Kingdom of Alashiya: History of Cyprus in the Bronze Age

This animated video essay by Wanax TV surveys the history of Cyprus in the Bronze Age, focusing on the kingdom of Alashiya and its diplomatic and commercial relations with eastern Mediterranean powers.

The account opens with copper metallurgy in the third millennium BCE, the native population, the undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script and the later Cypriot syllabary. It notes Enkomi, Alassa and Kalavasos as candidate capitals for Alashiya. For the Middle Bronze Age, it outlines Minoan contact, copper shipments to Mari and Babylon via Ugarit, and settlements at Marki-Alonia, Alambra-Mouttes, Pyrgos-Mavroraki and Kourion.

For the Late Bronze Age, the narrator follows Near Eastern textual records: deliveries of copper and other goods recorded as tribute by Pharaoh Thutmose III, Hittite claims under Arnuwanda, and raids on Alashiya by the Mycenaean commander Attarissiya and Maduwatta. It then turns to the fourteenth-century Amarna letters, where the king of Alashiya addresses Pharaoh Akhenaten as his brother while promising 200 talents of copper, reporting a plague ("the hand of Nergal") and denying that his subjects joined Lukka pirates in raiding Egypt.

For the thirteenth century BCE, the video covers Seti I's claim of tribute, the exile of Ugaritic princes to Alashiya, Tudhaliya IV's claimed conquest, and Ugarit tablets naming the Alashiyan king Kushmeshusha and the governors Sinama and Sangiwa. It concludes with Suppiluliuma II's naval and land battles against Alashiya, letters between King Ammurapi of Ugarit and governor Eshuwara during the Sea Peoples attacks, the destruction of Cypriot cities between 1190 and 1180 BCE, and the narrator's account of Mycenaean settlement.