The Complete Bronze Age Greek World

Pete Kelly presents a six-and-a-half-hour documentary surveying the archaeology and mythology of the Mycenaean world across twenty-six regional chapters, moving from the mainland Peloponnese and central Greece to Crete, the Aegean islands, western Anatolia, Cyprus, and Euboea. Alongside the fifteen-minute chapter on Cyprus near the end, Cypriot links appear briefly in the chapters on Pylos, on Thebes, where the Kadmeia treasury held imported Cypriot cylinder seals, and on Euboea, where the warrior cremation of around 1000 BC at the Lefkandi Heroon was interred inside a Cypriot bronze amphora.

Chapter 25 opens with the arrival of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition in September 1927 and introduces the island's undeciphered Bronze Age script, which Kelly calls Linear C, appearing around 1550 BC in the Middle Bronze Age and found also at Ugarit.

The chapter then turns to Enkomi and its role in mining, smelting, and shipping copper between the 16th and 12th centuries BC. Kelly summarizes the late-19th-century British Museum excavations, which yielded ivory board games, bronze smiting gods, and gold beads, and notes René Dussaud's identification of the city as Alashiya. He describes the twenty intact tombs uncovered by the Swedish team in 1930, which held over three hundred objects per grave with Mycenaean motifs, and outlines Enkomi's stratigraphy, with destructions around 1220 BC and 1125 BC. He connects this sequence, the Homeric foundation legend of Kourion from the Argolid, and Enkomi's horned god to the Sea Peoples reliefs at Medinet Habu and the displacement of warrior elites at the end of the Late Bronze Age.