100 BC

The buildings at Alassa-Paliotaverna

Alassa-Paliotaverna, on the hill above the Kouris valley

020 m
Scale bar: 20 metres.N

Choose a number on the plan, or a name below, to read what was found there and how well it is known.

Key

  • Wall
  • Wall, line only
  • Storeroom, south wing
  • Court, street
  • Pithoi, bases, fittings
  • Drain, approximate
  • Line of the portico
  • Contours at 1 m
After Hadjisavvas 2009, fig. 3, redrawn. The walls of Buildings I and II are simplified to straight runs; those of Building III follow the published drawing. Placed on the ground by fitting the walls to aerial imagery, to within about 5 m. Contours at 1 m from the Department of Lands and Surveys terrain model (2014, CC BY 4.0). North is up.

Mycenaean pottery came in quantity. "Large numbers of Mycenaean vases started to inundate the Cypriot market at the beginning of the fourteenth century B.C." [125, p. 61]: stirrup jars for perfumed oil and large painted kraters, mixing bowls for wine, with chariots, birds and bulls. The Zeus krater from Enkomi Tomb 17 shows a chariot scene with a robed figure holding scales [126, p. 84]. These pots were made in the Peloponnese and bought by Cypriots; at Kalavasos Mycenaean wares are under 1% of all the pottery [127, p. 19]. Cypriot potters copied them too, as in the three-handled jar below, made in Cyprus in the Mycenaean style (its article).

From left: a large Mycenaean krater in the Cyprus Museum; a Pastoral Style bell krater of the 13th century, made in Cyprus, from Enkomi, British Museum; a three-handled jar made in Cyprus in the Mycenaean style, about 1375–1300 BC, and a White Painted owl-headed rattle, about 1650–1300 BC, both in the Drakopoulos collection.

Gods of the copper towns: the Horned God and the Ingot God

No temple can be identified on Cyprus before the 13th century. Then sanctuaries were built in ashlar in the coastal towns, often joined to copper workshops [128]. At Kition, workshops with slag, furnaces and crucibles lay between Temple 1 and the town wall, and one room opened straight into the temple court [120, p. 77]. No inscription names the god.

At Enkomi Dikaios found the Horned God in a room of the Ashlar Building: a bronze young man 54.2 cm high, wearing a cap with a pair of horns, made in the 12th century BC [129, p. 94; 130]. Some fifteen ox skulls lay in his sanctuary [131]. In 1963 Schaeffer's mission found a second bronze in another sanctuary of the town: an armed man 35 cm high in a horned helmet, with spear and round shield, standing on a base shaped like an oxhide ingot. He had been set upright in a pit 80–110 cm deep under two floors [132, p. 56; 129, p. 95]. George Papasavvas has shown that the ingot base was added later: the figure began as a smiting god of Levantine type and became, in his phrase, a god of smithing [133]. The Ingot God's sanctuary was still visited after much of the town had been deserted [130, p. 79].

Bronzes of the 12th century BC. From left: the Horned God and the Ingot God from Enkomi, both Cyprus Museum, Nicosia; a small copper-alloy figure of a nude woman standing on an ingot, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

A small nude female figure standing on an ingot, the Bomford figure in the Ashmolean, has no recorded findspot but belongs to the same century [134, pp. 15–32]. Hector Catling suggested that copper was produced under the protection of the temples; Knapp argued that elites used religion to legitimate their control of copper [134; 135]. In tombs, Base Ring figurines of nude women with large earrings, about half of them holding an infant, go with fewer than 5% of the burials of Late Cypriot II, and specialists "lack any consensus" on their meaning [128, p. 211; 14, p. 200]. The compendium's pages on bronze figurines and Base Ring bulls and the architecture lesson houses for the gods cover the material.

The crisis around 1200 BC and the end of the Bronze Age

Shortly before Ugarit fell, about 1190 BC, its last king, Ammurapi, received a letter from a king, most probably the king of Alashiya, written on clay from the Troodos [86, pp. 238–239]: "Surround your cities with walls and bring your troops and chariots into them. Watch out for the enemy and reinforce yourself well!" Ammurapi wrote to the king of Alashiya: "Father, the ships of the enemy have been coming. They have been burning down my villages ... Does my father not know that all my troops [and chariots] are in Hatti and that all my ships are in Lukka?" [136, p. 230]. Ugarit was destroyed and never lived in again. The Hittite capital was abandoned at about the same time, when tree rings show a severe drought of several years in Anatolia around 1198–1196 BC [137]. In about 1177 BC the pharaoh Ramesses III recorded at Medinet Habu that before the invaders from the sea "not one stood before their hands, from Kheta, Kode, Carchemish, Arvad, Alasa, they were wasted"; Kheta is Hatti, the Hittite land, and Alasa is Alashiya [138, §64].

A carved stone wall with rows of ships and fighting figures in low relief
The naval battle relief on the funerary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, in which the Egyptians defeat the Sea Peoples. Photograph taken between 1870 and 1896.Photo: Antonio Beato, Museo Egizio, TurinCC0Wikimedia Commons

What happened on Cyprus is argued. Karageorghis described destructions at Enkomi and Kition at the end of Late Cypriot IIC, then rebuilding with walls of huge stones [71, p. 88]. Iacovou stresses abandonment over destruction: Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios and Maroni-Vournes were "peacefully yet thoroughly deserted", while Alassa and Episkopi-Bamboula carried on into Late Cypriot IIIA with no sign of fire [139]. Enkomi, Kition, Palaepaphos and Hala Sultan Tekke went on, and Steel calls Late Cypriot IIIA "the culmination of urbanisation on Cyprus and a period of great economic and cultural prosperity" [22, p. 244].

New, short-lived settlements appeared on defensible ground. Maa-Palaeokastro, a headland on the west coast north of Paphos, was built on bare rock about 1200 BC with walls of huge stones across its landward neck, and had "a maximum life of some fifty years" [140, p. 260]. Pyla-Kokkinokremos, a plateau near the coast north-east of Larnaca, was founded only a few decades before it was abandoned at the end of the 13th century [141, p. 10]. Karageorghis read these as settlements of Achaeans, Greeks from the Aegean; Ioannis Voskos and Knapp answer that the "Mycenaean colonization" "was neither Mycenaean nor colonization", and see Aegean migrants mixing with Cypriots [127, pp. 19–21]. Most scholars accept some migration from the Aegean, because a Greek dialect related to Arcadian was later spoken on Cyprus; its scale and manner are the debate [127, p. 19]. The first iron objects in Cyprus, mostly knives with bronze rivets, date from about this time [71, p. 117].

An excavator kneeling beside a large buried storage jar in a rock-cut chamber
Photo: BretschneiderJCC BY-SA 4.0Wikimedia Commons
A low green headland with scrub and stone walls running out into a blue sea
Photo: Wojciech BiegunCC BY-SA 3.0Wikimedia Commons
Settlements of the years around 1200 BC. Left: excavating a large storage jar in an underground structure at Pyla-Kokkinokremos, 2015. Right: the Maa-Palaeokastro headland on the west coast.

The last phase, Late Cypriot IIIB, about 1100–1050 BC, is defined by Proto-White Painted pottery, the ancestor of the pottery of Iron Age Cyprus [142]. The change to the Iron Age shows less in the towns than in the cemeteries: in Iacovou's words, "not one site shows Late Bronze to Early Iron Age continuity in tomb use, tomb architecture, or burial practices" [143]. Chamber tombs with long passages, in cemeteries outside the towns, replaced the burials under houses and streets. As its harbour silted, Enkomi was gradually given up for a new town at Salamis, about 3 km to the north-east, while Kition and Palaepaphos carried on where they were [143].

The story continues in Cypro-Geometric Cyprus, which opens in one of those new cemeteries, at Palaepaphos-Skales, and follows Salamis and the Iron Age kingdoms.

In the Drakopoulos collection

Pieces of this period in the Drakopoulos collection.

References

  1. 1.Webb, J. M., & Frankel, D. (1999). Characterizing the Philia facies: Material culture, chronology, and the origin of the Bronze Age in Cyprus. American Journal of Archaeology, 103(1), 3–43.
  2. 2.Frankel, D. (2000). Migration and ethnicity in prehistoric Cyprus: Technology as habitus. European Journal of Archaeology, 3(2), 167–187.
  3. 3.Hauptmann, A., Laschimke, R., & Burger, M. (2016). On the making of copper oxhide ingots: Evidence from metallography and casting experiments. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 8, 751–761.
  4. 4.Moran, W. L. (1992). The Amarna letters. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  5. 5.Gjerstad, E. (1926). Studies on prehistoric Cyprus. Uppsala University.
  6. 6.Knapp, A. B. (2013). Revolution within evolution: The emergence of a "secondary state" on Protohistoric Bronze Age Cyprus. Levant, 45(1), 19–44. https://doi.org/10.1179/0075891413Z.00000000015
  7. 7.Manning, S. W. (2013). Appendix: A new radiocarbon chronology for prehistoric and protohistoric Cyprus, ca. 11,000–1050 cal BC. In A. B. Knapp, The archaeology of Cyprus: From earliest prehistory through the Bronze Age (pp. 485–533). Cambridge University Press.
  8. 8.Falconer, S. E., Ridder, E., Pilaar Birch, S. E., & Fall, P. L. (2023). Prehistoric Bronze Age radiocarbon chronology at Politiko-Troullia, Cyprus. Radiocarbon. https://doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2022.99
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