Silver bowl from Amathus may carry the earliest known picture of a hoplite phalanx

An engraved silver bowl from a tomb near Amathus probably carries the earliest known picture of Greek hoplites, heavy infantry, fighting as a phalanx, according to Tamás Dezső and Ádám Vér, Assyriologists at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. Their 2013 paper in Acta Antiqua gathers the scattered texts and finds for Greeks in the Assyrian world of the 9th–7th centuries BCE as raiders, mercenaries, settlers and traders.

The authors date the bowl to 710–675 BCE. Among its military scenes, four soldiers in Corinthian-style helmets advance on a walled town with spears, in phalanx order, while a fifth hoplite stands with the defenders on the walls. One reading puts the scene in Cyprus, an attack by Assyrians, Phoenicians and Greek mercenaries on a Cypriot town during the Assyrian intervention of 709–708 BCE for Šilṭa, the vassal king of Tyre. Dezső and Vér think it more likely shows the battle between Assyrians and Greeks in Cilicia in 696 BCE recorded by Polyhistor. Anna Cannavò, of the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée in Lyon, reads the siege instead as a mythical episode that is hard to identify [1].

Cyprus came under the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the same decade: a stele of Sargon II set up at Kition in 707 BCE records the submission of seven Cypriot kings, early in the Cypro-Archaic period.