La Longue Durée: The View from Idalion

Pamela Gaber, Professor Emerita at Lycoming College, reflects on fifty-three years of fieldwork at Idalion and the four-millennium history of the settlement and its region. Introduced by CAARI director Lindy Crewe, Gaber follows three lines of inquiry prompted by finds from the site: the early onset of urbanism in the Cypriot interior, Near Eastern origins of goddess iconography, and the long continuity of cult and industry from the Bronze Age into the Roman era.

Addressing the debate on when urbanism began on Cyprus, Gaber points to 18th-century BCE Mari texts recording Cypriot bronze and to Jennifer Webb's work on Early and Middle Bronze Age copper-working settlements. She traces an inland line of sites along the igneous-sedimentary interface, including Alambra Mouttes, Ayios Sozomenos, and Politiko Troullia, arguing that copper metallurgy began around 2200 BCE and supplied coastal ports such as Kalopsidha, Enkomi, and Hala Sultan Tekke. As Ayios Sozomenos grew in the Late Bronze Age, industrial work such as the West Acropolis pithos factory excavated by Maria Hadjicosti and Giorgos Georgiou shifted to Idalion in the 13th century BCE.

Gaber next reviews the uninterrupted stratigraphy across Idalion: the 12th-century BCE founding levels of the Adonis Temenos on the East Acropolis, the 9th-century stronghold excavated by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, 8th- and 7th-century monumental architecture beneath the 500 BCE fortification walls dug with Lawrence Stager, and a deep sounding in the Lower City North industrial area where floors and stone courses accumulated from c. 1300 to the 1st century BCE around settling basins and loom weights.

A limestone plaque with a Cypriot Syllabary inscription from the Lower City leads into a study of so-called Hathor and Proto-Aeolic capitals. Gaber argues that their volutes and curls derive from fourth-millennium Mesopotamian gatepost sheaves of Inanna rather than Egyptian Hathor imagery, surviving in their original form only in Israel and Cyprus where aniconic queens of heaven were worshipped.

Finally, she examines the City Sanctuary in the Lower City South. Beneath a pisé floor dated by 5th-century BCE Attic pottery to Kition's conquest around 450 BCE, thick ash yielded holm oak charcoal identified at the Weizmann Institute, indicating three wooden cult poles (xoana). She shows how the site's long-standing northwest-southeast building alignment shifted in the Roman period to meet a new Roman road, while cult features including open lamps, syllabic inscriptions, water installations, an ancestor circle, and offering benches persisted.