Two Article Tuesday: On Cyprus

Cyprus has long hung out “betwixt and between” the Aegean Greek world and the Near East. As a result, scholarship on Cyprus can sometimes be marginalized neither being “Greek” enough to appear in the places where scholars publish on the Greek world or Near Eastern enough to appear in appear in typical Near Eastern venues. The tendency for Cyprus to fall between these two academic spheres becomes particularly noteworthy when it comes to the publication of post-prehistoric sites and material.

It is happy coincidence then that the American Journal of Archaeology and Near Eastern Archaeology both feature articles on post-prehistoric Cyprus. 

Article the First

Michalis Karambinis’s article “The Gladiatorial Spectacles in Cyprus and the Enigma of the Amphitheater at Salamis,” in the most recent AJA 129.2 (2025) offers an intriguing survey of Cypriot amphitheaters with particular attention on the amphitheater at Salamis. Karambinis traces the emergence of gladiatorial combat in Cyprus and associates it, at least partly, with modifications to theaters in Paphos, Kourion, and Salamis. These modifications, which were well-known from elsewhere in the Roman world, involved transforming the stage area with a post-and-net barrier so that wild animal shows were possible and the spectators would be safe.

The paper goes on to argue that Paphos was the first city to receive a proper amphitheater with curved sides. At the same time, the appearance of an inscription suggests that Salamis received an amphitheater as well. Excavations before the 1974 invasion produced an amphitheater, but Karambinis showed that this was not, in fact, the amphitheater mentioned in the inscription, but a 4th or 5th century structure built atop the earlier amphitheater. It may be that this building dates to the massive urban renovations associated with the naming of Salamis the capital of the island in the 4th century. This is rather conjectural, but the dating of this amphitheater to Late Antiquity adds it to the growing list of monumental structures from the 4th-7th century on the island.

Article the Second

Jolanta Młynarczyk’s “Ritual Banqueting at a Hellenistic Sacred Area on the top of Fabrika Hill, Nea Paphos” appeared in the latest issue of Near Eastern Archaeology 88.1 (2025). In it, Młynarczyk details the discovery of three new ritual dining spaces on the Fabrica Hill in Paphos dating, it would appear, to the Hellenistic period. These seem to be broadly associated with a sanctuary to Paphian Aphrodite constructed atop a rock cut platform. Because the area saw both contemporary and later quarrying and these structures were erected upon bedrock, stratigraphy was largely non-existent. Młynarczyk and the Cypriot, Polish, and French excavators, however, were able to reconstruct some sense of phasing on the basis of bed rock cuts and in a few cases the contents of pits containing the discard from ritual dinners.

The most intriguing thing to me was that these ritual dining rooms were outside and quite small. This suggested to Młynarczyk that members of the religious and presumably social and political elite would recline in these areas. Their being carved into the bedrock of Fabrica Hill would literally anchor the participants in the landscape where they’d be partly below the level of the ground. Considering that Nea Paphos was a new foundation during the Hellenistic period, one wonders if the construction of dining rooms carved into the bedrock served to conjure a more ancient and even autochthonous origins for the city, it’s deities, and even its elite. To be clear, this isn’t an argument that Młynarczyk advanced and such rock cut ritual dining rooms aren’t that uncommon elsewhere in the Mediterranean (in fact, we surveyed around one at the site of Cromna in the Corinthia). It may be that the soft limestone of the Fabrica Hill and the level surfaces created by quarrying for the new city created spaces suitable for periodic ritual dining.

While neither of these articles are going to make me rethink everything I know about Cypriot archaeology, it was exciting to see two article from the historic period appearing in two major journals at the same time. Let’s hope this marks the beginning of a new wave of publications on post-prehistoric Cyprus!