The Cypro-Archaic Period

In 1845 a slab of black stone 2.09 metres tall came to light by chance in Larnaca [1, p. 349]. Carved on it in low relief was a bearded king in a fringed robe, a mace in his left hand and his right hand raised in prayer; the stone also carried 167 lines of cuneiform [2, pp. 429–431]. The king was Sargon II of Assyria. His text records that "seven kings of Ya', a district of Adnana," living "in the midst of the Sea of the Setting Sun in a distance of seven days," heard of his deeds and "their hearts quivered." They sent him silver, gold and "furniture of ebony and boxwood" in Babylon, "and kissed my feet" [2, p. 441].

The stone is the westernmost Assyrian royal monument known and the only physical trace of Assyria ever found on Cyprus [2, pp. 429, 440]. It is also the earliest written statement that the island had kings. For the next two centuries, the period archaeologists call the Cypro-Archaic (c. 750–480 BC), Cyprus was shared among seven to ten small kingdoms, each ruled by a king from a town on the coast or near the copper of the Troodos foothills [3, p. 62; 4, p. 71].

Most of what we know of their kings comes from foreign inscriptions and from Herodotus. The richest evidence of how they lived comes from the ground: royal tombs at Salamis with chariots and sacrificed horses in their entrance passages, sanctuaries crowded with terracotta and limestone figures, and painted pottery on which birds catch fish. The period's last chapter is a failed revolt against Persia, which ended in 498 BC with the head of a rebel king hung over the gate of Amathus, where bees filled it with honeycomb [5, 5.114].

The Cypro-Archaic period at a glance

750 BC700 BC650 BC600 BC550 BC500 BC

Cypro-Archaic Ic. 750–600 BC

Cypro-Archaic IIc. 600–480 BC

Sargon II's stele at Kition707 BCTomb 79 burials, Salamisc. 700 BCEsarhaddon lists ten kings673 BCAshurbanipal's listc. 667 BCMould-made terracottasc. 650 BCFall of Nineveh612 BCAmasis (claimed rule)570–526 BCEvelthon of Salamis560–525 BCSubmission to Persia545–525 BCFlood buries Ayia Irinic. 500 BCRevolt of Onesilos499–498 BC150 Cypriot ships for Xerxes480 BC

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The Cypro-Archaic period at a glance: phases

• Cypro-Archaic I, c. 750–600 BC (boundary uncertain)
• Cypro-Archaic II, c. 600–480 BC (boundary uncertain)

Events

• Sargon II's stele at Kition, 707 BC
• Tomb 79 burials, Salamis, c. 700 BC
• Esarhaddon lists ten kings, 673 BC
• Ashurbanipal's list, c. 667 BC
• Mould-made terracottas, c. 650 BC
• Fall of Nineveh, 612 BC
• Amasis (claimed rule), 570–526 BC
• Evelthon of Salamis, 560–525 BC
• Submission to Persia, 545–525 BC
• Flood buries Ayia Irini, c. 500 BC
• Revolt of Onesilos, 499–498 BC
• 150 Cypriot ships for Xerxes, 480 BC

Kings, kingdoms and copper

A silver-gilt bowl in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said to come from Kourion, shows at its centre a winged god of Assyrian type killing a lion with a sword. Above the scene someone scratched a line in the Cypriot syllabary: "I am [the bowl] of Akestor, king of Paphos." The name was later partly erased and replaced with "I am [the bowl] of Timokretes," presumably the next owner [8, pp. 182–183]. Akestor and Eteandros, both kings of Paphos in the 7th century BC, are the earliest Cypriot kings whose names were written on the island itself: Akestor's on a bowl, Eteandros's on a pair of gold bracelets inscribed "I belong to Eteandros, basileus of Paphos" [3, p. 64; 9, p. 192].

• Silver-gilt bowlArchaic I · 725–675 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art

Basileus, the Greek word for king, was the title of the head of each state, written syllabically pa-si-le-u-se. At Kition, the Phoenician city, the king was a mlk [10, p. 27]. Kings were also priests: the kings of Paphos called themselves priests of the goddess in their inscriptions, and heirs of Kinyras, a priest-king of myth [3, p. 64; 11].

The number of kingdoms changed. Sargon's stele speaks of seven kings without naming them. Esarhaddon of Assyria named ten in 673/672 BC, the only ancient king-list of Cyprus. By the late 4th century there were seven again: Salamis, Paphos, Soloi, Marion, Lapithos, Amathus and Kition [10, p. 27]. Some capitals on the Assyrian list, Chytroi, Ledra and Tamassos, later vanish from the record, while Amathus, Kition, Marion and Lapithos are missing from it by name. Maria Iacovou insists the changing count reflects real political history, with kingdoms rising and being absorbed [10].

Copper explains much of the map. All the capitals on Esarhaddon's list except Salamis, Ledra and Chytroi lie within about 15 km of copper mines, and the richest ores belong to the territories of Soloi, Marion, Amathus, Tamassos and Idalion [4, p. 71]. Vasiliki Kassianidou argues that "the successful management of this multi-stage activity must have defined, in part, the very identity and power structure of Cypriot kingship" [4, p. 49]. Single workshops could be small: a smelting site at Agia Varvara-Almyras, at work from about 600 BC, made about a ton of metal over all its phases [4, pp. 56–57]. The island also sent out gold, textiles, timber and grain, and Cypriots served abroad as sailors and mercenaries: the kittiyim of the ostraca from Arad in Judah, of the late 7th or early 6th century [7, pp. 23–25].

One royal residence has been dug on a large scale at Idalion, a city of about 40 hectares in the centre of the island, only 10 km from the copper mines, with two acropoleis, a lower town and cemeteries around it. On the west slope of the hill of Ampileri the Department of Antiquities uncovered, between 1991 and 2012, about 3,000 m² of a palace fortified with a massive wall and towers, with storerooms of large jars still in place, workshops and "a huge olive press installation." It was probably first built early in the Cypro-Archaic period and stayed in use until the end of the 4th century BC [12, pp. 66–67].

How these states began is argued. David Rupp proposed in 1987 that they formed in the 8th century, Salamis first, under economic pressure from the Phoenician cities, and he read the Salamis royal tombs as "conscious political statements made by the first kings of Salamis" [13, p. 156]. Iacovou sees instead a long continuity from the kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age, "an encore of the Late Cypriot state formation structure," and rejects any 8th- or 7th-century birth date [14, p. 464; 10]. Rupp's model has not been widely accepted, and Rupp himself granted that parts of it were speculative [15; 13, p. 156]. Country sanctuaries multiplied in this period, and Iacovou reads them as the kings' way of marking their borders and protecting the routes that carried copper and other raw materials to the coast, with regional figurine styles tracing each kingdom's reach [3, p. 64; 16].

Map of Cyprus

Kingdoms and sanctuaries of Archaic Cyprus

• Royal capitals
• Sanctuaries
• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Salamis
2. 2Kition
3. 3Palaepaphos (Kouklia)
4. 4Amathus
5. 5Kourion
6. 6Idalion
7. 7Tamassos
8. 8Soli
9. 9Marion
10. 10Lapithos
11. 11Chytroi
12. 12Ledra
13. 13Ayia Irini
14. 14Golgoi
15. 15Achna
16. 16Athienou

The Assyrian kings and the kings of Cyprus

The stele of Sargon II at Kition

The Sargon stele was found in October 1845 or shortly before, lying in later debris away from wherever it first stood. It is usually said to come from the mound of Bamboula by the old harbour of Kition, though Robert Merrillees, going back to the reports of the 1840s, places the find on or beside the ancient city wall near the church of Phaneromeni [2, p. 429; 1, pp. 349–350]. Britain and France both wanted it. Prussia won, the Berlin museum bought it in August 1846, and it is now in the Vorderasiatisches Museum (VA 968), with a cast in Larnaca. To make it lighter for shipping, a slab about 13 cm thick was sawn off its back, damaging the ends of the lines [1, pp. 349–350; 2, p. 431]. The relief shows Sargon praying before eight divine symbols, among them the horned crown of Ashur, the crescent of the moon god Sin, the star of Ishtar and the winged disc of Shamash [2, p. 431]. It names no Cypriot city and shows no tribute.

Karen Radner, who published the fullest study of the stone, argues from its geology, a dark rock of the Troodos like the black stone of the Paphian goddess, that it was carved on Cyprus by an Assyrian mason sent for the purpose; Grant Frame notes that Syrian basalt is also possible, and Merrillees finds no evidence that it was made on the island rather than brought ready-made [2, p. 432; 17, p. 403; 1, p. 349]. The text dates itself to Sargon's third year as king of Babylon, 707 BC [2, pp. 433–434]. Between 709 and 707 Sargon had helped his ally Shilta, king of Tyre, against Tyre's rebellious vassals on Cyprus, the seven kings of Ya'. The Cypriot delegation reached him in Babylon in 708, and the stele was set up in 707 [2, pp. 434, 438; 18]. It says that it was erected facing a mountain called Ba'al-harri, which Radner identifies with the range of Stavrovouni, the peak above Kition; Edward Lipiński placed Ba'al-harri on the Lebanese coast, and Merrillees sees nothing to show that the stele first stood on Stavrovouni [2, pp. 432–433; 19; 1, p. 349].

The Assyrians called Cyprus Iadnana (or Yadnana, Atnana, Adnana), perhaps "island of the Danunians" [2, p. 435]. The stele's own words about where it stood, and its findspot, prove that Iadnana was Cyprus [2, p. 436]. The "seven days" of the text are a fabulous distance marking the edge of the world, matched in Assyrian texts by Dilmun in the Sea of the Rising Sun. The real crossing from Tyre to Kition is about 110 sea miles, two days' sail [2, pp. 438, 440]. Seven is probably a formulaic round number too [7, p. 36].

Older histories by Gjerstad and others spoke of Sargon's conquest of Cyprus. Andres Reyes, Nadav Na'aman and Radner read the evidence differently: Assyria fought no campaign against the island, it backed Tyre in a quarrel with its Cypriot vassals, and the Cypriot kings then made a diplomatic submission to the king who had backed their overlord [2, pp. 438–439; 7, pp. 36–38]. Nearly all scholars now follow this reading. Radner adds a hypothesis: the stele, a public inscribed stone, may have prompted Cypriots to set up their own inscribed stelae in the syllabary in sanctuaries such as Paphos and Rantidi [2, pp. 446–449].

Ten kings on Esarhaddon's prism

Thirty-five years after the stele the Cypriot kings appear by name. A clay prism of Esarhaddon (reigned 680–669 BC), dated 673/672 BC, records the rebuilding of his arsenal palace at Nineveh. It lists twenty-two western kings who had to supply timber and stone: twelve "from the seacoast" and ten from Iadnana [20, p. 291; 21]. The passage, in A. Leo Oppenheim's translation, ends:

10 kings from Cyprus (Iadnana) amidst the sea, together 22 kings of Hatti, the seashore and the islands; all these I sent out and made them transport under terrible difficulties, to Nineveh ... as building material for my palace: big logs, long beams (and) thin boards from cedar and pine trees.

The names come in Assyrian spelling. Scholars match them to Cypriot names and cities as follows, with varying confidence [16; 19, pp. 62–76; 7, p. 59 and Table 2; 22, p. 303]:

Iacovou warns that "Qartihadasti is not necessarily another name for Kition; Noure may be Amathous as easily as it could be Marion or, why not, Lapithos" [10, p. 27]. At least half the ten bear Greek names, among them Akestor, Eteandros, Damasos, Admetos and Onasagoras [3, p. 64; 2, p. 435]. Eteandros of Paphos is the king of the gold bracelets [9, p. 192]. The Akestor of the prism, however, ruled Idalion, while the Akestor of the Metropolitan Museum bowl was king of Paphos: the same name, and probably two different men.

Ashurbanipal repeated the same ten names around 667 BC, in his account of his first campaign against Egypt [20, p. 294; 7, pp. 39–40]. Gjerstad took this for lazy copying by scribes and built on it "a hundred years of independence" from about 663 to 560 BC, a view he later withdrew in a footnote. Reyes points out that the Levantine names in the same list were brought up to date, so the scribes were not copying blindly, and he thinks the Assyrian relationship lasted until Nineveh fell in 612 BC; he grants that the question is still open [7, pp. 40–41]. Cyprus also served as a refuge. When Sennacherib (704–681 BC) attacked, Luli, king of Sidon, fled "to Iadnana in the midst of the sea" and died there [20, p. 288; 23, p. 364].

No Assyrian governor, garrison, fort, destruction layer, palace pottery or official sealing has been found on Cyprus [7, pp. 41–42; 2, p. 444]. Assyria had no fleet of its own and reached the island in Phoenician ships [2, p. 439], and the Assyrian words for what the Cypriots sent mean gifts more than provincial tax [7, p. 38]. Radner suggests that Assyrian pressure on Tyre helped free the Cypriot kings from Tyrian overlordship [2, pp. 448–449]. These inscriptions are also the firmest absolute dates in the Cypriot Iron Age. No Greek writer knows anything of Cypriot politics so early; Herodotus' earliest Cypriot kings belong to the later 6th century [16].

Egypt, Persia and the first coins

Who claimed Cyprus, 707–480 BC

1. Assyria707–c. 612 BC

   Gifts and labour at a distance: Sargon II (707), Esarhaddon (673/672), Ashurbanipal (c. 667). No governor or garrison on the island.

2. No overlord attestedc. 612–570 BC
3. Egypt (disputed)c. 570–545/525 BC

   Herodotus says Amasis took Cyprus and made it pay tribute. No archaeological trace requires it, and it may not have happened.

4. Persiac. 545/525–480 BC and after

   Tribute and warships. The kings kept their thrones, laws and coinage. The revolt of 499–498 BC failed.

Amasis and the Egyptian-looking statues

The whole case for Egyptian rule over Cyprus rests on one sentence of Herodotus, at the end of his book on Egypt: "and Amasis seized Cyprus, the first man to do so, and compelled it to pay tribute" [7, p. 46]. The later historian Diodorus adds that Amasis "subdued the cities in Cyprus," and that his predecessor Apries (588–569 BC) defeated a Phoenician and Cypriot fleet [7, pp. 47, 50].

Reyes doubts that the conquest happened. Herodotus uses nearly the same words of the Lydian king Croesus, so the phrase may be a literary formula, and in Reyes's words "it is not possible to associate anything Egyptian in the material record with an 'Egyptian domination', if only because, historically, there need not have been any such phenomenon" [7, pp. 49–50, 78]. Iacovou agrees [16]. Andreas Mehl takes the other side: Egyptian supremacy "has not to be denied as a fact," though it may have been indirect rule that left the kings in place [24, pp. 65–66]. If it happened, it lasted perhaps fifteen years, from about 560 to 545 BC, or as much as sixty years, from about 600 BC, on a longer reckoning [24, p. 65].

Egyptian-looking objects cannot settle the question. Reyes went through every class of material once claimed for an Egyptian occupation and found none that requires it [7, pp. 50–53]. Even Mehl holds that Cypriot borrowing of Egyptian forms "was independent from the current political relation between Cyprus and Egypt" [24, p. 66]. The best-known case is the limestone statues of men in Egyptian kilts, wigs and crowns. They are a Cypriot way of dressing a votary, closer to Phoenician art than to anything made in Egypt and largely reached through Phoenicia [25; 7, pp. 43–44].

• Limestone votary of a bearded male in Egyptianizing dressArchaic I · 650–600 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art
• Upper Part of a Mould-Made Female Figure with an Egyptianizing WigArchaic II · 625–525 BCDrakopoulos collection

Under the Persian kings

The Cypriot kings went over to Persia either around 545 BC, as Xenophon implies, or around 525 BC, just before Cambyses invaded Egypt. Philip Stylianou and Gjerstad preferred the earlier date; Reyes notes "general agreement that, around 525 BC ... the Cypriot kingdoms became part of the Empire" [26, pp. 26, 42; 27, p. 277; 7, p. 53]. Herodotus says that the Cypriots "had also joined the Persians of their own accord" and sailed with them against Egypt in 525 [28, p. 254].

The kings kept their thrones, their laws and their coins, and owed tribute and warships [27, p. 277; 26, p. 45]. Gjerstad put it plainly: "if we did not know that Cyprus formed a part of the Persian empire we could not possibly imagine it from a study of the Cypriote coinage" [27, p. 277]. The first Cypriot king to strike coins was Evelthon of Salamis (c. 560–525 BC), who also made a dedication at Delphi [27, p. 277]. Herodotus tells how Pheretime of Cyrene came to Evelthon asking for an army to restore her son. He gave her a golden spindle and distaff instead [29, 4.162]. The visit is dated around 530 BC by Gjerstad and around 518 BC by Reyes [27, p. 277; 7, p. 54].

From the second half of the 6th century Salamis, Paphos and Idalion struck silver coins with Greek legends in the syllabary, and their style and weight did not follow the Persian coinage [16; 3, p. 64]. Three Archaic Cypriot silver issues were buried in the foundation deposit of the Apadana, the great audience hall at Persepolis [30]. Herodotus puts Cyprus in the fifth Persian tax district, with Phoenicia and "Syria which is called Palestine," the three together assessed at 350 talents; Cyprus's share is unknown [7, p. 56; 27, p. 278]. Stylianou distrusts the list, since it also names client kingdoms such as Cilicia [26, p. 44].

On the ground, Persian rule left little. "Only single objects of Persian provenance have been found in Cyprus" [27, p. 277; 28, p. 254]. Some statues wear Persian dress, the kandys coat, trousers and hood [28, p. 258]. Inland capitals such as Chytroi, Ledra and Tamassos faded as the coastal ports gained [3, pp. 64–65; 16].

The royal tombs of Salamis

In 1956 Porphyrios Dikaios sent Symeon Klonaris, an experienced digger of the Department of Antiquities, to clear a large built tomb west of Salamis, now Tomb 1. Klonaris had never heard of horses buried in the passage of a tomb, and he threw away "many baskets of horse bones," thinking them the remains of a donkey that the villagers of Enkomi had buried there some years before; Dikaios saved what was left the next year [31, p. 667]. The bones were the first sign of what made the tombs famous. British diggers tunnelling into Tomb 3 in 1896 had thrown out its horse bones and bronzes without noticing what they were, and in the 1880s Max Ohnefalsch-Richter had missed the horse skeletons in the royal tombs of Tamassos, though they yielded bronze blinkers and frontlets [32, p. 71; 31, pp. 666–667]. Vassos Karageorghis opened Tomb 2 in 1962 and dug the cemetery systematically until 1967, with further work up to 1974, and published the final volumes before that year [32, pp. 32, 54; 31, p. 666].

Chariots and horses in the dromos

After a silence in the 10th and 9th centuries, burials resumed west of Salamis at the end of the 8th century [32, p. 27]. The cemetery has two parts. A few monumental "royal" tombs have a chamber of cut stone, a long open passage sloping down to it (the dromos) and a gateway in front [32, pp. 103–104]. Some dromoi are more than 13 m wide and 20 m long, wide enough to take chariots [7, p. 32]. The dead came on a hearse or a war chariot. The animals that drew it were killed in the dromos, and amphorae of oil and food were stacked along the walls; one amphora from Tomb 3 is painted in the syllabary "of olive oil" [32, p. 75].

The excavators found the horses where they fell. In Tomb 47 the second horse "twisted and broke his neck round the yoke; his head was found lying on his ribs." A later burial in the same dromos had six horses killed at once, four for a four-horse chariot and two for a pair, two of them with carved ivory blinkers, and an Egyptian scarab of Osorkon I (926–881 BC), an heirloom by then [32, pp. 44, 54–58]. In Tomb 2 one of two asses broke free, ran to a corner and was buried alive under stones and earth. The skeleton of a man lay in the same dromos with "the hands ... joined as if fastened together," and Karageorghis read it as a human sacrifice [32, pp. 35–36]. Horses went with royal burials, asses with lesser nobles [32, p. 77].

Tomb 79

Tomb 79, found in 1966, has a dromos of about 200 m² and produced 1,107 catalogued objects from two burials of around 700 BC, each with its vehicles and their yoked horses, four vehicles in all [33; 32, pp. 82–91, 105]. Bronze breastplates carry twenty-three figures from eastern myth. A bronze armed soldier 37 cm tall topped a linch-pin, the pin that held a wheel on its axle; it was cast hollow with a rattle inside, to sound as the procession moved [32, pp. 82–84, 89–92]. A bronze cauldron on an iron tripod, about 125 cm high, carries eight griffin heads and four double-faced bird-men round its rim, "more protomes round its rim than any other known specimen"; it is now in the Cyprus Museum [32, pp. 93–94]. Beside it lay iron fire-dogs shaped like the prow and stern of a ship and a bundle of twelve iron spits for roasting meat [32, pp. 95–96].

Then there is the furniture. Throne I, 90 cm high, is of wood sheathed in ivory, with openwork plaques of a winged sphinx in the double crown of Egypt and a composite lotus, inlaid in blue and brown. A second throne was covered in silver with gilt studs. A bed 1.89 m long carried ivory plaques of the Egyptian god Heh holding a palm branch and the sign of life [32, pp. 86, 96–100]. The ivories are Phoenician or North Syrian work, with close parallels at the Assyrian palace city of Nimrud [32, pp. 96–98; 33].

Reconstruction · Tomb · Cypro-Archaic I

Salamis Tomb 79: A Royal Tomb with Chariots in the Dromos

around 700 BC

Tomb 79 rebuilt as it was closed around 700 BC: the stone chamber, the long dromos and the chariots with their horses where the excavators found them.

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

Homer and the Salamis burials

During the excavation, Karageorghis wrote later, the funeral of Patroklos in Book 23 of the Iliad "was for us a kind of Bible" [31, p. 667]. Horses killed at the pyre, jars of oil, spits for roasting meat: the parallels seemed close, and R. D. Barnett found that the Tomb 79 throne fitted the description of Penelope's chair in the Odyssey "exactly" [33]. Karageorghis himself later turned the argument round: "Homer himself was describing burial customs which were widespread among the elite society of his time" [31, p. 668]. N. G. Blackwell notes that most of the royal tombs show only one "Homeric" feature each, so deliberate imitation of epic is unlikely, and he reads the cemetery as competition between rival elites [15]. Reyes points to a Neo-Assyrian royal funeral with horses slaughtered and a bronze bed buried, a custom of Near Eastern rulers that Cypriot kings imitated without being ruled by Assyria [7, pp. 42–43]. No Salamis tomb can be tied to a named king [32, pp. 27–28, 102].

Ordinary families of Salamis were buried about 500 m to the south-east, in the Cellarka: about 100 rock-cut tombs packed into just over 1,000 m², used from about 700 BC to the end of the 4th century. Beside them were offering pyres, with burnt grapes, almonds, grain and egg-shells [32, pp. 103–104, 121–125].

Built tombs for the powerful appear at other capitals too: Amathus, Idalion, Kition, Kourion and Tamassos, as well as Pyla, Trachonas and Xylotymbou [3, p. 64; 7, pp. 32–33]. At Tamassos, Royal Tomb 5 has stone pilasters with Aeolic volute capitals and chains of lotus and palmette carved in stone [7, pp. 32–33]. These tombs show a royal ideology of the later Archaic period in an inland kingdom that would soon fade [16].

Reconstruction · Tomb · Cypro-Archaic II

Tamassos Royal Tomb 12: A Built Stone Tomb of the Sixth Century BC

c. 600–550 BC

Royal Tomb 12, another of the built stone tombs of Tamassos, of about 600–550 BC, reconstructed from the excavation plans.

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

Sanctuaries full of figures

In early November 1929 the priest of the village of Ayia Irini, Papa Prokopios, brought the upper half of a terracotta statue from his field to the Cyprus Museum as a present. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition went to look and found "an intact temple-site with numerous terracotta sculptures" [34, p. 733]. Erik Sjöqvist excavated it in the winter of 1929–30, John Lindros photographed it, and Gjerstad published it in 1935 [34, pp. 642–824].

About 2,000 terracotta statues and statuettes stood largely where they had been placed, in rough semicircles round the altar: "the smallest statuettes were placed nearest the altar, the larger statuettes and small statues behind these, and the life-size statues further back" [34, p. 936]. The excavators compared them to spectators in the auditorium of an ancient theatre [35, p. 105]. Chariot groups stood nearest the altar [34, p. 936]. Most of the figures are men, many armed and bearded, in long garments and conical helmets or caps with cheek-pieces. Among them are war chariots, horsemen, ring-dancers, musicians with flutes and tambourines, bulls, bulls with human torsos, and men wearing bull masks [34, pp. 818 ff., 935–936]. The object of worship was probably an oval stone found by the altar [34, p. 934].

The figures survived standing because floods buried them layer by layer; the last, around 510–500 BC, ended the sanctuary, where worship had begun around 1200 BC [34, pp. 933, 937]. The large statues probably came from wealthy dedicants and the small handmade ones from people of modest means, though that is an inference from their size and placing. Iacovou reads the warrior figures here and at Idalion and Kourion as "eloquent witnesses of a period when the different polities must have expected their male citizens to do army service" [10, p. 29]. No inscription names the god. Gjerstad thought of a fertility god who became a god of war as well; Giorgos Bourogiannis, in the latest study, sees a local male god "best understood as Apollo-like" [34, p. 935; 36, pp. 161–165]. The finds are divided between the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm and the Cyprus Museum, and the site now lies inside a military zone in the north of the island [36, p. xiii].

• Terracotta warriorsArchaic II · 599–500 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art
• Handmade Horse and Rider, the Rider in a Flaring CapArchaic I · 750–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Horse and Rider Figurine with a Painted Star on the NeckArchaic II · 600–480 BCDrakopoulos collection

Ayia Irini is the best documented of many such places. Most Cypriot sanctuaries of the period were open-air enclosures with an altar, a sacred stone without human form and great quantities of offerings [7, p. 28; 34, p. 934]. At Golgoi, Luigi Palma di Cesnola dug the sanctuary from 1870 and recorded no layers [37, pp. 17, 31–32]. At Idalion, Robert Hamilton Lang found thirteen bronze statuettes in the sanctuary of Apollo in 1868, still set in their marble bases [7, p. 31]. Achna, Arsos, the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion and Athienou-Malloura were also crowded with offerings in clay and stone.

The island's chief deity was a goddess called the wanassa, "the Queen," known to Greeks as Kypris and later Aphrodite, and linked with the Phoenician Astarte. At Paphos she was worshipped as a conical stone. Apollo was identified with the Phoenician god Reshef [16]. From about 650 BC clay figures were pressed in moulds as well as shaped by hand, earliest at Ayia Irini [7, p. 28]. Metalworking went on beside some sanctuaries: at Polis-Peristeries, in the kingdom of Marion, copper slag lay with a bull's skull and "hundreds of broken murex shells" from the making of purple dye [4, pp. 60–61]. Cypriot votive figures also travelled, and are found in quantity at the sanctuary of Hera on Samos [37, p. 25].

• Two Veiled Figures from a Terracotta Ring-Dance Group, with the Stump of the Central TreeArchaic · 750–480 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Hollow Mould-Made Female Votary of the Achna Type, Hands to the BreastsArchaic II · 600–480 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Limestone Female StatueArchaic II · 650–550 BCBritish Museum

The ring-dance fragment and the tree it once surrounded are the subject of Two Figures and a Tree; the types are described in the compendium under ring-dance groups, horse-and-rider figurines and terracotta figurines.

Sculptors in stone and clay, painters of pots

Limestone and terracotta statues

"No other area of the Levant can boast such a tradition of monumental terracotta sculpture," Reyes writes [7, p. 29]. Clay came first and limestone followed [37, p. 25]. When the first limestone statues were made is debated. Most scholars place it in the second half of the 7th century [8, p. 106; 16; 7, p. 30]. Antoine Hermary prefers about 600 BC, because on Samos, where the layers are well dated, Cypriot stone statuettes "hardly appear in levels earlier than around 600 B.C." [37, p. 25]. The earliest datable figures come from Arsos, and the earliest workshops lay in the area of Golgoi, whose style spread to Idalion, Arsos and Kition [7, p. 29; 8, p. 121].

Some figures were enormous. A bearded head in a conical helmet from Golgoi, now in New York, is 88.3 cm high, from a statue that Hermary estimates at 3.5 to 4 metres; he suggests it may represent a ruler of Idalion. Its discovery in 1870 launched Cesnola's digging at Golgoi [37, pp. 17, 31–32]. The story of that night is told in The Night of the Colossal Head. A Herakles from the same sanctuary, of the third quarter of the 6th century, stands 2.17 m, the largest Cypriot statue now known [37, pp. 227, 229]. Both are published in Hermary and Mertens's catalogue of the Met's Cypriot stone sculpture.

Most limestone votaries are smaller and flat at the back. At Tamassos small ones were set in rows into the plaster of a wall, so their backs were never meant to be seen [7, p. 30]. The men wear conical helmets or rosette diadems and hold an offering to the chest; some wear Egyptian kilts. The women wear heavy jewellery and hold flowers, and traces of red, yellow and green paint survive on many [7, pp. 29–30]. More on the types is in the compendium entry on Archaic limestone sculpture.

• Limestone head of a bearded manArchaic II · 599–550 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art
• Limestone HeraklesArchaic II · 530–520 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art
• Limestone Head of a Beardless Votary in a Conical HelmetArchaic II · 600–500 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Terracotta Head of a Bearded Votary in a Pointed CapArchaic II · 650–500 BCDrakopoulos collection

Metalwork tells the same story of mixed sources. More than a hundred "Cypro-Phoenician" bowls of bronze and silver are known, made from about 900 to 675 BC with scenes in Egyptian and Near Eastern styles. Two of the Cypriot bowls carry owners' names in the syllabary, one of them the Akestor bowl [8, pp. 198, 206; 38, p. 73]. See also metal vessels.

Painted pottery and the free-field style

Cypriot potters of the period worked in several wares. White Painted has black paint on the bare clay. Bichrome adds red to the black, and the red came from iron-rich ochres found with the copper ores. Black-on-Red, red-slipped and polished with black circles, was used mostly for small juglets of perfumed oil, and reaches about 26 to 29 per cent of tomb pottery in both phases [27, pp. 54, 135, 140; 4, p. 51].

In the 7th century some painters dropped the panels and frames of Geometric decoration and set a single animal, bird or person freely on the open surface of the pot [8, p. 116]. This is the free-field style. The favourite subjects were a bull sniffing a lotus flower, a bird catching a fish, an archer shooting a stag and birds before a stylised tree, and most of the pots probably came from one or two workshops in eastern Cyprus [39; 8, p. 116]. A forerunner is the "Hubbard amphora," painted with a woman on a throne drinking through a straw, a lyre-player and dancers [27, p. 51]. Reyes notes that the chariot scenes on Cypriot pots are not copies of Assyrian palace reliefs [7, pp. 42–43].

• Bichrome IV Jug with a Waterfowl Catching a FishArchaic I · 750–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• White Painted IV Trefoil Jug with a Wild Goat and a Composite Plant-like FigureArchaic I · 750–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Bichrome IV Trefoil Jug with a Striding BirdArchaic I · 750–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Bichrome IV Amphora with a Lotus-and-Bud Shoulder FriezeArchaic I · 750–600 BCDrakopoulos collection

The striding-bird jug was published in 1881 in the catalogue of the Lawrence-Cesnola collection, excavated by Alessandro Palma di Cesnola; its later travels are followed in A Bird in the Hand. The goat jug is discussed in A Goat and a Composite Figure. The pottery course lesson Bichrome and the free-field style shows how to tell the wares apart.

• Large Bichrome Plate from Salamis with a Wave Band and Rosette MetopesArchaic I · 700–550 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Bichrome IV Face-Neck Jar of the Kourion TypeArchaic I · 750–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Black-on-Red Biconical Juglet with Disc MouthArchaic II · 700–475 BCDrakopoulos collection

How the pots date the period

Pots like these also give the period its name and its dates. Einar Gjerstad, director of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, divided the Cypriot Iron Age into Cypro-Geometric, Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical in 1948, borrowing the Greek period names; the prefix "Cypro-" warns that the dates and styles do not match the Greek ones [27; 7, Table 1]. Many Cypriot tombs were used again and again, and by measuring how the proportions of the wares changed from one burial to the next Gjerstad put the pottery in order. He then tied that order to Near Eastern sites that were themselves poorly dated at the time [6, p. 352].

The order has held up, but the start date has moved several times. Gjerstad began Cypro-Archaic I in 700 BC, to match the start of the Archaic period in Greece. After a new study of the layers at Al Mina in Syria the start moved to 720 BC, and others, Nicolas Coldstream among them, argued for c. 750 BC, the date now in general use. Some put it near 800 BC, and new radiocarbon dates for Black-on-Red at Megiddo have led Francisco Núñez to argue for the third quarter of the 9th century [6, pp. 351–355]. The end, c. 480 BC, is set at the Persian Wars [27, p. 280]. Gjerstad also laid a political scheme of Assyrian, independent, Egyptian and Persian phases over his pottery, and it stands on much weaker ground than the sequence of pots [7, Table 1 and p. 78].

Two chronologies

Gjerstad's Iron Age dates, and the dates used now

The order of the periods has survived seventy years of testing; some of the years under them have moved. Each line joins the same boundary in the two schemes. Choose a line, or a boundary in the list, to see why.

Gjerstad, 1948 · Swedish Cyprus Expedition IV:2

1050950850700400325

CG I100 yrs

CG II100 yrs

CG III150 yrs

CA I, CA II, CC I: lines not given here

CC II75 yrs

CG I100 yrs

II

CG III150 yrs

CA I150 yrs

CA II120 yrs

CC I80 yrs

CC II90 yrs

1050950900750600480400310

Used now · the dates used on this site

1000900800700600500400300

• Start of the Iron Age (CG I)1050, unchanged
• CG I to CG II950, unchanged
• CG II to CG III850 → 900
• Start of the Cypro-Archaic700 → 750
• CA I to CA II600
• Start of the Cypro-Classical480
• CC I to CC II400, unchanged
• End of the Cypro-Classical325 → 310

Start of the Cypro-Archaic

700 750 BC

Gjerstad began the Cypro-Archaic at 700 BC. Coldstream's cross-dating with Greek Geometric pottery moved the start to about 750, the date modern catalogues use.

Lesson 8: Bichrome and the Free-Field Style

Three written languages: Kition, Amathus and the syllabary

Archaic Cyprus wrote in three languages: Greek, Phoenician and a language now called Eteocypriot [16]. Greek and Eteocypriot were written in the Cypriot syllabary, a script of signs for whole syllables, which Cypriots went on using long after the Greek mainland had taken up the alphabet. Philippa Steele's Syllabic Writing on Cyprus is the standard modern account, and the compendium covers it under writing and literacy.

Amathus had no Bronze Age predecessor; it was founded in the 11th century BC [40]. Its state language was the undeciphered, non-Greek Eteocypriot, although its later kings, such as Lysandros, Epidalos and Androkles, had Greek names [16]. "Eteocypriot," Iacovou stresses, is "a modern linguistic term that is incorrectly used as an ethnic name" [14, p. 463]. Kition was the Phoenician city. Herodotus never names it, about 150 Phoenician inscriptions and no syllabic ones are known from it, and a Phoenician royal house there, under Baalmilk I, is attested securely only at the start of the 5th century. The older idea of a 9th-century "Tyrian colony" at Kition is now treated with caution [16; 14].

Speakers of Greek had lived on the island since the end of the Bronze Age, so the period cannot be told as the arrival of Greek colonists or as a gradual "Hellenization" [14; 16]. Ancient writers named the islanders by their city, as Amathousioi, Paphioi or Salaminioi, and as a whole they "identified themselves and were collectively identified as Kyprioi," Cypriots [3, p. 65].

Plan · c. 1050 BC to the end of the 7th century AD

The city of Amathus

Amathus, on the coast east of Limassol

The kingdomHellenistic and RomanLate antique

The kingdom: c. 1050 to 310 BC

2040608088 mNorth cemeteryEast cemetery← West cemetery1234

0200 m

Scale bar: 200 metres.

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

1. 1The sanctuary of Aphrodite
2. 2The palace
3. 3The earlier harbour (not found)
4. 4The cemeteries

Key

• Sea
• Earlier harbour, supposed
• Excavated area
• Contours at 10 m

The Ionian Revolt in Cyprus, 499–498 BC

Almost everything known about the revolt comes from Herodotus (5.104–116), whose account Stylianou found "so sketchy and biased against the Ionians as to be little more than a caricature" [26, p. 47]. In 499 BC the Greek cities of Ionia rose against Persia. At Salamis, Onesilos, younger brother of King Gorgos and great-grandson of Evelthon, shut his brother out of the city and took the throne. He then "overpersuaded all Cyprus to revolt with him, all save the Amathusians," and laid siege to Amathus [5, 5.104].

The next year a Persian army under Artybios crossed from Cilicia and marched on Salamis, while the Phoenician fleet sailed round "the Keys of Cyprus," the Klidhes islets off the tip of the Karpas [5, 5.108; 41, p. 195]. An Ionian fleet came to help, and its captains refused to change places with the Cypriots and fight on land; Stylianou thinks the speeches Herodotus gives them "properly belong in Homer's Iliad, not in history" [5, 5.109; 26, p. 55]. Artybios rode a horse trained to rear and strike at a man on foot. When it reared at Onesilos, his Carian squire cut its legs with a curved sword and Artybios fell [5, 5.111–113].

The battle was lost by desertion. Stesenor, ruler of Kourion, "played the traitor, with his great company of men; and at the treachery of the Curians the war-chariots of the Salaminians did likewise" [5, 5.113]. Onesilos was killed, and so was Aristokypros of Soloi, son of the Philokypros whom Solon had praised in verse [5, 5.113]. Stylianou sees in the episode a split inside Salamis between chariot-owning nobles and Onesilos' foot soldiers [26, pp. 55–56]. At sea the Ionians, with the Samians foremost, beat the Phoenicians, and then sailed home [5, 5.112, 5.115].

As for Onesilus, then, the Amathusians cut off his head and brought it to Amathus, where they set it aloft above their gates, because he had besieged their city; and the head being there set aloft, when it was hollow a swarm of bees entered it and filled it with their cells. On this an oracle was given to the Amathusians ... that they should take the head down and bury it, and offer yearly sacrifice to Onesilus as to a hero ... This the Amathusians did, and have done to this day.

The cities held out one by one. Soli lasted longest and fell in the fifth month, when the Persians dug a mine under its walls [5, 5.115]; Canadian excavators there thought the Archaic town had been destroyed suddenly [26, p. 56]. Herodotus does not mention Kition in the revolt at all [16].

The siege mound at Palaepaphos

At the north-east gate of Palaepaphos, on the ridge of Marchello, excavators from 1951 and then Franz Georg Maier from 1966 to 1971 uncovered a mound of stones, rubble and earth heaped against the city wall. It stood about 4.5 m above the outer edge of the ditch and more than 7 m above the ditch floor [41, p. 199]. In its fill were more than 1,000 pieces of limestone sculpture and carving: statues, sphinxes, lions, votive stelae and columns, incense altars and syllabic inscriptions [41, p. 188], including a dedication by "Onasicharis, king of Paphos, son of Stasis, king of Paphos" [7, p. 54]. Among them was a head wearing the Egyptian double crown and cobra, now in Liverpool [28, p. 258].

The weapons tell of a fight. The mound held more than 500 iron and bronze arrowheads and spearheads, a bronze helmet of Corinthian type of about 500 BC with striding lions, "the only Greek bronze helmet found so far in a battle context," and over 450 rounded stones of 2.7 to 21.8 kg, possibly shot for stone-throwing engines [41, pp. 200, 202]. Under the wall the defenders had cut a covered passage and four tunnels, lit by clay lamps in niches. At their ends stood large bronze cauldrons on mud-brick supports, filled with charcoal and lime, set to burn out the timber props and bring the mound down [41, pp. 202–204]. Maier called it "an archaeological context dated to the year" [41, p. 204].

Iacovou has offered a different reading, which she herself calls tentative. The ditch may lie inside the wall, and the sculpture may come from a royal precinct on Marchello that was deliberately buried after the defeat, a votive deposit rather than a Persian siege ramp [42]. Cannavò reports that "there is still general agreement around the traditional interpretation" [28, p. 256]. Whether the revolt split Cypriots along ethnic lines is argued too. Gjerstad held that "the opposition to Persia was not determined ethnically"; Stylianou sees Phoenician Kition and Eteocypriot Amathus as loyal to Persia and the Greek kingdoms as rebels; Maier called the supposed struggle between Greeks and Phoenicians a "factoid" [27, p. 278; 26, pp. 50–54; 28, p. 254]. The walls and war lesson of the architecture course looks at the fortifications.

"So the Cyprians, having won freedom for a year, were enslaved once more," Herodotus concludes [5, 5.116]. Gorgos got Salamis back, and Persia favoured kings it could trust, among them the Phoenician kings of Kition [27, p. 279]. Cypriot ships fought for Persia against the Ionians at Lade in 494 BC [5, 6.6]. In 480 BC Cyprus sent 150 warships to Xerxes' fleet, fewer than the 300 of the Phoenicians and more than the 100 of Cilicia; his fleet numbers are round figures that show relative size only [5, 7.90]. Herodotus noticed that the Cypriot kings wore turbans [5, 7.90]. Penthylos of Paphos brought twelve ships [5, 7.195], and among the commanders was Gorgos of Salamis, the brother Onesilos had shut out of the city [5, 7.98]. The Persian defeat at Salamis in Greece that year marks the end of the Cypro-Archaic period [27, p. 280]. The siege of Idalion by the Medes and the Kitians, recorded on a bronze tablet a few years later, and Idalion's absorption by Kition belong to the Cypro-Classical period [43, pp. 63, 91].