Iacovou, M. 2014. 'Working with the shadows': in search of the myriad forms of social complexity

ΑΘΥΡΜΑΤΑ

Critical Essays on the Archaeology of the Eastern

Mediterranean in Honour of E. Susan Sherratt

Edited by

Yannis Galanakis, Toby Wilkinson and John Bennet

Archaeopress Archaeology

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© Archaeopress and the individual authors 2014

The editors wish to express their gratitude to the Sheffield Centre for Aegean Archaeology and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge for generous financial support that enabled the inclusion of colour images.

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Contents

Contents

List of Contributors �� iii

Introduction �� 1Yannis Galanakis, Toby Wilkinson and John Bennet

A selected list of publications by Sue Sherratt (as of autumn 2014) �� 6

How and when did Tel Akko get its unusual banana shape? �� 11Michal Artzy and Jamie Quartermaine

The integration of gold resources in the Byzantine economy: an open question �� 23Evanthia Baboula

The ‘Sea Peoples’ as an emergent phenomenon �� 31Alexander A. Bauer

Pottery mobility, landscape survey and maritime activity: a view from Kythera �� 41Cyprian Broodbank and Evangelia Kiriatzi

‘In vino veritas’: raising a toast at Mycenaean funerals �� 51William Cavanagh and Christopher Mee†

Geraki in Laconia in Late Helladic times �� 57Joost Crouwel

How warlike were the Mycenaeans, in reality? �� 67Oliver Dickinson

Desecrating signs: ‘hieroglyphic’ writing systems and secondary script inventions �� 73Silvia Ferrara

Chronologies should carry a ‘use by’ date: the archaeological life history of the ‘Beth Shan Stirrup Jar’ �� 81Elizabeth French

Arthur Evans and the quest for the “origins of Mycenaean culture” �� 85Yannis Galanakis

Man/Woman, Warrior/Maiden: The Lefkandi Toumba female burial reconsidered �� 99Kate Harrell

The Waz-lily and the Priest’s Axe: can relief-beads tell us something? �� 105Helen Hughes-Brock

‘Working with the shadows’: in search of the myriad forms of social complexity �� 117Maria Iacovou

James Saumarez Cameron: a forgotten collector of Cretan seals �� 127Olga Krzyszkowska

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The Post-Mycenaean dead: ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ �� 135Katie Lantzas

The spider’s web: innovation and society in the Early Helladic ‘Period of the Corridor Houses’ �� 141Joseph Maran and Maria Kostoula

‘Metal makes the wheel go round’: the development and diffusion of studded-tread wheels in the Ancient Near East and the Old World �� 159Simone Mühl

“For it is written”: an experimental approach to the materiality and temporality of clay documents inscribed in Linear B �� 177Tom Pape, Paul Halstead, John Bennet and Yannis Stangidis

A ‘wall bracket’ from Kandia in the Argolid: notes on the local character and function of an ‘east Mediterranean’ artefact of the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age�� 187Lorenz Rahmstorf

Reading post-palatial Mycenaean iconography: some lessons from Lefkandi �� 197Jeremy B. Rutter

Functions and meanings of Aegean-type pottery at Tel Beth-Shean �� 207Philipp W. Stockhammer

Ceramic developments in coastal Western Anatolia at the dawn of the Early Iron Age �� 223Rik Vaessen

Beaker Folk in Thrace: a metrological footnote �� 233Michael Vickers

Rosso antico marble and the façade entablature of the Treasury of Atreus �� 237Peter Warren

Feasts of clay? Ceramics and feasting at Early Minoan Myrtos: Fournou Korifi �� 247Todd Whitelaw

Dressing the house, dressing the pots: textile-inspired decoration in the late 3rd and 2nd millennia BC east Mediterranean �� 261Toby C. Wilkinson

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14

‘Working with the shadows’: in search of the myriad forms of social complexity1

Maria Iacovou

In fact, if anything, we should probably revel in the shadows, since they expand our potential to make sense of the early Mediterranean in general, and of interaction within it in particular… (Sherratt 2011, 3).

Introduction1

With this contribution I wish to express how much the richer I have become because of the diverse paths that Sue Sherratt’s thought-provoking writings have made me travel in Mediterranean archaeology; it is also a note of gratitude for her participation in the ‘Palaepaphos Urban Landscape Project’ (Iacovou 2008a: 276 n. 14; Sherratt, in press). Despite its sincerity, this introductory statement may appear at odds with the critical nature of the paper, which solicits counter-arguments from Sue’s constantly frothing mind. I throw the glove (part of the blame for this gesture should be borne by the editors’ call for irreverent contributions) knowing that if Sue picks it up, her response is likely to initiate a much more productive inter-Mediterranean dialogue on the myriad forms that social complexity may have taken, especially on the easternmost Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

A messy theme: from a Late Cypriot coastal polity to a ‘Phoenician’ kingdom via a colonial episode?

In 2006, Sue wrote in her review of The Plain of Phaistos (Sherratt 2006: 998):

[T]heir conclusions include that, twice in their long history, the inhabitants of the western Mesara formed themselves into a state polity with its centre at Phaistos (once at the end of the Prepalatial period and once in the Early Iron Age), and that the growth of social complexity took myriad forms and is generally much messier and less predictable in its trajectories than will allow for any simple model.

If I were to take this quote and replace “the inhabitants of the western Mesara” with ‘the inhabitants of the south-eastern Mesaoria in Cyprus’, and “Phaistos” with ‘Kition (once in the Late Cypriot and once in the Iron Age)’, I wonder whether I could succeed in directing attention to another messy theme: that of dogmatic narratives (their

1 The title of the paper is a mélange of two of Sue’s published papers: the title comes from Sherratt 2011: 3 and the subtitle from Sherratt 2006: 998.

origin dating from the colonial period),2 which provide simplistic interpretations to the ‘birth’ of states in Iron Age Cyprus.

Why choose Kition and not Paphos or Salamis for Sue’s Festschrift (Figure 14.1)? Because Kition remains to this day hostage to a ‘Phoenician colonization’ narrative, which treats it as if it were a new Iron Age establishment, a Quardihadast (New Town) founded by colonists, and not the same port site that had been one of the island’s primary coastal polities at the end of the Late Bronze Age (cf. Karageorghis and Demas 1985; Knapp 1997: 66 and 70). Kition as well as Paphos were thriving urban polities from the 13th century BC, if not earlier still, and had risen to even greater economic importance in the 12th century BC (Webb 1999: 3, 288, 292 and 302), almost certainly because of the crisis, which had eliminated their next door neighbours at Kalavassos and Alassa (cf. Iacovou 2012a: 63; 2012b: 216-18). How could one or the other have been colonized or taken over by Greeks or Phoenicians as if they had been vacant coastal territories, or territories where the indigenous population was a negligent socio-economic factor (see also Van Dommelen 1998)?3

The development of Paphos-Palaepaphos and Enkomi-Salamis (Iacovou 2007: 3 and 10) from Late Cypriot to Iron Age coastal polities is no longer viewed as the result of a ‘Mycenaean colonization’ (cf. Iacovou 2008b: 630, 632 and 648). Beginning with her doctoral thesis (Sherratt 1981) and, a decade later, with her paper on ‘Cypriot pottery of Aegean type in LCII-III’ (Sherratt 1991), on which a younger generation of scholars continues to elaborate (most recently: Georgiou 2012), Sue played a decisive role in liberating Cypriot archaeology from the monolithic belief in a Mycenaean colonial activity, which

2 The effects of colonialism on the history of research on ancient Cyprus are acknowledged by many scholars and have been approached from different perspectives; see for example Given 1997; 2002; Cannavò 2011; Iacovou, in press.3 A fundamental aspect of colonial situations is “the existence of asymmetrical socio-economic relationships of political domination or economic exploitation between the colonizing groups and the inhabitants of the colonized region” (Van Dommelen 1998: 15); “[t]he establishment of one or more clearly distinct and often separate settlements where […] the colonizers live” is considered “a recurring feature of colonial situations” (ibid.).

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ΑΘΥΡΜΑΤΑ: Critical Essays on the Archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean in Honour of E. Susan Sherratt

brought to the island a superior political culture and set forth the process of its Hellenization. Sue had successfully challenged the notion of “a neat line” between LC IIC and LC IIIA on ceramic grounds or on grounds of a break in cultural continuity, which had for long accommodated “a major episode of disruption followed by cultural change” (Sherratt 1991: 186 and 191; Iacovou 2013a: 590 and 593 n. 15). It took a lot of courage to challenge the established Mycenaean dogma (her views fired bitter confrontations in the 1990s) but gradually the term ‘colonization’ and the term ‘Mycenaeans’ were removed from the list of key words used to interpret the Cypriot Late Bronze Age. The enrichment of the Late Cypriot material culture with phenomena described as ‘Aegeanizing’ or as cultural innovations relating to the ‘Sea Peoples’ (cf. Karageorghis 2000) has since received alternative and nuanced interpretations in the context of: (a) the island’s rapidly developing social complexity (cf. Knapp 2013) and (b) the Mediterranean-wide mobility of goods and peoples caused by the rejection of the Late Bronze Age state economies (cf. Bell 2006; Georgiou 2011; Iacovou 2012b: 215). In fact, Sue was the first to suggest that Cypriot merchants, operating from harbours like Kition and Enkomi, were responsible for undermining the established economic system (Sherratt 1998) and for fuelling “the forces of globalization” (Sherratt 2003a: 44).

The danger presented by an ‘overtly political’ colony

Besides the aforementioned ‘liberating’ works, Sue is also the author of (at least) a couple of papers where she describes the foundation of Kition as an “overtly political” Tyrian colony (Sherratt 2003b: 238). This straightforward statement has left me with an unresolved research puzzle: the use of the terms ‘political’ and ‘colony’ continue to trouble me as I cannot see the kind of evidence that would justify them. I have noted that Sue’s paper on visible writing (2003b) made references to the unpublished (and not easy to find) doctoral thesis of Swinton (1996). Not having read this interesting work, which treated the development of public cult on Cyprus from Late Cypriot I to Cypro-Archaic I, I must admit that I am not as “thoroughly well-informed” as the editors’ have asked us to be;4 but I continue to claim that my attempt is “to side-step dogma and conventional wisdom”. With Sue being the last person one could suspect of relying on conventional wisdom, I kindly ask her to share with us the evidence she has collected and assessed before she felt she could render

4 More recent works by Webb (1999), Fourrier (2007), Ulbrich (2008) and Papantoniou (2012), to mention only the most influential, provide updated and masterful interpretations of the Cypriot sacred environment in relation to the island’s political geography.

Figure 14.1. Map of Cyprus indicating the location of ancient slag deposits (digitised from Stos-Gale, Maliotis and Gale 1998 and the Archives of the Cyprus Geological Survey); it confirms that in antiquity copper was primarily exploited

from the pillow lavas around the Troodos. Digital geological data from Cyprus Geological Survey (map drafted by Athos Agapiou).


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Maria Iacovou: ‘Working with the shadows’: in search of the myriad forms of social complexity

her support to “the foundation of a formal Tyrian colony at Kition in the ninth century” (Sherratt 2003a: 234-35).5

Although I continue to agree that “a Phoenician presence on the Island [Cyprus] before c. 800 still needs to be demonstrated and not invoked uncritically” (Gilboa et al. 2008), I have recently argued that the discontinuity in the use of the Cypriot script in the territory of Kition after the end of the 2nd millennium BC, and the sheer predominance of the Phoenician alphabet down to the fourth century BC (see Yon 2004: 337), suggest that a literate Semitic group could have acquired a foothold in this particular area from as early as the 12th or the 11th century BC (Iacovou 2012b: 220), although not as colonists: “[c]olony is a word which has strong ‘statist’ overtones” (Osborne 1998: 251). It is worth recalling that Popham defined Early Greek contact with the East as “precolonization” in order to underline the contact’s temporal precedence to the later Greek colonization to the West and to stress that it was a different kind of influx: “the revitalizing of communications in the course of the 12th century is the result of the evident diaspora of the Mainlanders overseas where their arrival can be detected on Crete, […] and most of all in Cyprus” (Popham 1994: 11). The Greek people that made a permanent home on Crete and Cyprus had not been sent out as colonists on behalf of politically-minded states. At that time, the establishment of Greeks and, I would assume, also Phoenicians in Cyprus and elsewhere was “a product of a world in which many were constantly moving across the seas” (Osborne 1998: 268).

Admittedly, for lack of a better single-word explanation for the introduction of two new languages into Iron Age Cyprus, we use terms such as ‘migration’ and ‘immigrants’ in attempting to explain how these two linguistic groups, the Greeks and the Phoenicians, may have come to enrich and diversify the human landscape of Cyprus in the 1st millennium BC.6 The substitution of the term ‘colonization’ with the term ‘migration’ is not necessarily ideal but it helps us bring into perspective the diametrically different targets that such population moves would have had: migrations do not originate from the decision to occupy territories away from home and establish political control (see also discussion in De Angelis 2009; Iacovou 2012b: 211). “[T]he model of a human colony” on the other hand “remains tied up with states. Founding a colony is not an end in

5 An almost identical statement is made in Sherratt 2009: 130: “During the ninth century, Tyre began the process of laying political claim to colonies in Cyprus (Kition) and the central Mediterranean”.6 I have noted with great interest the aim of Peter van Dommelen’s recent call for papers for the World Archaeology issue (46.4) on ‘Mobility and Migration’: “the aim…is to look beyond the mere observation of large-scale movements or migrant networks and to examine not only the reasons that motivated people to migrate but also the consequences for both migrants and their host societies. This issue is therefore not so much about finding ‘hard evidence’ of actual migrants and migrations, although that is certainly part of the equation, but it rather represents an endeavour to explore the diversity and complexity of mobility and migration in the past, both recent and distant, and to investigate the many dimensions of these broad processes. The emphasis of the issue thus falls on local actors, practices, contexts and networks that sustained migrations and enabled mobility of, within and between communities in order to highlight the social and economic dimensions of migration and mobility”.

itself but a means to a further end; colonies are instruments of political and cultural control” (Osborne 1998: 252). Is such control made evident in the material culture of Kition in the 9th century or in the Phoenician inscriptions found in Cyprus, which date from the first half of the 1st millenniumBC(cf.Lipiński2004)?IntermsofitsEarlyIron Age material culture Kition is indistinguishable from the rest of the Cypro-Geometric sites. The textual data (numerically limited before the Cypro-Classical period) do not confirm the presence of a Kitian political authority prior to the fifth century BC (cf. Iacovou 2013b: 147). The reign of Baalmilk I, the first known ruler of Kition and founder of the Phoenician dynasty, dates to the beginning of the fifth century BC (cf. Yon 1989: 365; 2006: 59; Collombier 1991: 438-39). So, what of Kition after the 12th and before the 9th century BC? And how does a Tyrian colony fit into this very long period?

Space restrictions do not allow me to explain in detail the damage that Sue’s authoritative statements could engender, especially now that Cypriot archaeology has, at long last, taken a decisive step away from the uncritical notion that external agents are per force the introducers of state formation in Iron Age Cyprus. Colonization has been repeatedly defined as a mission civilisatrice (Van Dommelen 1998: 19): “the subjection and the ‘civilizing’ of the natives as well as the act of founding colonies” (Morel 1984: 124). In the case of Early Iron Age Cyprus, the Phoenicians have for long been considered as the agents of such a ‘civilizing mission’, and, recently, the hosting of Sargon’s stele in the colonial setting of Kition has been credited for triggering “the emergence of a pan-Cypriot identity” (Radner 2010: 429); we are not told how and where the island had lost its dynamic Bronze Age identity and had ended up a tabula rasa.7

This is why I think that Sue should flesh out her statements, lest younger scholars begin to cite her – as Radner does (2010: 444 n. 80) – with the same blind faith with which they have been citing Rupp’s 1987 paper. If I were to provide an unsolicited review of the latter, I would ask

7 Radner’s paper has many serious problems, all of which stem from the fact that she looks at Cyprus from outside and through external textual sources, while completely disregarding the local archaeological and epigraphical evidence. Her implicit suggestion that the island and its rulers were in need of an identity at the end of the eighth century is only one of the problems. Her argument goes something like this: “sometime in the 9th century…Tyre had established a formal colony on the island at Kition in order to gain sole control of the rich copper deposits”; in 707 BC, the stele of Sargon II was erected in this colonial setting, from where – “quite unintended by the Assyrian king” –it “may have played a role in the emergence of a pan-Cypriot identity, transcending the political boundaries of city-states” (Radner 2010: 429). The argument is well known: only an imported deus ex machina could possibly provide the “focus for an emerging Cypriot identity” (ibid.), but it becomes more problematic because of the author’s mishandling of basic terms: “The Phoenician colony [Kition] was surrounded by a network of small city states ruled by kings known in Eteocypriot as pasilewose and in Greek as basileus a term derived from Mycenaean quasireu” (Radner 2010: 436). It is disconcerting that despite referencing recent Cypriote scholarship (unfortunately, Iacovou 2006), Radner does not realize that the word for king in the Eteocypriot language has not been identified. It could not have been the Greek term pasilewose; qa-si-re-u/qwasileus (in Linear B), basileus (in alphabetic Greek) and pa-si-le-wo-se (in syllabic Greek) are different renderings of the same Greek term for ‘king’.


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readers to pay attention to its three distinct themes. Of the three, only the first rests on archaeological evidence that concerns Cyprus; it is related to the data on settlement pattern collected by the ‘Canadian Palaipaphos Survey Project’. The preliminary interpretation of the results of the survey (the final volume has not been published: see Rupp 2004) are not structurally integrated with the second theme of the paper: a theoretical approach to secondary state formation, which has since been questioned because of the inconsistencies observed in the typological distinction between pristine and secondary states and because it marginalized the so called ‘secondary states’ (McEnroe 2011).8

The third theme is a historical summary of events relating to the Assyrians and the Phoenicians; relying on textual sources, Rupp outlines the Assyrian empire’s imperialistic moves, and comments on its relation with the Phoenician city-kingdoms. From these three separate themes – (a) survey archaeology in Paphos, (b) state formation theory and (c) a historical narrative concerning the Assyrian empire and the Phoenicians – Rupp concluded that Iron Age Cyprus was “a classic example of the formation of secondary state under the pressure of economic contacts and exploitation from an existing state in nearby region” (Rupp 1987: 152). The contact was articulated through the “Phoenician colonization of Kition”. Hence, state formation in Iron Age Cyprus was the result of the establishment of a foreign colony on the island. “Colonization”, Rupp maintains, “generally takes place when a culture with a more complex form of societal organization expands into a region with a lower level of organization” (1987: 153).

I cannot resist the temptation to mention here one of my favourite phrases from Sue’s oeuvre where she eloquently describes the migration from the Aegean to Cyprus at the end of the Bronze Age as a move “from the periphery to the core, from the Provinces to Versailles” (Sherratt 1992: 325). Yet, until the end of the 20th century, few scholars underlined the absence of evidence in support of the claim that Phoenicia had a more complex political organization than Cyprus, or questioned the notion that a colonial episode was a pre-requisite for state formation. It was a truism well-established since the early days of the history of research, and widely disseminated through George Hill’s explicitly stated conviction that “to set [the island’s] history in true perspective” one would have to approach it from “the history of all the peoples who came into contact with it, whether as colonists or as conquerors” (Hill 1940: ix). The excerpt is from the Preface to the History of Cyprus, where it is also stated that “Cyprus has had no continuous history of its own, except to some degree in the Lusignan period. What light we have on it is chiefly a pale and shifting reflection from the activities of the great powers which from age to age have found it necessary to deal with it on their way to some important objective” (Hill 1940: ix).8 “Confusion about the meaning of the term secondary has led to a general assumption that if states were ‘secondary’ their formation did not need to be explained” (Parkinson and Galaty 2007: 114).

In a liberating critique of these stalemate biases, Thomas Kiely in his unpublished thesis (supervised by Sue Sherratt) notes:

[A]ncient Cypriot society is often characterised as an isolated, conservative and fundamentally passive actor in the cultural and economic trends of the LBA and early IA, simply waiting for the next passing people or economic trend to leave their cultural mark on the archaeological record of the island; more charitably, it is often described as an area very much outside of the mainstream of contemporary complex societies in the Near Eastern and Aegean world. (Kiely 2005: 4)

Eventually, Rupp’s scheme did little more than replace one colonial narrative with another: the purported Mycenaean colonization was replaced by a Phoenician colonization, peppered with secondary state-formation theory, which has been its basic attraction.9 Regarding the absence of archaeological evidence in support of the colonial claims, Kiely was again one of the first to stress that “the early Iron Age levels of Tyre and Sidon, whose transformations in the same period as their Cypriot near-neighbours underlay their economic survival over the transition to the 1st millennium, are as poorly documented in the archaeological record as most of Cyprus in these early years” (Kiely 2005: 358). He has also criticised the fact that these Levantine centres “are solely credited with initiating the regional economic revival of this period, not because of any specific material evidence for their activities […] but with the hindsight of the later pattern of Phoenician expansion from the 8th centuries onwards” (ibid.).

The comments of Niemeyer on the insufficient and distorted presentation of most aspects of Phoenician civilization in the written tradition of antiquity show that, like the Cypriot polities, the city-states of Phoenicia have been suffering from similar research problems:

Neither the historiographers of classical, i.e. Graeco-Roman antiquity nor the authors of the Old Testament – still our two main sources – ever had a specific interest in reporting on Phoenician matters correctly and in detail… even modern historiography has not done too much to make good the deficiencies in our general knowledge of Phoenician history. (Niemeyer 2006: 143)

Today, the prevailing concept is that we have a lot more to do in order to define and refine the distinct histories and politico-economic identities of the various Levantine and 9 Anna Cannavò has also found it necessary to provide a succinct and balanced response to the argument concerning the Phoenician colonization model: “Giving the Phoenicians a propulsive role in the creation of Cypriot political organization, as in Rupp’s theory, is then something absolutely hypothetical that is in no case supported by the documentation. It is not to underestimate the Phoenicians’ presence in Cyprus, to say that there is at the moment no specific evidence linking Cypriot kingship to the Phoenician city-state model – not lastly [sic] because of our insufficient knowledge of the political organization of the Phoenician cities themselves” (Cannavò 2010: 42).


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Cypriot microstates (see e.g., Iacovou 2004); and for the relations between the island and the Levant in the course of the Early Iron Age, we do need to rely on something more substantial than the adventures of Luli and the narratives of Josephus.10 As Counts has observed, “[d]espite the ubiquitous nature of Phoenician material culture in the context of colonial expansions to the west (e.g., Cyprus, North Africa, Italy, Spain), scholars have often lamented the relatively meager archaeological remains of the Phoenicians in Phoenicia” (Counts 2006: 21). Fortunately, fieldwork of primary importance has been carried out at Tyre Al Bass (Aubet 2004; Aubet and Núñez 2008) and Sidon (Doumet-Serhal 2008; 2013). These projects, as well as the Tel Dor excavations (Gilboa et al. 2008), have started to yield controlled material data for the construction of a Levantine protohistory from the earth, and have given voice to preliminary assessments, such as Núñez Calvo’s remarkably forward-looking contribution (2008).

A new agenda for Cypriot archaeology

Not everyone may have had reason to notice (especially if one’s research interests wane after the 13th or the 12th century BC), but Cypriot archaeology entered the 21st century with fresh approaches regarding the archaeologically invisible processes concealed behind the introduction and establishment of two new languages (Greek and Phoenician), not two new ethnic cultures (it is evident that we should continue to emphasise this), in the human landscape of the island. These new directions have been put forward by scholars willing to consider the rise of social complexity from a diachronic and inside view (e.g., Papantoniou 2012 and Satraki 2012). Instead of separating Bronze from Iron Age Cyprus or, worse, ‘Greek’ from ‘Phoenician’ polities, they attempt to recognize the immutable factors built into the distinct landscapes of the island. For this reason, in introducing ‘new approaches to the elusive Iron Age polities of ancient Cyprus’, we have underlined four themes, which we believe should receive extensive treatment in the study of the Cypriot microstates: 1) regionalism, in the context of territories and unique histories; 2) Cyprocentricism, in the context of local responses to cultural exchange and long-term change; 3) the economic needs of state centres, in the context of natural resources and environmental constraints; and finally 4) identity, in the context of power relations, social structure, and political change through time (Counts and Iacovou 2013: 9).

“The darkest remaining patch in our rapidly receding vision of a dark age” is not necessarily confined to “a period of little more than 50 years” (Sherratt 2003a : 51) between the end of the 12th and the early 11th centuries; darkness continues to reign over the regional patterns for a longer period of time.11 The fact that Paphos was ruled

10 The narratives of Josephus (c. 37-?100 AD), the son of a priestly aristocrat in Judea, “have become the indispensable source for all scholarly study of Judea from about 200 BCE to 75 CE” (Mason 2007: ix).11 Vlassopoulos has prudently asked in a recent review, “how do we

from the end of the eighth century BC by Greek-speaking basileis and Kition from the beginning of the fifth BC by Phoenician-speaking mlk does not cover the gap in our knowledge as regards changes in their political economies, which affected their entire territories since the 12th century BC and in the Early Iron Age. The Bronze / Iron Age dichotomy in the study of the same urban landscape is a methodological fault that has been recognized and is currently being remedied, at least in the case of Paphos (Iacovou 2008a) and Kition: Sabine Fourrier, the efficient successor of Marguerite Yon in the directorship of the Mission archéologique française de Kition et Salamine, has been carrying out a GIS mapping project which, as stated in the title (‘Programme sur la topographie urbaine de Kition à l’époque des royaumes, XIIIe-IVes. av. J.-C.’),12 studies the development of Kition from the 13th century to the end of the age of the kingdoms. But, in order to begin to grasp the changes that the region (Figure 14.2), and not just the urban centre, of Kition has absorbed since the 12th century BC, we should not forget the abandonment of the nearby coastal emporium of Hala Sultan Tekke, as a result of the silting up of its harbour (see e.g., Iacovou 2007: 12-13),13 the short-lived establishment and sudden abandonment of Pyla-Kokkinokremos on the summit of a hill overlooking another anchorage (see e.g., Georgiou 2011: 120), and the rapid development of Idalion as an inland primary site within the same economic and copper producing territory, i.e., the Larnaca hydrological zone (see e.g., Satraki 2012: 167, 181, 207).14 All are near-contemporary episodes directly relevant to the economic territory of Kition, before its purported ‘colonisation’.

Returning to the urban centre of Kition, Kition-Bamboula VI. Le sanctuaire sous la colline (Caubet et al.) is in press; and, recently, Anna Georgiadou has defended a doctoral thesis on the regional identities of the ceramic industry in the Cypro-Geometric period (2013), which will replace the problematic classification published by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition in the 1940s (Gjerstad 1948); it will also contribute essential evidence to the status of Kition during the Early Iron Age (see also Georgiadou 2012).15

square the biased focus of sources on external interventions in a region with the often invisible structure of regional patterns?” (Vlassopoulos 2013: 326-27).12 For information see the HiSOMA website: http://www.hisoma.mom.fr/recherche-et-activites/programme-de-recherche-sur-chypre 13 The silting up of anchorages and ports especially on the east and south coasts of Cyprus was not a one-time phenomenon that can be attributed to “a marked decline in their regular use” (Sherratt 2003a: 51); it is a long-term geological factor also associated with coastal uplift (Zomeni 2012).14 A pioneering landscape analysis, developed by Frixos Markou in the course of his MA thesis has provided the first concise and diachronic treatment of a hitherto uncharted territory that lies between the coastal polity of Kition and the inland polity of Idalion; it is the catchment area of the Pouzis and Tremithos Rivers, both of which originate near copper ore deposits and flow to the sea (Markou 2013).15 Hadjisavvas has also published the first volume of The Phoenician Period Necropolis of Kition (Hadjisavvas 2012). Dozens of other tombs excavated by the Department of Antiquities during rescue operations in Larnaca await publication.


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Epilogue

It is still likely that a number of chronologically different events have been compressed into a single and temporally specific episode described as a ninth-century colonization.16 If, in the end, one of these shadowy episodes was an influx of Phoenician people who had been instructed by a Tyrian political authority to establish a colony in Kition – admittedly, there are cases where existing settlements may be transformed to house the colonizing groups (Van Dommelen 1998: 16) – this will have to be defended by the material evidence under study from Kition itself.

The archaeological evidence should be allowed to define the context of this particular ‘colonial situation’: did, for instance, large numbers of migrants take possession of the land and transform it after the example of their country

16 If, as De Angelis (2009: 51-52) has convincingly argued, “to describe most instances of ancient Greek ‘colonization’ as colonialism sensu stricto is false”, should we start examining whether the same error has engrossed the number of the Phoenician colonial establishments around the Mediterranean? He suggests that “[t]he phrase ‘culture contact’ should serve as the first and general level of description, and then a case should be made to distinguish between the possible types of encounter” (De Angelis 2009: 51).

of origin, or was the colonial presence limited to a small trading post, and the relationship with the colonized region remained economic rather than exploitative (Van Dommelen 1998: 16)? The still unpublished tophet, located on the coastal strip of Amathous, a burial site distinct from the Cypriot chamber tombs found in their hundreds around the Amathousian citadel, suggests the establishment of a Semitic trading community in this major port site of the south coast. At Amathous, however, the Phoenician element did not take over the state in the fifth century BC (Iacovou 2013c: 34).

It may sound very simplistic, but I find it hard to believe that the material evidence, which would have transformed a typical Cypro-Geometric environment into a Phoenician urban centre on the prototype of a politically dominant Tyrian motherland, could have disappeared. But then, I need to remind myself that we continue to operate “in a shadowland inhabited by things we know we do not know, things we do not know we do not know, and things we think we know but might well be wrong about” (Sherratt 2011: 3). Who could have said it better than Sue!

Figure 14.2. Map of the eastern part of Cyprus with main sites relevant to the discussion and the location of copper-rich pillow lavas and ancient slags. Digital geological data from Cyprus Geological Survey

(map drafted by Athos Agapiou).


123


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