Cypro-Geometric: The Start of the Iron Age

Some time around 1000 BC a man was laid in a rock-cut chamber tomb at Skales, a low hill outside Palaepaphos in the south-west of Cyprus. Among the bronzes buried with him were three long roasting spits, found standing together against the wall of the entrance passage, near the door of the chamber. Into one of them someone had scratched five signs, o-pe-le-ta-u, a Greek name in the genitive: "of Opheltas" [1, pp. 56, 58; 2, p. 75]. Leaving aside the Linear B records of the Mycenaean palaces, it is the oldest text in the Greek language found anywhere in the Mediterranean [1, p. 56].

Everything else about the grave is Cypriot. The other two spits carry signs of the island's own tradition of writing, the tomb is of a type known in Cyprus since the Bronze Age, and one of its pots came from the same local workshop as a pot in a neighbouring tomb [1, p. 58; 3]. A Greek name, a Cypriot script and a Cypriot burial lie together in one chamber, and they are the three things scholars still argue about when they discuss this period.

The Cypro-Geometric period, conventionally c. 1050 to 750 BC, is the first part of the Cypriot Iron Age. Its towns lie buried under their later selves, so most of what is known about it comes from tombs. Its calendar dates are borrowed from the Levant and the Aegean. Its kingdoms are named only at the very end, by an Assyrian king, and every label attached to its people (Greek, Phoenician, Eteocypriot) is contested [4; 5]. This page follows the island from the new harbour towns of the 11th century to the eve of Assyrian rule, picking up where the Bronze Age ends.

The Cypro-Geometric period at a glance

1200 BC1100 BC1000 BC900 BC800 BC700 BC

CG I

CG IIIc. 900–750 BC

CA I

Enkomi gives way to Salamis1100–1000 BCKaloriziki Tomb 40, sceptrec. 1050 BCOpheltas spit, Skalesc. 1000 BCFirst Phoenician gravestonec. 900 BCKition temple rebuilt (debated)c. 850 BCCypriot pots reach Knossosc. 800 BCFirst Salamis Royal Tombs725–700 BCSargon's stele at Kition707 BCEsarhaddon lists ten kings673 BC

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The Cypro-Geometric period at a glance: phases

• Late Cypriot IIIB, c. 1125–1050 BC (boundary uncertain)
• Cypro-Geometric I, c. 1050–950 BC (boundary uncertain)
• Cypro-Geometric II, c. 950–900 BC
• Cypro-Geometric III, c. 900–750 BC (boundary uncertain)
• Cypro-Archaic I, c. 750–650 BC (boundary uncertain)

Events

• Enkomi gives way to Salamis, 1100–1000 BC
• Kaloriziki Tomb 40, sceptre, c. 1050 BC
• Opheltas spit, Skales, c. 1000 BC
• First Phoenician gravestone, c. 900 BC
• Kition temple rebuilt (debated), c. 850 BC
• Cypriot pots reach Knossos, c. 800 BC
• First Salamis Royal Tombs, 725–700 BC
• Sargon's stele at Kition, 707 BC
• Esarhaddon lists ten kings, 673 BC

From Enkomi to Salamis: new towns after the Bronze Age

Over the later 12th and the 11th centuries Enkomi, for half a millennium the leading town of Late Bronze Age Cyprus, emptied. Silt brought down by the Pedieos river was choking its harbour. Its people moved about 3 km north-east to a new site on the shore, Salamis, which remained for the next 1,800 years the easternmost port of call in the Mediterranean short of the Levantine coast itself [4, p. 635; 8, p. 667]. The move was gradual. Jennifer Webb showed that the sanctuary of the Ingot God at Enkomi was closed in an orderly way, its bronze statue put away on purpose, and that the community which used it stayed on a generation or so after others had left [9]. The archaeologist Maria Iacovou describes the change as a move "from heterarchy to hierarchy", from several competing groups to a single centre [8, p. 667].

Inland the break was sharper. Around 1200 BC the inland towns of the Late Bronze Age, with their buildings of dressed stone, were abandoned and never rebuilt: Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, Maroni, Alassa and Morphou-Toumba tou Skourou among them [4, p. 638; 10, p. 660]. Iacovou, who in the 1980s had pictured an island-wide catastrophe, now describes the destructions as "regional and episodic" [9]. Four harbour towns carried on into the 12th century: Enkomi, Hala Sultan Tekke, Kition and Paphos [8, pp. 664–666].

On the south coast Hala Sultan Tekke went the way of Enkomi. By the 11th century its anchorage had silted up into the lagoon that is now the Larnaca salt lake, and nearby Kition took over its role as the main port of the region [4, p. 637]. Further west, Palaepaphos is "the only settlement that can claim continuity of habitation and continuity of the syllabic scribal tradition after the 12th century" [4, p. 632]. Its sanctuary of the goddess was laid out about 1200 BC and stayed the chief sanctuary of the Paphian kingdom until the end of the 4th century BC [11]. The town's syllabic inscriptions call her the wanassa, the Lady, and never use the name Aphrodite [11]. In the 11th century a ring of new cemeteries opened on the hills round the town, Skales among them [4, p. 634].

Plan · about 1200 BC to the 4th century AD; a sugar refinery in the 14th to 16th centuries

The Sanctuary of Aphrodite at Palaepaphos

Kouklia, on the Alonia plateau

Sanctuary ISanctuary IISugar refinery

Sanctuary I: Late Bronze Age, about 1200 BC

85 m12

020 m

Scale bar: 20 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 temenos wall of Sanctuary I
2. 2The hall of Sanctuary I

Key

• Wall of the period shown
• Contours at 1 m

Other towns were new. Amathus, on the south coast, was founded late in the 11th century on a site "with no previous history", in the empty stretch of coast left by the end of the Bronze Age centres at Kalavasos and Maroni [12; 4, pp. 635, 638]. Kourion grew up in the same century, west of the Kouris river, to fill the gap left by Alassa and Episkopi-Bamboula. Where it first stood is uncertain: its earliest tombs, of the 11th century, lie in the Kaloriziki cemetery below the bluff of the later city, but burials of the same date lie further north at Episkopi-Bamboula [4, pp. 638–639]. Inland, Idalion on the Ambeleri hill, founded at the start of Late Cypriot III, is the strongest case for continuity away from the sea [13]. Soloi on the north-west coast has burial evidence from the same horizon; it was the only future kingdom that had both a harbour and the copper-bearing lavas of the Troodos [14].

Iacovou lists three new habits that first appear in the 11th century: moving to new sites, opening new burial grounds, and a growing role for the Greek language [4, p. 634]. A Cypriot town that wanted to become the centre of a state needed "a geographically unified economic territory that had access to copper sources, agricultural land, and a port of export" [8, p. 662]. Inland centres such as Tamassos could be cut off from the sea, and in the long run "the harbours, not the mines, gained the upper hand" [15].

Map of Cyprus

Towns of the 11th century and the Bronze Age centres they replaced

• Towns founded or moved in the 11th century
• Older centres that carried on
• Bronze Age centres given up
• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Salamis
2. 2Amathus
3. 3Kourion
4. 4Soli
5. 5Palaepaphos (Kouklia)
6. 6Kition
7. 7Idalion
8. 8Enkomi
9. 9Hala Sultan Tekke
10. 10Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios
11. 11Maroni
12. 12Alassa
13. 13Morphou-Toumba tou Skourou

An island known from its tombs

Skales was a rescue excavation. When Vassos Karageorghis of the Department of Antiquities began a rescue excavation there in 1979, bulldozers had already emptied Tombs 42 to 57 without record [2, p. 9]. "The softness of the rock and the weight of the bulldozer caused the ceiling of almost all the tombs to collapse," he wrote [2, p. 10]. The team still recovered dozens of tombs, published in 1983, and Karageorghis returned with Eustathios Raptou in 2008 and 2011 [2; 16]. The reports are listed under Palaepaphos-Skales and its 2016 sequel.

Tombs dominate because the towns are out of reach. The Cypro-Geometric settlements lie under their Hellenistic, Roman and modern successors, and archaeologists in Cyprus "have come to lament the absence of destruction levels or abandonment episodes that could have preserved the basic internal structure of settlements" [5]. The cemeteries are another matter. In the Late Bronze Age the dead were often buried inside the towns, at Enkomi in courtyards and under passages. From the mid-11th century the island turned to burial grounds outside the settlements, organised by the community, with a single type of grave almost everywhere: a chamber cut into the rock, reached by a long sloping passage called a dromos [9; 4, pp. 634, 639]. The mortuary practices section of the compendium follows the custom through other periods.

The long narrow dromos appears first in the Late Cypriot IIIB cemetery of Gastria-Alaas [17]. At Skales, Karageorghis watched it give way to a wider, shorter passage and warned that the shape of a tomb is "not a safe criterion, since there is no consistency" [2, p. 228]. The tombs were family vaults: for each new burial, earlier skeletons were pushed aside or gathered into large jars [18], one reason the dates of tomb groups are so blurred.

Map of Cyprus

Cemeteries of the Cypro-Geometric period named on this page

• Cemeteries outside the towns
• Royal tombs at the end of the period
• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Palaepaphos-Skales (approx.)
2. 2Kourion-Kaloriziki (approx.)
3. 3Alaas (approx.)
4. 4Lapithos
5. 5Amathus
6. 6Kition
7. 7Salamis

The record is lopsided. The best-preserved tombs "seem to pertain to relatively wealthy individuals, and we must be missing the evidence for poorer Cypriots" [1, p. 54]. Infants were mostly buried apart from adults: at Enkomi and later at Salamis newborns went into jars inside the settlement, a Bronze Age custom that survived the move [19]. One infant buried in a jar at Kition-Bamboula wore an imported bead and a dress pin, with small vases set in front of the jar [19]. At Skales the 2008 and 2011 seasons found Tomb 197 holding a child of about five and six adults aged between about 22 and 40 [16].

Even the sex of the dead is usually inferred from what was buried with them, and where bones have been studied the guesses often fail [20, p. 202]. A "warrior tomb" therefore describes the grave goods; it says nothing certain about who lay there. What does vary from grave to grave is metal. The pots are much the same across the island, but jewellery, seals and weapons differ widely, and status was shown with bronze, gold, imports and ornament [18].

• Proto-White Painted stirrup jarLate Bronze Age III · 1100–1050 BCAshmolean Museum
• Bow-shaped gold fibulaLate Bronze Age III · 1100–1050 BCAshmolean Museum
• Proto-White Painted Stirrup JarLate Bronze Age III · 1100–1000 BCBritish Museum

Opheltas and the Greek language in Cyprus

Skales Tomb 49 is one of the richest of its time; the archaeologist J. N. Coldstream classed it as "Outstandingly Rich" [1, p. 61]. Besides the spits it held bronze bowls, a strainer and a tripod, a silver dress pin, an iron knife, four Canaanite storage jars from the Levant and a limestone bathtub [1, pp. 60–61]. Karageorghis saw the bath as a comfort "which the Palaepaphians enjoyed during the 11th century B.C. when such amenities had been forgotten on the Greek Mainland" [2, p. 229; 21, p. 128]. The tripod was probably made in the 13th or 12th century and was already an heirloom when it went into the tomb [22, p. 140].

The inscribed spit was published by Émilia and Olivier Masson in Karageorghis's report of 1983, and Karageorghis had already announced it in 1980 as "the earliest Greek inscription so far known in Cyprus" [2, p. 75; 23]. The spits were prestige goods, fit for a high-status burial [1, pp. 57–58]. They need not all have belonged to Opheltas: they differ slightly in length, and the tomb held at least three people buried over as much as a century, so each spit may have gone in with a different burial [1, p. 61]. What script the name is written in is less clear. The Massons took the inscription for the earliest example of the new Cypriot syllabary. Jean-Pierre Olivier argued in 2008 that it shows no feature the syllabary introduced and so should be classed as Cypro-Minoan, the Bronze Age script, while the reading stands; his view is widely but not universally accepted [1, pp. 56–57]. Philippa Steele declines both labels for any inscription this early: the awkward pe sign is a variant of a Cypro-Minoan sign, scratched with difficulty into hard metal [1, ch. 2]. As Olivier put it, one can write any language in any script [3].

The language is clearer. The ending -au of the genitive is an innovation shared only by Cypriot Greek and the Greek of Arcadia, in the central Peloponnese, which is attested in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. The two dialects share a whole set of such features: in for en, verb endings in -si where other Greeks wrote -ti, the pronoun sis for tis [3]. There are too many to be chance, and Arcadia and Cyprus were too far apart for them to have spread by contact, so the two must descend from a common ancestor [3]. For Iacovou the fossilised dialect "requires the arrival of people of the same Mycenaean-Greek dialectal origin in Cyprus and their subsequent isolation from other Greek speakers" [4, p. 633]. Steele adds a caution: the dialect cannot pin down where those speakers came from or when, and the legend of Agapenor of Tegea, the Arcadian hero said to have founded Paphos, proves nothing about either [3].

The argument is over what the spit proves about people. Iacovou reads it as the trace of a genuine migration from the Aegean, almost invisible in the ground but proven by language: "Greeks had acquired a permanent presence on the island by the end of the second millennium" [4, p. 633]. Karageorghis in 1983 went further and spoke of "Mycenaean aristocrats who arrived as colonists", though in the same book he warned against reading ethnicity from tomb shapes [2, pp. 228–229]. Others start from the grave, where a face-spouted jug was made by the same local potter as one in Tomb 78 [3]. Susan Sherratt pictured Opheltas as one of a Greek-speaking community "whose culture is generally indistinguishable from that of other contemporary Cypriots" [24]. Ioannis Voskos and Bernard Knapp went further: he may have been "a member of the local Cypriot elite, one who may have had a Greek name", and who saw no reason to be buried in anything but the Cypriot way [3; 10]. Steele prefers a language shift: some Greek speakers arrived, Greek gained prestige, and people who had spoken other languages took it up [3].

Knapp points out that the spit has served as the "lynchpin" for claims that Greek speakers were politically dominant, and reads the mix of name, script and burial as a hybrid culture in the making [25, p. 288]. With Voskos he summed up the older story in one line: "the 'Mycenaean colonization' of Cyprus was neither Mycenaean nor a colonization" [10, p. 684]. No second text like it has been found. Iacovou calls the spit "an unicum for the Early Iron Age" [26], and no syllabic inscription at all can be dated with certainty to the 9th century [1, p. 48].

Reconstruction · Tomb · Cypro-Geometric I

Palaepaphos-Skales Tomb 49: An Early Iron Age Chamber Tomb

c. 1050–950 BC

The chamber, dromos and grave goods of Palaepaphos-Skales Tomb 49, the tomb of the Opheltas spit, rebuilt from the excavation report.

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

The Cypriot script carries on

In the Late Bronze Age, Cypriots wrote in Cypro-Minoan, a script of the Linear family that is still undeciphered. Writing flourished in the last century and a half of that age: about 70 per cent of the texts that can be dated fall between the early 13th and the mid-12th century BC [1, p. 47]. Fewer than 20 inscriptions can be dated with any certainty to the whole Cypro-Geometric period, and the first texts that are certainly in the later Cypriot syllabary belong to the 8th century [1, pp. 48, 55]. In between lies a near blank, but the two scripts share sign shapes and probably sound values, which only unbroken use can explain. Steele's verdict is that "The 'gap' is ours, a gap in surviving epigraphy" [1, p. 48].

That continuity sets Cyprus apart. "In all of the Greek world, literacy was preserved only in Cyprus; elsewhere the Greeks had forgotten how to read and write" [27, p. 224]. Mainland Greeks would later have to borrow the Phoenician alphabet. Small habits carried through as well. A formula of two signs and a divider, which Steele calls "1+1", runs from Bronze Age vases, clay balls and ingots to the Cypro-Geometric spits and stone blocks at Palaepaphos and a vase handle from Kition, and on to Archaic stone drums at Kouklia. Inscribed metal bowls with text round the rim run from the Bronze Age through Skales to Classical dedications, and Cyprus is "the only area where the practice continued, possibly unbroken, for 800 years or more" [1, p. 88]. A bronze bowl from Skales Tomb 235, of CG I, turned out under X-ray to carry a Cypro-Minoan inscription round its rim [1, p. 62; 16].

Other habits did stop. Clay tablets, clay balls, labels and cylinders went out of use at the end of the Bronze Age, and the potmark scratched on a Cypro-Geometric vase handle from Kition is the last of its kind [1, ch. 2]. The later split of the syllabary into a Paphian script written left to right and a "common" script written right to left, each of about 55 signs, had not yet happened; the few early signs fit both [1, ch. 2]. The first syllabic word ever deciphered, by the Assyriologist George Smith in 1871 from a bilingual inscription at Idalion, was pa-si-le-wo-se, "of the king" [28].

In Greece the centuries after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces are often called a Dark Age, a time without palaces, towns or writing. Specialists in Cyprus reject the term for the island. Iacovou lists four things that carried across the divide: the script, a regional hierarchy of settlements, cult practice and an economy built on trade in metals [4, p. 625]. In her words, "On the mainland and in the Aegean islands, the Greek world remained stateless, nonurban, and illiterate for centuries... This sharp discontinuity finds no match in Cyprus, where both the script and the state system survive into the next horizon" [4, p. 631]. Crete, in the same reading, did go through a Dark Age [29]. Her own name for the stretch is "Cypriot Protohistory": a society that could write but has left almost no history [4] (more in The Island With No Dark Age).

A second script arrived during the period. The oldest Phoenician inscription from Cyprus is a gravestone of about 900 BC, of unknown findspot and now in the Cyprus Museum, which warns passers-by not to disturb the tomb; it is also the earliest inscribed gravestone of any kind from the island [1, p. 72; 24, pp. 195–197]. More on scripts is in writing and literacy and the languages of Bronze Age Cyprus.

Spits, swords and a gold sceptre: the rich in their graves

The spits that carry Opheltas's name are themselves a Cypriot novelty. These obeloi, long rods of square section with a socket for a wooden handle, appear in the 11th century and are "very likely a Cypriot invention" [30, p. 146; 5]. The earliest are of bronze, among them three from a tomb of about 1050 BC at Salamis and the three from Skales Tomb 49 [1, p. 57; 2, pp. 60–61, 80]. Iron ones follow, among them a complete iron spit more than 91 cm long from Lapithos, and iron feasting equipment appears in Cyprus earlier than anywhere else [31]. Iacovou noticed that they were buried "in numbers that can be divided or multiplied by six". Six spits make a handful, the root of the Greek word drachma, and the spits may have become "an index of wealth, a primitive currency" in a world without coins [5; 30, p. 148].

Some graves held weapons. Skales Tomb 76, of CG I, contained two iron swords. One had been bent before burial, "killed" in the excavators' word, and was originally about 70 cm long; the other, 41 cm long, had an ivory handle. With them were a bronze spearhead 39.7 cm long, iron knives and an iron axe [32, p. 147]. Karageorghis found that "a common characteristic of all CG I–II tombs is the richness of the tomb-gifts" at Skales, and that no other cemetery of the period had produced so many bronzes, among them a tripod cauldron of Aegean form, "the first of its kind ever to have been found in Cyprus", and twelve Canaanite amphorae from the Levant [2, pp. 228–229]. Aegean imports are almost absent. Gold work shifts from solid pieces to thin sheet and hollow or plated jewellery [2, p. 229].

• Agate scepter headGeometric I · 950–900 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art
• SpearheadGeometric I · 1050–1000 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art
• Bronze bowl with handles terminating in lotusesGeometric III · 850–750 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art
• Bronze handles and part of the rim of a cauldronGeometric III · 850–750 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art

The most famous object of the period came to light through the police. In 1903 they confiscated a group of objects said to come from Kourion, among them two bronze tripods, a bronze cauldron that had held a cremation, and a gold sceptre [33, p. 28; 34]. Fifty years later George McFadden, excavating for the University of Pennsylvania, found the robbed tomb they came from in the Kaloriziki cemetery below the city: Tomb 40 [35]. It had held two cremations. A middle-aged woman's ashes were still in their bronze krater when McFadden dug in 1953; the man's krater, and probably the sceptre, had gone with the robbers [36]. What was left included two bronze stands with bull protomes, three bronze discs and strips of sheet bronze perhaps from a shield, and a spearhead [36]. The tomb stands on the line between Late Cypriot IIIB and CG I, about 1050 BC.

The sceptre is a gold tube, 16.5 cm high, made to slot over a staff. It is topped by a globe covered in a scale pattern of small cells filled with white, blue-green and mauve enamel, with two falcons perched on top, and it is so unusual that it was long thought to be much later [37, p. 117]. Karageorghis called it a king's sceptre, "a token of his authority according to the usage recorded in Homer", and Tomb 40 "probably a royal tomb" [38]. Where it was made (Egypt, Syria, the Aegean or Cyprus) is still argued [34]. Steele notes that the grave goods and the burial type can be read as "as much local as they are Aegean", and that some of the goods belonged to the man and some to the woman [1, pp. 53–54]. Jan Paul Crielaard notes that scholars "tend to have an eye for one category of objects", which forces "a binary choice: the deceased is either Greek or Cypriot" [36]. Secure royal titles appear in Cyprus only in the 7th century [22, p. 64].

Crielaard also set three almost contemporary graves side by side: Skales Tomb 67, Tomb 1 at Achziv on the Phoenician coast, and Toumba Tomb 79 at Lefkandi on Euboea. Each held earrings, balance weights, seals and Phoenician flasks, the same equipment of a well-off trader from the Levant to the Aegean [36].

Foundation legends and the Eteocypriots

Greek writers gave most Cypriot cities a hero from the Trojan War as founder. Teucer, son of Telamon, banished from Salamis near Athens, was said to have sailed to Cyprus and founded a new Salamis; Agapenor of Tegea, leading the Arcadians home from Troy, was driven by a storm to Paphos and founded the town and its sanctuary [39]. Other cities received founders from Argos, Athens and Laconia [4]. Kition and Amathus were never claimed as Greek foundations, and the geographer Skylax called the people of Amathus autochthones, natives [4, p. 638].

The stories are late. At least 95 per cent of the surviving ancient passages about the island's Iron Age states were written centuries after the last of them had been abolished [28]. Einar Gjerstad, who led the Swedish Cyprus Expedition of 1927–31, argued in 1944 that the Teucer story was Athenian propaganda of the 5th century [40], and David Rupp suggested it "may have been the invention" of the first king of Salamis [41, p. 156]. Iacovou puts it plainly: "Polities... do not spring out of foundation myths; the myths are created after the foundation event" [28]. The Salamis legend even includes the other communities of the island: Teucer is helped by Belos, king of Sidon, and marries Eune, daughter of the native king Kinyras, with the Greek hero placed on top [39]. The kings of Paphos called themselves Kinyradai, descendants of Kinyras, to claim the old cult [39].

No colonising event in the ground answers to these stories, and the Greek migration that the language implies was, in Iacovou's phrase, "of limited archaeological visibility" [4, p. 633]. The idea of a Greek colonisation also had a modern career: it suited British administrators and, until 1960, Greek-Cypriot advocates of union with Greece [10].

Gjerstad tried to find the native Cypriots in the cemeteries. At Lapithos he made the chamber tombs of Kastros Greek and the shaft tombs of Plakes "Eteocypriot", and at Amathus he gave the same label to the shaft and composite tombs. A. T. Reyes has shown the circularity: "Since he had already decided from the literary evidence that Amathus was an Eteocypriot stronghold, he argued that this type of tomb was Eteocypriot, and then used this conclusion to reinforce his earlier claim" [42, p. 18]. Plakes has only three tombs, shaft graves occur at "Greek" Kastros as well, and Gjerstad conceded that the burial customs did not differ. Reyes puts the differences down to "economic or even geographical exigencies" [42, p. 19]. Amathus, for its part, has as many chamber tombs with a dromos as Paphos [4, p. 635].

"Eteocypriot" is best kept as the name of a language. About 100 to 150 syllabic texts from Cyprus cannot be read as Greek, and some 22 to 25 of them share recurring features; they cluster at Amathus and run from the 8th or 7th century to the late 4th. Scholars can sound out the signs, but the language itself remains undeciphered [24]. The name, "true Cypriot", was coined by J. Friedrich in 1932 on the model of Homer's "Eteocretans" [24]. The earliest text dates only from about 750 BC, at the very end of the Cypro-Geometric period [39]. A minority language of this kind survived, in Iacovou's view, only "so long as Cyprus was divided into autonomous states" [4, p. 640].

Phoenicians at Kition and the temple of Astarte

In the sacred quarter of Kition at Kathari, under modern Larnaca, Karageorghis excavated the Late Bronze Age temples and what came after them. On the foundations of the largest, Temple 1, he found a new temple, its holy of holies a long narrow room across the whole 22 m width of the west end, facing a large courtyard. Two porticoes ran along the courtyard, their roofs carried on four rows of seven wooden pillars set in stone bases. Two free-standing pillars flanked the central door of the inner room and reminded him of Jachin and Boaz, the bronze pillars of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem, which Tyrian masons had built [43, pp. 97–98, 100]. He dated the rebuilding to "round about the middle of the ninth century BC", after about 150 years in which the old temple had stood empty, and called it the largest Phoenician temple then known [43, pp. 100–101, 171]. "Was this a symbolic gesture on the part of the Phoenicians to demonstrate their domination over the New City?" he asked [43, p. 100].

The temple also produced a red-slipped bowl inscribed in Phoenician. André Dupont-Sommer read it as the record of a man, Mula, who had his hair shaved and "prayed to Lady Astarte and Astarte listened to his prayer"; he offered a sheep and a lamb, and his family another lamb [43, p. 106]. Near the offering table lay about a dozen ox skulls with the backs cut away so that they could be worn as masks, which Karageorghis read as Phoenicians taking up an old Cypriot bull ritual [43, pp. 102, 171; 14]. Both finds need care. The reading of Mula's home town as Tamassos is doubtful [44], and Steele dates the bowl to about 800 or even 750 BC and thinks it may have been imported from the Levant [24, pp. 195–197].

The story of a Tyrian colony founded at Kition in the mid-9th century has been questioned piece by piece. Gjerstad, from his soundings at Bamboula in 1929–30, had already put Phoenician settlement about 800 BC and called it "a trading factory" [45, pp. 260, 262]. Joanna Smith re-examined the Kathari sequence and found no gap between the Bronze Age floors and the first temple floor, which she dates about 850 BC; in her reading Kition became Phoenician only with a later floor, in the second half of the 8th century [46]. Karageorghis's own final report on the Phoenician levels dates that first floor to about 800–725 BC [47, pp. 103–105, 107–110]. Ayelet Gilboa, who places the first lasting Phoenician settlements in the far west in the second half of the 9th century, concludes that "Kition is in risk of losing her crown as the earliest establishment beyond the homeland" [46].

Iacovou agrees with Gilboa and her colleagues that a Phoenician presence before about 800 "still needs to be demonstrated and not invoked uncritically", and adds that "In terms of its Early Iron Age material culture Kition is indistinguishable from the rest of the Cypro-Geometric sites" [48; 5]. She allows that a literate group speaking a Semitic language may have had a foothold near Kition from the 12th or 11th century, but not as colonists; borrowing a phrase from the historian Robin Osborne, she notes that "colony" is a word with strong "statist" overtones [48]. At Bamboula, on the other side of the town, the French excavations found that the first built sanctuary dates from the beginning of CG III, in the 9th century BC; it later belonged to Astarte and Herakles-Melqart [49, pp. 55–66].

Other evidence points to Phoenician speakers on the island by 900 BC. Besides the gravestone of about 900, a stone plaque from Khirokitia of about 800 may carry the word for "wall" or "city", and three Phoenician letters appear on a 9th-century sherd from Salamis. Gravestones point to people settled on the island, though not necessarily to a planned Tyrian colony [24, pp. 195–197; 1, pp. 72–73]. Of about 549 Phoenician inscriptions from Cyprus, only 32 are securely earlier than the 5th century [24, pp. 198–199]. At Kathari, Coldstream recognised a Euboean drinking cup "unlikely to be much later than 900 BC", older than any Phoenician pottery from the site [50].

Vassiliki Kassianidou sees copper as the reason they came. The great copper works of the southern Levant, at Faynan and Timna in the Arabah valley, peaked in the 10th century and collapsed in the 9th, while Cypriot mines kept working [51]. She also suggests that Cypriots had sailed west for tin and silver before the Phoenicians did [52]. The Phoenician kingdom of Kition, with its own dynasty of kings, belongs to the 5th and 4th centuries BC [49, pp. 169–200]. The compendium's page on the Phoenicians covers the wider picture.

• Phoenician Pilgrim FlaskGeometric I · 1050–900 BCBritish Museum
• Phoenician Pilgrim FlaskGeometric I · 1050–850 BCBritish Museum
• Phoenician Bichrome JugGeometric III · 850–750 BCBritish Museum

Iron and copper

The first iron objects in Cyprus, from about 1200 BC, a century and a half before the period began, are mostly knives: iron blades fixed to their handles with bronze rivets, the handles often of ivory [31]. Knife production seems to have started first in Cyprus, and in the 12th century the island was probably the only producer of iron tools for everyday use [31]; there are more iron tools and weapons of the 12th and 11th centuries in Cyprus than anywhere else in the eastern Mediterranean [4, p. 642]. Eric Cline ranks Cypriot ironworking "with the alphabet as one of the great innovations of this age" [21, p. 122]. Three knives from the acropolis of Idalion show the carburising and quenching that turn iron into steel, but they come from disturbed upper levels that also held later finds, so their early date is not secure [31].

Copper working carried on beside the new metal. At Kition-Kathari the copper workshops stayed active into the 11th century, "rare evidence for the continuation of the copper industry into the Iron Age", until earthquake damage ended them [53]. Radiocarbon dates from mine galleries in the Troodos now show that Cypriot mining carried on after the Bronze Age [51]. Cypriot bronze-casters went on making rod tripods and four-sided stands to the end of the 11th century and sending them abroad, where they were imitated in Crete, Italy and Sardinia [5]. The compendium's page on metals beyond copper covers iron.

Dating the period by its pottery

The period takes its name from its pots. Gjerstad, whose expedition dug Iron Age tombs at Lapithos, Amathus and elsewhere, sorted their pottery into seven numbered stages, Type I to Type VII, and in the expedition's fourth volume (1948) gave each stage a period: Cypro-Geometric I to III, Cypro-Archaic I and II, Cypro-Classical I and II [45; 54]. "Geometric" was borrowed from Greek archaeology, where it describes the painted pots of Athens and its neighbours in the same centuries, decorated like the Cypriot White Painted and Bichrome wares with bands, lines and circles [54].

Gjerstad's sequence of pots has stood up well; his calendar dates have been revised. He put CG I at 1050–950 BC, CG II at 950–850 and CG III at 850–700 [45, p. 254]. Coldstream argued in 1999 that a century-long CG II could not be sustained, cut it to fifty years and raised the start of CG III [7]. The dates most catalogues use today are CG I c. 1050–950, CG II c. 950–900 and CG III c. 900–750, with the Cypro-Archaic beginning about 750 [6; 54].

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

CG II to CG III

850 900 BC

J. N. Coldstream argued that a century-long CG II could not be sustained. CG II is now c. 950 to 900 BC, half Gjerstad's length, and CG III starts c. 900.

Lesson 7: The Cypro-Geometric Repertoire

All these dates are borrowed from abroad. The tombs were reopened and reused over generations, settlement layers are almost absent, and there are no usable radiocarbon dates from Cyprus for the period [26; 55]. The chronology rests instead on Cypriot pots found in dated levels on the Levantine coast, above all at Tyre and Tel Dor [55]. At Megiddo, radiocarbon now places the earliest Black-on-Red pottery, and with it the start of CG III, at the end of the 10th century BC [7]. For a while the traffic ran the other way: after about 1050, Cypriot pottery in dated Levantine contexts was used to date the Protogeometric pottery of Greece [56, p. 158].

The start of the period is as soft as its end. Late Cypriot IIIB, c. 1125/1100–1050 BC, already has the new pottery, Proto-White Painted, and many of the new towns and cemeteries, and the line between it and CG I is hard to see in the ground [57; 8]. Even the pottery boundary is drawn by a small detail: Angeliki Pieridou separated Proto-White Painted from White Painted I by the paint, matt orange or orange-brown on the first, a uniform dull matt black on the second [57].

Potters at the wheel: White Painted, Bichrome and Black Slip

The pottery of the period was made on the fast wheel. From the 11th century, Iacovou writes, the Cypriot industry "achieved (for the first time) the standardization and fast-wheel mass production of an impressive range of high-quality utilitarian vessels" [5]. Sherratt describes Proto-White Painted as an "island-wide, standardized... mass-produced but quality controlled product" [58; 4, p. 639]. Storage jars and some cooking pots stayed handmade [54]. The Cypro-Geometric repertoire lesson of the pottery course shows the shapes one by one.

White Painted ware, pale clay with matt dark paint, is the commonest pottery of CG I and declines afterwards [45, pp. 205–206]. It shares only its name with the White Painted ware of the Middle Bronze Age. Bichrome adds a matt red to the dark paint. It is rare in CG I and grows steadily until, in the Cypro-Archaic, it outnumbers White Painted; it was strongest in the eastern workshops of Salamis and Amathus [45, pp. 205–206; 54]. Black Slip, dark-surfaced and often fluted, is common in the Cypro-Geometric period and rare after it [45, p. 141].

One shape belongs to this period alone: the shallow plate with two handles and its main decoration painted on the underside. It was "produced only during the CG period" [54; 57]. Three examples in the Drakopoulos collection show the range of designs, from latticed triangles and wavy lines to a four-armed cross and a sawtooth star (more in the article on these plates).

• White Painted Plate with Latticed Triangles and Wavy Lines on the UndersideGeometric I · 1050–850 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Large White Painted Plate with Knobbed Handles and a Four-Armed Cross on the UndersideGeometric I · 1050–850 BCDrakopoulos collection
• White Painted Plate with a Sawtooth Star on the UndersideGeometric II · 950–750 BCDrakopoulos collection
• White Painted Amphoriskos on a Conical FootGeometric I · 1050–850 BCDrakopoulos collection

Some shapes came from the Levant and were changed on the way. The jug with a ridged neck, a Levantine form, was "transformed in the Cypriote repertoire to a barrel-shaped jug", its body thrown on the wheel to lie on its side [54]. Small containers for perfumed oil, lentoid and pilgrim flasks and later juglets, multiplied [54].

• Black Slip Bucchero Jug with Trefoil Mouth and Fluted BodyGeometric I · 1050–850 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Two-Handled Amphoriskos with Grooved Bucchero BodyGeometric II · 950–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Bichrome Barrel Jug with Circled End-KnobsGeometric III · 850–750 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Bichrome Tripod Bowl with Painted BandsGeometric III · 850–600 BCDrakopoulos collection

Each region had its own workshops. Anna Georgiadou has shown that Paphos, Kourion, Amathus, Kition, Lapithos, Salamis and Kythrea each preferred their own wares and motifs. The western workshops of Paphos and Kourion favoured concentric circles and made the finest Black-on-Red; the eastern ones of Salamis and Amathus favoured Bichrome and, later, figured scenes [54]. The territories of the later kingdoms can be traced in the pottery before any text names them.

Map of Cyprus

Iron Age kingdoms and their workshops

• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Salamis
2. 2Kition
3. 3Amathus
4. 4Kourion
5. 5Palaepaphos
6. 6Marion
7. 7Lapithos
8. 8Kythrea (approx.)
9. 9Tamassos

The dense style of concentric circles, drawn with a multiple brush, is a development of CG III [59, p. 39]. Anthony Snodgrass notes that the multiple brush was used in Cyprus "for a very long time indeed", but freehand [56, p. 382], and who borrowed the compass-drawn circle from whom, Greeks or Cypriots, is still argued. Gjerstad thought "the Greek and Cypriote circle ornaments have originally nothing to do with each other" [45, p. 188]. By the end of the period White Painted jugs carry eyes, arrows and swastikas as well (see circles and swastikas in the compendium).

• White Painted Trefoil Jug with Painted Eyes and SwastikasGeometric III · 850–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• White Painted Jug with Painted Eyes, Chevron Arrow and SwastikaGeometric III · 850–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• White Painted Juglet with a Dotted ArrowGeometric III · 850–600 BCDrakopoulos collection

Figurines are rare. In the 11th century they "are very rare... and are always associated with sanctuaries" [57], and the large limestone statues of Cyprus belong to the following period.

Black-on-Red and Cyprus between the Levant and the Aegean

In CG III a new ware appeared: Black-on-Red, a red-slipped pottery with thin, well-fired walls, a shining surface and decoration in black, often circles. It was long called "Cypro-Phoenician" and credited to the Phoenicians, but it is now agreed to be Cypriot, and Georgiadou argues that it was invented in the workshops of Paphos [54]. Gjerstad had already doubted that it was Phoenician [45, p. 262]. Clay analysis of early sherds from Megiddo confirms that they were made in Cyprus [7]. The small Black-on-Red juglet, a container for scented oil, travelled widely [54; 5] (the origins of Black-on-Red are discussed in a separate article).

Cypriot pottery abroad

Black-on-Red abroad

N

200 km

Find-spots (8)Show the listHide the list

1. 1MegiddoIsrael
   • Black-on-Red. Black-on-Red from a level radiocarbon-dated to about 900 BC; the ten early sherds analysed were made in Cyprus. Lesson 9
2. 2Tarsus (Gözlükule)Turkey
   • Black-on-Red. Kilns with misfired Cypriot-style White Painted, Bichrome and Black-on-Red, read by Gjerstad as Cypriot potters working abroad. Lesson 1
3. 3Tell Beit MirsimWest Bank
   • Black-on-Red. The juglet Albright published in 1932 as Cypro-Phoenician. Lesson 9
4. 4AchzivIsrael
   • Black-on-Red. Only 20 Black-on-Red vessels from the main cemeteries of this Phoenician town. Lesson 9
5. 5LefkandiGreece
   • Black-on-Red. A juglet from a tomb, dated 875 to 850 BC: the first Black-on-Red in Greece. Lesson 9
6. 6KnossosGreece
   • Black-on-Red. Black-on-Red is the commonest Cypriot import here. Lesson 13
7. 7CosGreece
   • Black-on-Red. Cypriot imports from about the last quarter of the 9th century BC, and local copies. Lesson 9
8. 8RhodesGreece
   • Black-on-Red. Cypriot imports from about 800 BC, and local copies. Lesson 9

Cypriot goods had reached Greece earlier. At Lefkandi on Euboea, in the first half of the 10th century, the ashes of a warrior were buried in "a huge bronze amphoroid krater, its rim decorated with a scene of huntsmen with bows... evidently another imported antique from the Cypriot Bronze Age, at least two centuries old at the time of burial" [50]. A later tomb there held the wheels of a large Cypriot bronze stand, and moulds for the leg of a bronze tripod in the Cypriot style were found at Lefkandi, the work perhaps of "an immigrant smith from Cyprus" [50].

Traffic ran the other way too. The Euboean drinking cup decorated with pendent semicircles turns up at more than twenty sites in the eastern Mediterranean in the late 9th and early 8th centuries, Cyprus among them, and Cypriot potters imitated it. One class of cups from Al Mina in Syria, at first thought to be local, is "Euboean in shape and exterior decoration, but Cypriot in their interior lines and Bichrome technique" [50]. From about 800 BC Cypriot pottery, mostly Black-on-Red, arrived at Knossos on Crete "in a steady flow", and Black-on-Red was "copiously imitated" on Rhodes, Kos and Crete [5]. The trade networks of the Early Iron Age are followed further in a separate article.

• Black-on-Red Deep Bowl with Concentric Circles below the RimGeometric III · 850–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Black-on-Red Globular Trefoil Jug with Concentric CirclesGeometric III · 850–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Black-on-Red Trefoil-Mouthed Juglet with Ringed CirclesGeometric III · 850–600 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Miniature Black-on-Red Globular JugletGeometric III · 850–600 BCDrakopoulos collection

The debate over when the kingdoms began

By 700 BC Cyprus was divided into kingdoms, each ruled from a city. When they began is the central question of the period, and it divides the field. "City-kingdoms" is itself "a shorthand term constructed by modern historians"; the Greek sources speak of cities ruled by kings, never of kingdoms [28].

One side, led by Iacovou and Sabine Fourrier and building on Gjerstad and Karageorghis, sees continuity. The towns of the 11th century were the capitals of the later kingdoms, and the polities took shape in "a cumulative process... as far back as the final years of the Bronze Age" [6, p. 3]. Fourrier writes that Cypriot capitals "were either founded in the 11th century B.C. or continued to be occupied... Stability and longevity are primary characteristics of the urban topography of Cyprus" [60]. For Iacovou, "The question, therefore, is not when a Cypriot 'kingdom' is 'born'; this meaningless argument has produced more than enough dead-end scholarly monologues" [15, p. 17]. Reyes found it reasonable "as a hypothesis" that the kingdoms had lasted from the Late Bronze Age [42, p. 23].

The other side is David Rupp, following Veronica Tatton-Brown. He argued that the first hereditary territorial kingdoms appeared only in the mid-8th century, and that the Cypro-Geometric period was genuinely without states. The Canadian survey around Palaepaphos, which he used, found only 2 sites of CG I–II against 34 of CG III and 60 of the Cypro-Archaic, and he read this as the growth of a central place with villages around it only in the 8th century [41, p. 149]. For Rupp the Royal Tombs of Salamis were "conscious political statements made by the first kings of Salamis", and Phoenicians at Kition together with Assyrian pressure triggered the formation of states [41, p. 156]. His view has not been widely accepted, but it remains the sharpest challenge to the continuity model [61].

Between the two lies a middle ground. Old urban centres, most of them founded in the 11th century or earlier, are one thing; fully territorial kingship with monuments to show for it is another, and that becomes visible only at the end of CG III. Iacovou herself grants that the evidence "does not introduce us to individuals with state authority" before the early Archaic, and that the Cypro-Geometric period "conceals the process and the political struggle" [39, p. 47]. Sanctuaries tell the same story. Fourrier finds that "Cypro-Geometric sanctuaries were not places of display", and that sanctuaries outside the towns multiply only from the end of CG III, as markers on the borders between states, such as Ayia Irini between Soloi and Lapithos [60].

When kings do appear in writing, each is king of a named city, and the Mycenaean title wanax survived in the Cypriot word for the princes of the royal families, anaktes [60; 41]. The Iron Age cities course lesson and the article on the copper kingdoms follow the kingdoms in their prime.

On the threshold of the Assyrian age

The end of the period is marked in the ground by the Royal Tombs of Salamis. The earliest date from the last quarter of the 8th century and, in Iacovou's words, "constitute material evidence for the establishment of state authority within a highly stratified society shortly after the end of the Cypro-Geometric period" [39, p. 45]. The dead were brought down the long dromos on a hearse or a chariot, and the team of horses or asses was killed where it stood, still yoked to it [62, pp. 31–32]. Tomb 79, of about 700, held thrones and a bed covered with ivory and silver [61]. The earlier burial in Royal Tomb 1, of the middle of the 8th century, was a cremation in a bronze cauldron [62, pp. 25–26; 63]. The tomb held the largest group of Athenian pottery of the time found in the east, a krater and twenty drinking cups, with thirteen cups and plates from the Cyclades and thirty Phoenician vessels. Gjerstad took the Athenian set for the dowry of an Athenian princess married to a Cypriot Greek king. Coldstream offered a "wholly unromantic" alternative: so many imports from three sources show a prosperous, high-ranking family at a port on one of the main sea routes between the Aegean and the north Levant [50].

Reconstruction · Tomb · Cypro-Archaic I

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

around 700 BC

Salamis Tomb 79 with its chariots in the dromos, the kind of royal burial that begins at the close of the Cypro-Geometric period.

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

Texts begin to name rulers in the same decades. Two bronze bowls bought in 1877 by the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris, said to come from a hill north-east of Limassol, were dedicated by "The governor of Qartihadasht, servant of Hiram, king of the Sidonians" to "Baal of Lebanon, his Lord"; Hiram II ruled Tyre in the 730s BC [24, p. 250]. Qartihadasht, "New City", is usually taken to be Kition, though some prefer Amathus. Then Assyria arrived. In 707 BC Sargon II set up a stele at Kition recording the submission of seven kings of Cyprus [4, p. 642]. It came to light by chance in Larnaca in October 1845 and is now in Berlin [64]; apart from it, nothing found on the island points to an Assyrian presence [4, p. 642].

Seven kings of the land of Ia', a district of Iatnana, whose distant abodes are situated a seven days' journey in the sea of the setting sun.

The "seven" may be a conventional number, since seven had sacred overtones [42, p. 23; 4, p. 642]. The Assyrians never crossed the sea to occupy Cyprus; the Cypriot rulers submitted of their own accord, and the Assyrians addressed them as kings. As Iacovou points out, the date 707 is therefore a terminus ante quem for the Cypriot kingdoms: they existed by then, and Assyria recognised them [4, p. 642].

In 673/672 BC a prism of Esarhaddon listed ten kings of Iatnana, the only Assyrian list of Cypriot kings by name, recopied for Ashurbanipal a few years later. Among them are Akestor of Idalion, Eteandros of Paphos, Damasos of Kourion, Pylagoras of Chytroi and Onasagoras of Ledra, with kings of Salamis, Soloi, Tamassos, Qartihadasti and Nuria; more than half the names are Greek [15; 39]. Paphos, Kourion and Salamis on that list can be followed in their cemeteries back to the 11th century, to tombs like those of Opheltas and the couple at Kaloriziki. The kingdoms themselves, in their Archaic prime, are the subject of the Cypro-Archaic page.