Maria Iacovou

The Greek exodus to Cyprus: The antiquity of Hellenism

The antiquity of (a) the particular proto‐Greek dialect of Cyprus and (b) the syllabic script which was employed to write it as early as the eleventh century BC, suggests that Greek‐speaking people settled in Cyprus before the end of the Late Bronze Age. The peculiarity of this colonization movement is that the newcomers integrated with a highly civilized and literate indigenous population but did not succumb to acculturation; instead, they left on Cyprus an indelible identity of direct lineage from the extinct Mycenaean prototype. It is suggested that in the colonial context of the island the process of ethnic identification was accelerated: archeologically detectable manifestations in the material record of the eleventh century BC imply that the immigrants of Greek tongue developed a collective definition of their ancestry centuries before this was to become a conscious ideal on the Greek mainland.

Historically Elusive and Internally Fragile Island Polities: The Intricacies of Cyprus's Political Geography in the Iron Age

This paper attributes the intricacies of the islands elusive political geography in the Iron Age to inherent factors. It is suggested that the immutable properties of the islands environment and geology, and the segmented politico-economic system employed in the exploitation of its natural assets, fostered both strengths and weaknesses, which became pronounced when the polities were confronted with Mediterranean-wide crises or drastic changes to the prevailing trading model of the time: some polities survived and even thrived in the midst of crisis, while others succumbed or became subordinate polities.

New Approaches to the Elusive Iron Age Polities of Ancient Cyprus: An Introduction

Maria Iacovou: Archaeological Research Unit, Department of History and Archaeology, University of Cyprus, PO Box 20537, Nicosia, 1678 Cyprus, mariai@ucy.ac.cy Last year marked the 15th anniversary of BASOR’s theme issue devoted to “The City-Kingdoms of Early Iron Age Cyprus in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context” (BASOR 308 [1997]). According to its guest editors, the late Diana Buitron-Oliver and Ellen Herscher, the issue (which had its roots in an organized session at an annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America) set out to elucidate the evidence for “daily life in the kingdom, contacts among the kingdoms in Cyprus, and foreign trade” (Buitron-Oliver and Herscher 1997: 5). The issue thus brought together excavators to provide surveys of the literary, numismatic, and archaeological data related to the history of five Iron age polities: Kition (Yon 1997), Amathous (Aupert 1997), Idalion (Hadjicosti 1997), Marion (Childs 1997), and Kourion (Buitron-Oliver 1997). A second article on ancient Marion (Smith 1997) focused specifically on the Archaic-period sanctuary at Peristeries, its phases and use, but also the relationship of cult activity to broader economic and social concerns within that polity (Fig. 1). The result was an important contribution to our knowledge of the cultural history of these individual sites, with a particular focus on questions of chronological phasing (Table 1) and foundation histories, sacred and secular building projects and burial grounds in the identified urban centers, and the wealth of material culture (ceramics, sculpture, metal finds, etc.) uncovered through recent excavations. Nevertheless, in that same issue, the published responses to the articles by Rupp (1997) and Reyes (1997) were strikingly unified in their assessment of the contributions. It is worth recalling Reyes’s (1997: 65) rather prophetic appraisal of the current (at that time) state of research in Iron Age Cyprus: