BRONZE AGE CYPRUS

By the beginning of the Bronze Age, about 3000 b.c., most Mediterranean islands, large or small, had been settled. People were producing their own food and living in the same community year-round. About the same time, Mediterranean societies were becoming increasingly complex, which is evident from such factors as population growth, the production of food surpluses, the use of storage facilities, involvement in long-distance trade relationships, and the establishment of territorial boundaries. These developments occurred because special-interest groups, or possibly even a single local leader, came to control access to various items increasingly in widespread demand on the Mediterranean islands and in the surrounding countries: raw materials (copper, gold, silver, tin), precious goods (ivory, alabaster, faience, lapis lazuli, and other precious or semiprecious stones), and a range of more perishable goods lost to the archaeological record. Intricate and interconnected economic systems also came into operation at this time: from the Levantine coast in the east; through Cyprus and western Anatolia to the Aegean, Italy, and Sardinia; and as far west as Spain. By the end of the third millennium b.c., the trade in metals had become a key factor in promoting social change, and copper from Cyprus was an important component of this Mediterranean interaction sphere.

Cyprus, the third largest island in the Mediterranean (9,251 square kilometers), lies in its northeast corner. The mainland of Syria is approximately 100 kilometers east of Cyprus, that of Turkey about 70 kilometers north, while Egypt lies about 400 kilometers south. The boundary of the Aegean world, at the island of Rhodes, is situated about 500 kilometers west. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that Cyprus increasingly developed trade links and other social contacts with these areas during the course of the Bronze Age. Several important Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1200 b.c.) Cypriot sites with imported goods—Enkomi, Hala Sultan Tekke, Maroni, and Kition (fig. 1)—had inner harbors situated on large bays or at river mouths, all of which are now silted in or dried up. The material culture of Bronze Age Cyprus—from pottery to seals, from ornate buildings to burial chambers, from copper awls to bronze cauldrons—is among the best known and widely published of any island culture in the Mediterranean.

CYPRUS: THE CULTURAL SEQUENCE C. 2500–1700 b.c.

Toward the end of the fourth millennium b.c., certain innovations such as the cart and the plow, a variety of domesticated animals and their "secondary products" (e.g., wool, leather, and milk), and evidence for the widespread herding of these animals (pastoralism) had appeared in parts of Europe and the Mediterranean. By adopting all or even some of these technological and cultural innovations, people were able to maximize agricultural production and thus ensure a reliable subsistence base. These new technologies represent a phenomenon known as the "Secondary Products Revolution." Along with the emergence of regional trade systems, this revolution brought about changes in the way that people thought about things, and also brought an increased
capacity for societies to process and transfer information, ideas, and material goods.

Although such innovations had been adopted in the Levant and the Aegean during the third millennium b.c., initially they seem to have bypassed Cyprus, perhaps as a result of its insularity. Toward the end of the Chalcolithic period (about 2800–2500 b.c. on Cyprus), however, the introduction of the plow and the reappearance of cattle in large numbers demonstrate that the island also had been touched by this Secondary Products Revolution. Excavations at several sites on Cyprus since the 1980s have provided important new evidence for this major economic transformation, evidence that also has helped archaeologists to understand better the transition to the Bronze Age.

The Cypriot archaeological record of this early stage in the Bronze Age also reveals an increased number of ground stone tools used in agricultural production and a growing dependence on domesticated animals at the expense of hunted animals such as deer. This expansion in the agricultural and pastoral sectors of the economy, in turn, served to underpin a key industrial development: the mining and production of copper from Cyprus's abundant ore deposits. Although the use of copper becomes evident at several sites on Cyprus during the third and especially the early second millennium b.c., expertise in metallurgical technology is best demonstrated by the quality and quantity of metal products found in several tomb deposits along or near the north coast (e.g., Lapithos, Bellapais Vounos, Vasilia Kaphkalla). Almost all foreign imports into Cyprus—pottery, metal implements, stone vessels, and faience goods from the Levant, Egypt, and the Aegean—also were recovered from these north coast sites. Together, the native metalwork and the imports suggest something far beyond local production for local consumption: external demand for Cypriot copper also must have been increasing at this time. Indeed, nineteenth century b.c. cuneiform records from Mari on the Euphrates River in Syria make the earliest reference to copper from "Alashiya," a place-name that virtually all archaeologists and ancient historians now accept as the Bronze Age equivalent of "Cyprus."

Despite the limited evidence for Cypriot overseas contacts during the period between about 3000–2000 b.c., various states and kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean maintained a high level of demand for imports such as the cedars of Lebanon
or the copper of Cyprus. Because tin was the metal of choice to alloy with copper in order to manufacture bronze, long-distance trade was stimulated even further. Silver produced in the Cycladic islands of the Aegean also became an important commodity, and the products of early Aegean metallurgists helped to expand trade rapidly throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Other goods traded at this time in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean included wine, olive oil, precious metals, and pottery. Technological innovations of the third millennium b.c., such as the longboat and sail, facilitated the bulk transport of raw materials or manufactured goods on an unprecedented scale. A multitude of harbors and the diversity of trading routes further promoted a budding sense of internationalism.

On Cyprus, the increased size, number, and spread of settlements throughout the centuries between about 2500–1700 b.c. indicate a successful adaptation to environmental constraints imposed by an island ecosystem. The limited evidence for external contacts up to about 1700 b.c. suggests that subsistence needs were met and social networks maintained within the island system. Perhaps because innovations associated with the Secondary Products Revolution reduced the amount of time that had to be devoted to subsistence needs, some people began to specialize in producing goods such as woolens and textiles, stone figurines, shell beads, gaming stones, and a variety of metal tools and implements. Although a large part of the published archaeological data from this period comes from burials, excavations at sites such as Kissonerga-Mosphilia, Sotira-Kaminoudhia, Marki-Alonia, and Alambra-Mouttes are changing that picture dramatically. As a result we are better able to understand issues of chronology, cultural continuity and discontinuity, foreign contacts, and all the developing signs of a more complex social system.

To summarize the earliest phases of the Bronze Age on Cyprus, the Secondary Products Revolution enabled people to utilize their animals more fully and effectively. One result was that more land became available, and some people were able to exploit these economic developments, eventually to establish themselves in positions of social if not political power. The increase in the number and size of sites during the third millennium b.c. indicates population increase; at the same time, some settlements began to show marked differentiation from others. In turn, these developments were linked directly to the increased production of metals and the emergence and expansion of long-distance trade, which was closely associated with the acquisition of imported luxury or prestige goods. Although Cyprus never developed the type of palaces and palatial economies that came to typify Levantine city-states or Aegean citadels, somebody on the island must have managed the increasingly specialized levels of production and overseen the subsistence needs of those specialists who were producing surplus goods and metals for trade. During the third and early second millennia b.c., major social changes took place on Cyprus, when trade and contact with external groups helped to overcome a deep-seated resistance to social and economic stratification. At the same time, this was a transitional era, when indigenous elites seized the opportunity to formalize, legitimize, and integrate the copper industry that would become so critical in all of the social, politico-economic, and urban developments of the later Middle and Late Bronze Ages.

CYPRUS: THE CULTURAL SEQUENCE C. 1700–1100 b.c.

Throughout the course of the second millennium b.c., states and kingdoms in the Levant and the Aegean, as well as on Cyprus, became entangled in the production, trade, and consumption of utilitarian and luxury goods as well as a range of organic items (e.g., olive oil, wine, honey, spices). Port cities and palatial centers took part in this lucrative international trade and found their political positions enhanced as a result. Some of the best-known trading centers involved were Ugarit (Syria), Enkomi and Hala Sultan Tekke (Cyprus), Tell el-'Ajjul and Tel Nami (Israel), Troy (Anatolia), Kommos (Crete), and Mycenae and Pylos (mainland Greece). Cypriot and Aegean pottery has been recovered everywhere from the southern Levant and Egypt to Sicily and Sardinia; Aegean (Mycenaean) pottery has even been found in Spain. Copper oxhide ingots, which most likely served as a medium for exchange during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1200 b.c.), have been recovered in contexts stretching from the Black Sea and Babylonia to Sardinia.

Since the early 1990s, a number of remarkable finds have helped to extend and refine our understanding of Mediterranean trading systems. Two deserve special mention: The first is the rich and diverse cargo—including Cypriot, Aegean, Egyptian, and Levantine goods—of a Late Bronze Age shipwreck found at Uluburun on the southern coast of Turkey. The second is the fragmentary wall paintings from a Middle Bronze Age palace in Israel (Tel Kabri) and from a Middle to Late Bronze Age palace in the eastern Nile Delta (Tell ed Dab'a), both of which reveal iconographic and design elements common throughout the eastern Mediterranean world. All these goods demonstrate the mobilization of workers and the deployment of craft specialists in a wide-reaching communication system that linked traded goods, ideology, iconography, and sociopolitical status.

To understand how and why Mediterranean peoples became involved in these production and trade systems, it is necessary to realize that trade is a form of social communication, and social resources are as important as natural ones. All goods of lasting value, including prestige or luxury items, are important not only in amassing wealth but also in building social status and creating social or economic alliances. An exceptionally diverse and abundant archaeological record shows clearly that seaborne trade throughout the Late Bronze Age Aegean and eastern Mediterranean had many dimensions: complex in nature and diverse in structure, it encompassed both state-dominated and entrepreneurial aspects. Within the Bronze Age Mediterranean, there were so many different kinds of resources and unique types of goods available, and so many different ways to transport them, that no single overarching system ever prevailed.

On Cyprus itself, several striking changes appear in the archaeological record of the late Middle to Late Bronze Ages (c. 1700–1100 b.c.): (1) urban centers with public and ceremonial architecture ("temples") appear throughout the island; (2) burial practices reveal clear distinctions in social status (e.g., three females found in Tomb 11 at Ayios Dhimitrios were interred with various gold items totaling nearly one pound in weight); (3) writing ("Cypro-Minoan"), on clay tablets, first appears; (4) copper production and export intensified as extensive regional and long-distance trade developed; (5) newly built fortifications and a relative increase in the number of weapons found indicate other kinds of change in Cypriot society. This dramatic trajectory of development and change reveals the island's transformation from a somewhat isolated, village-oriented culture into an international, urban-centered, and highly complex society. The successful exploitation of mineral resources and production of agricultural surpluses meant that political authority, at least initially, had to be centralized. Eventually, the intensified production and trade of copper catapulted Cyprus into the role of the most important purveyor of this metal in the Mediterranean region, a situation that continued at least until the fall of the Roman Empire, some two thousand years later. The name Cyprus, after all, is directly related to the Latin word for copper—cuprum.

Newly built port cities (e.g., Hala Sultan Tekke, Maroni, Kition) specialized in trade and prospered as their populations grew. Cuneiform letters sent from "Alashiya" (Cyprus) to the Egyptian pharaoh show that the king of Cyprus wielded considerable authority over copper production and trade. Two cuneiform documents from Ugarit in Syria demonstrate that high-level, diplomatic trade between Cyprus and the Levant continued into the late thirteenth century b.c. Like the dynasts of contemporary western Asia, the Cypriot ruler used state agents to conduct foreign trade. All these documentary records reveal the organizational efficiency, shipping capacity and product diversity that characterized this highly specialized, well-coordinated political and economic system. One of the letters from Ugarit, for example, which states that copper was sent from Cyprus to Ugarit as a "greeting gift," exemplifies a royal correspondence deeply concerned with trade emissaries, the exchange of various goods, and the commercial regulations that kept the entire system functioning.

In tandem with these specialized developments in urbanization, metallurgical production, and international trade, Cyprus's mixed farming economy also underwent some changes. There is evidence, for example, of extensive centralized storage facilities at the site of Ayios Dhimitrios: some fifty massive pithoi, or terra cotta storage jars, would have held up to 50,000 kilos of olive oil. The faunal record is less dramatic, but it seems clear that animal exploitation centered on sheep and goats, although cattle remains have been recovered from several sites. This configuration may reflect the dietary preferences of social elites. Overall, this economic system had to be adequately flexible to feed and support the specialists who made up such a key component of the urban economy. One of the more interesting results of the excavation of the Uluburun shipwreck is the appearance of organic goods—coriander, caper, safflower, fig, and pomegranite seeds; olive pits; cereal grains; almond shells; terebinth resin—part of a usually invisible component of trade in resins, oils, fibers, wine, and other foodstuffs. Demand for such goods certainly would have stimulated Cyprus's subsistence economy.

During the three centuries between about 1500–1200 b.c., the archaeological record of Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean reveals a quantum leap in the production and trade of goods such as Cypriot and Aegean pottery; copper oxhide ingots and metal artifacts; glass products; prestige goods such as ivory, gold, amber, and faience; and various organic goods. Trade goods fluctuated as new opportunities or distinctive products became available. Not only did the burgeoning international system of exchange bring prestige goods to ruling elites, it also brought raw materials to craftspeople and food supplies and basic products to rural peasants and producers. Even if powerful elites controlled local economies, the dynamics of production, distribution, and consumption freed up resources for individual activities within a more structured political economy.

Involvement in trade thus had the capacity to transform social groups, change economic motivations, or inspire individual actions. What had begun as a limited trade in high-value, low-bulk luxury goods (e.g., precious metals in the form of jewelry, semiprecious stones, ivory handicrafts) expanded over time to incorporate the bulk exchange of "nonconvertible" commodities (storage jars, textiles, glass) that were locally produced for export on an interregional scale. The real determinants of economic power and political status, however, were convertible goods, especially metals and the copper oxhide ingots; these were subject to tight control by powerful rulers and may have been traded exclusively through formal gift exchange. Another significant incentive in Middle to Late Bronze Age Mediterranean trade was the desire by elites, especially newly formed elites, to acquire exotic goods from a distance. One of the ways that elites and rulers legitimized their position and consolidated their power was to import luxury goods that could only have been acquired through the production of other goods—whether raw materials (e.g., metal, wood, ivory, ebony) or finished products (e.g., bronzes, textiles, jewelry, decorated chests).

THE END OF THE BRONZE AGE: CYPRUS AND BEYOND

The century between about 1250–1150 b.c. was characterized by a bewildering array of site destructions and demographic movements (involving in part diverse Mediterranean peoples collectively known as the "Sea Peoples") that ended the cooperative and lucrative international relations of the Middle to Late Bronze Ages in the Mediterranean. The "Sea Peoples," and others like them, were more a symptom than a cause of the widespread decline. Behind the widespread movement of peoples—described on Egyptian monumental records and alluded to in the texts of cuneiform clay tablets—was a proliferation of human displacement and ethnic intermixing that spelled the end of an international era. In each country, stable groups like farmers and minor craftspeople remained in place, with their horizons narrowed but subsistence systems still intact.

On Cyprus, if expanding trade relations had once helped to promote social fusion, the natural circumscription of the island and the growing scarcity of land and raw materials (the result of extensive plow agriculture and copper exploitation) eventually may have led to social division and intra-island competition among various factions. The overall political and economic system nonetheless proved to be so stable that the widespread collapse of other states and trading networks in the Mediterranean seem to have had limited effects on Cyprus. Some of the most important developments in early iron technology took place on Cyprus at this very time. While some agricultural and mining or pottery-producing villages were disrupted or abandoned, the major coastal sites of Enkomi, Kition, and Palaepaphos survived the destruction and displacement that occurred elsewhere; they perhaps became new centers of authority, displacing smaller regional centers and managing new Cypriot contacts that were emerging overseas. New maritime trading routes opened to Crete in the Aegean and Sardinia in the central Mediterranean, in the quest for alternative metal supplies or for other resources in demand. As incoming Aegean and Levantine peoples—the latest "colonists" of the island—became acculturated to the Cypriot population, copper production and commercial enterprise seem to have been revitalized, at least in the short term. By 1100 b.c., however, the settlement patterns and political organization that had characterized the Late Bronze Age disappeared, as new social and economic structures dictated the establishment of new population and power centers on Iron Age Cyprus. These new political configurations heralded the rise of Cyprus's early historical kingdoms and the island's tactical and commercial adjustments to the new Age of Iron.

See alsoCopper Age Cyprus (vol. 1, part 4).

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A. Bernard Knapp