Borders, Ethnicity, and the State in Archaic Cyprus

Over the past three weeks I’ve been working on pulling together the various threads of our fieldwork at the Pyla-Koutsopetria in Cyprus for a synthetic conclusion. This will be the final chapter of our survey volume and consider the site in the broader context of settlement, politics, and the economy of both Cyprus and the wider Mediterranean world.

We’ve already made substantial headway in analyzing our site for the Hellenistic to Late Roman period, but we’ve done less with the Cypriot Iron Age. I want to offer some of our initial reflections on this complex period here, albeit in a brief and tentative way.

The most interesting thing about our site is that there is a some evidence for activity as early as the Cypro-Geometric period which on Cyprus dates to from around 1050 BC to around 750 BC. Our scatter of material most likely dates to the latter half of this period. The small scatter of Geometric material appears on the coastal ridge and in a few units on the coastal plain.

Things really get interesting, however, in the Archaic period (750 BC to 475 BC). At this time, it is clear that activity on the site has increased in intensity and expanded in area.

Contemporary with this expansion there appeared a crazy looking statue of with the head of the god Bes and a Phoenician inscription: “this which Eshmounhillec, the sculpture, made for this lord, Rshef Sh[ed]”. The statue is now in the Louvre in Paris and dates to the 7th century.

This is probably enough evidence to suggest that we have a sanctuary at our site that perhaps emerged as early as the Geometric period and continued into the Archaic age.  We have found some limestone votive-style figurines that may date to the end of the Classical period indicating that the site retained a religious function throughout the Iron Age.

The statue of Bes with the Phoenician inscription coincides with a period of increased Phoenician influence at the nearby urban center of Kition. In fact, the site of Kition sees consistent expansion during the Archaic period and some scholars have sought to link that to the arrival of Phoenician settlers. By the 6th century, we know that a Phoenician dynasty ruled the city of Kition and the power of the city and the continued to expand throughout the Iron Age.

In this context, then, the appearance of a statue with a Phoenician dedication probably indicates that our area – which stands about 10 km from the center of ancient Kition – saw some Phoenician immigrants. The presence of this kind of monument at our site and our site’s general expansion during the Cypro-Archaic period indicates a parallel between our site’s growth and the expansion of the city of Kition during the Archaic period.

Derek Counts has suggested that images of Bes (particularly in his guise as the Master of Animals)  in the Iron Age may have had an apotropaic function and been seen as particularly appropriate for sanctuaries located at the boundaries between state. He shows sites where these images have appeared on the map below.

Our site is not traditionally seen as being located at the borders of the city of Kition. In fact, there is tremendous ambiguity concerning the limits of any Iron Age polity in the Archaic period. At the same time, it is clear that the location of our site represents on the last substantial embayments along the east side of Larnaka Bay. Moreover, most scholars think that the major ancient road to Salamis – the major Iron Age city to the east of Kition – would turn inland at our site and proceed to the northeast. The combination of a major road and a harbor endowed our site with some liminal qualities by the Iron Age and made it a suitable location for a statue of Bes and a sanctuary.

The presence of a Phoenician inscription and a substantial votive dedication at our site may hint that the growth of our site represented an effort of the expanding city of Kition to establish authority in this strategically useful micro-region by stamping their signature on an earlier sanctuary in the area.