Map of Ancient Cyprus

How to read this map

• A site appears in every period its occupation overlaps, so a long-lived place like Kition stays on the map for many steps while a brief camp flickers past in one.
• Red pins have their own page on this site. Hollow pins are well-known sites we have not yet written up; they still carry their dates and a short note.
• The period boundaries are conventional round numbers. Real chronologies are argued over at the century level, and a site dated to a boundary year may sit on either side of it.
• Positions mark the excavated locality, not the modern village, and are approximate at the scale of this drawing.
• A small framed marker beside a pin, or out at sea, opens a reconstructed scene of daily life in that period. Each scene carries an evidence tag: documented where excavation and the dossiers support the practice at that kind of place, illustrative where it is a reasonable reconstruction without direct evidence there.
• The season label in the corner of the map turns every two minutes: in winter ships stay in harbour, in summer some flocks walk up to the hills, in autumn the plough teams are out, and in spring and autumn the migrating birds cross. Click it to step to the next season. The seasons are scenery, not evidence.

The map runs from the Epipalaeolithic (10,500 BCE) to the end of the Cypro-Archaic II (480 BCE). For the full catalogue with filters and search, see the list of archaeological sites.