Cyprus: An island culture

Society and Social Relations from the Bronze Age to the Venetian Period

Artemis Georgiou

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781842179512
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

This volume, introduced by Edgar Peltenburg, presents the results of latest research by young scholars working on aspects of Cypriot archaeology from the Bronze Age to the Venetian period. It presents a diversity excavation, material culture, iconographic and linguistic evidence to explore the themes of ancient landscape, settlement and society; religion, cult and iconography; and Ancient Cyprus and the Mediterranean.

1

TEXT MEETS MATERIAL IN LATE BRONZE AGE CYPRUS

Edgar Peltenburg

Current concerns about the role of the state in modern western society resonate strongly with key narratives about the nature of governance and society in Late Bronze Age (LBA) Cyprus.¹ Just as there are some who are ideologically opposed to the “big state”, so too are there scholars who argue against a centrally administered, island-wide LBA polity model. It is nonetheless generally agreed that the situation was not static over the five centuries of the LBA, c. 1600–1100 BC. Much of the debate concerns the role and identification of Alašiya with all or part of Cyprus (recently: Knapp 2008; Merrillees 2011).

A breakthrough from unexpected quarters has not entirely overcome the impasse between nay-sayers, those who remain sceptical of an association with Cyprus, and believers who are sometimes driven to exasperation: “why do Cypriot archaeologists still hesitate in accepting the identification [of Alašiya with Cyprus]” (Muhly 1996, 49). The breakthrough stems from archaeological science, from petrographic analyses of tablets of the king of Alašiya found at Amarna in Egypt, and possibly at Ugarit in Syria. They prove to be consistent with clay sources from the south-eastern margins of the Troodos Mountains on Cyprus. From this, Goren et al. (2003) argue that the political and administrative centre in the 14th-13th centuries was located at one of two sites in that region, Alassa-Paliotaverna or Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios. Not all are convinced, not least because we need to apply a battery of analytical techniques to sourcing issues rather than just one (e.g. Merrillees 2011). But there is little doubt that these petrographic results have bolstered the case for the identification of Alašiya with all or part of LBA Cyprus, one that is accepted in this paper.

There are several models for the socio-political organisation of LBA Cyprus (Bolger 2003; Steel 2004, 181–186 and Knapp 2008, 144–153 for overviews). In terms of methodology, we can divide them roughly into three groups. Most archaeologists privilege material culture in their reconstructions. A second group, comprised largely of Assyriologists, refers almost exclusively to textual evidence (e.g. Malbran-Labat 1999; Singer 1999, 721; Steiner 1962). Lastly are those researchers who attempt a combination of the two (e.g. Steel 2004; Eriksson 2007). Knapp (2008) has been a leading exponent of the third approach, advocating the need for a synthesis of both the material evidence and the documentary. But even using all the evidence to hand, many uncertainties prevail. In her overview, Steel highlights as an outstanding unresolved problem of LBA Cypriot studies the socio-political organisation that underpinned substantive economic and social transformations, increase in population, new settlements, hierarchical settlement patterns, urbanisation and international trade (Steel 2004, 150). So tenuous is the evidence that scholars make fundamental re-appraisals. Thus, Knapp once argued for the existence of local polities administered by local elites in the 14th-13th centuries BC, yet recently he opts for the existence of a king who controlled the entire island (Knapp 2008, 340–341; cf. 1997, 66–68; 2006, 52). But what kind of territorial polity (or polities) was it? What was distinctive about the organisation of LBA Cyprus to have produced the recovered material culture record? What was the role of the king? To try to address these and other questions, I re-visit what we mean by the problematic term “state” in the context of Alašiya and explore the intersections between text and material culture, following on from an earlier effort to account for the beginnings of a state on the island, one in which I had shied away from considering the evolved characteristics of that kingdom, its extent, or its government (Peltenburg 1996, 28). Specifically, I would like to evaluate what I see as an apparent conflict between textual evidence which projects Alašiya as comparable to other great states of the Ancient Near East and the contemporary material record which lacks so many features evident in neighbouring archaic states, that is entities that have left us explicit paraphernalia of formal institutions of government. This is potentially a revealing tension that merits investigation, one which acknowledges that contrasts between documentary sources and material culture evidence are commonplace in historical archaeology, a field where there is often “no easy way to resolve these ….. viewpoints into a comfortable narrative” (Foxall 2004, 83).

The shift in scholarly emphasis away from the neo-evolutionary project that seeks material correlates for artificially discrete stages of development has impacted on Cyprus. Scholars like Diane Bolger (2003), Bernard Knapp (2008), Joanna Smith (1994) and Jennifer Webb (2005), acknowledging the existence of a complex polity or polities, have chosen instead to investigate their operational mechanics. Priscilla Keswani’s influential model of a heterarchical society in the east, hierarchical in the south points to the likely existence of intra-island variation and to evolving rather than static systems (Keswani 1996). Highlighting the role of the political economy, I tried to apply the notion of territories, that is, an urban core that mobilised its resource-rich hinterland, as fundamental to the emergence of one or more polities on the island (Peltenburg 1996; see also Iacovou in press). In that regional treatment, export-oriented centres like Enkomi may have controlled or been closely allied with forts on the routes to the mines to ensure supplies of copper. But with a few notable exceptions, these and other studies have largely sidestepped the implications of relevant textual evidence.

When we turn to the royal texts which portray Alašiya as other Near Eastern states, we need to address the issue of why the material evidence of Cyprus does not match the evidence for archaic states found amongst its correspondents. The issue gains traction in light of a spate of studies on emulation as a key structuring principle in the emergence of complex socio-political organisation on Cyprus (e.g. Keswani 2004, 139; Knapp 2006; Webb 2005). Most concern the acquisition by elites of eastern valuables that served as insignia to define class membership and the manufacture of prestige items bearing a complex, foreign inspired iconography. Jennifer Webb has forcefully argued for the role of seals, with their exotic presentation scenes, horned divinities, lions and griffins, as “wholesale adoption of motifs drawn from foreign (primarily Near Eastern) cosmologies …. symptomatic of the profound and rapid change in material culture which accompanied secondary state formation on the island” (Webb 2005, 180). Emulation, in other words, played a significant role in the materialisation of an ideology to promote and legitimate the new order. Following Helms, this view applies to the concept of kingship itself, since in cases of newly formed states on the periphery of well established civilizations, “kingship was at least partly legitimised by association with foreign political ideologies derived from outside polities” (Helms 1988, 148). In the case of Cypriot elites, Webb proposes that they acquired “the conceptual means to implement their authority from the same sources which provided the suites of prestige objects which served as a visible manifestation of that authority. Foreign models of political ideology, that is, appear to have offered Cypriot elites a blueprint for domination” (Webb 2005, 181). Before turning to the question of agency and on-the-ground heterogeneity in adaptive behaviours (cf. Keswani 2007), it is instructive to note a key element of contemporary Amarna letters in the context of the above appropriations.

Documentary evidence regarding Alašiya mainly concerns external relations and so it tells us little about domestic socio-political arrangements. But there are hints, and it is possible to make inferences of a general nature (see below). The texts from Alašiya recovered in the Egyptian capital at Amarna are written in provincial Akkadian and they deploy the conventional salutations used amongst the royal houses of the Near East. Eastern scribes were brought to Cyprus for this purpose and they gave a standardised account of the sender: “For me all goes well. For my household, my wives, my sons, my magnates, my horses, my chariots, and in my country, all goes very well” (e.g. EA 35; Malbran-Labat 1999). In the eyes of the addressee the word household would typically refer to a governmental infrastructure attached to the royal household, that is, the palace (Schloen 2001). Such palaces, then, are a key element of the letters, they are emblematic of states of the time, and, as we have seen, the elites of Cyprus in both their material culture and Akkadian writings were well integrated into the contemporary international political milieu. But closer inspection reveals fissures in this neat equation. For example, we would expect that this elite-driven orientalising process would entail the construction of palaces such as those uncovered in Egypt, Hatti and the lands of other Great Kings, the metaphorical “brothers” or diplomatic equals of the king of Alašiya. Even minor and vassal states such as those at Qatna, Alalakh and Megiddo have kings and imposing palaces as befit their status (Pfälzner 2007; Woolley 1955; Bunimovitz 1994). The best known and nearest instance is the 7000 sq m palace of a long line of kings at Ugarit (Yon 1997). So, it is relevant that in the correspondence between Alašiya and Ugarit, the king of Ugarit holds an inferior rank to the king of Alašiya. Given the close, personalised relations between international royal households and the orientalising dynamic, we might anticipate the material manifestation of those ranked relations in quite a grand edifice on the island. And of course, despite the excavation of a large number of LBA sites, there is no unambiguous occurrence of a palace on the island (for an alternative view: Wright 1992, 278). What we have in terms of large structures are forts, elegant buildings often with storage facilities, and temples. Ashlar Building X at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios is only 900 sq m, Building II at Alassa-Paliotaverna 1421 sq m (South 1989, 320–322; Hadjisavvas 2003). There are no imposing structures equalling the size of even modest palaces in the Levant, ones with quarters for bureaucrats and dependent labourers. The usual apex of LBA state hierarchy is missing, even though the texts would seem to call for its existence.

There are other characteristic features of states intimately connected with Alašiya that are also missing on the island. In spite of her best efforts to argue for the use of seals as sphragistic devices for administration, Jennifer Webb acknowledges that the extreme scarcity of sealings, that is impressions made from stone seals, is problematic (Webb 1999, 306). Joanna Smith regards the single example from Enkomi as local, Edith Porada as an import (Smith 2002, 16). Inferred wooden rollers for impressed storage jars, especially at Alassa, and other evidence indicates that some of these devices were used for administrative purposes, but the virtual absence of sealings from stone seals suggests that the customary bureaucratic practices so closely associated with Near Eastern states were appreciably modified by islanders who so assiduously copied and, more significantly, adapted eastern models. The widespread distribution of the stone seals could be due to a number of reasons, but in the absence of sealings they remain equivocal signs of centralised administration of the island. Without independent supporting evidence, other material indicators marshalled for centrist interpretations such as standardised bull rhyta, female terracotta images, repeated depiction of deities, ashlar masonry, monumental complexes and common imagery on prestige goods (Webb 1999, 307; Knapp 2008, 339–340) seem too precarious a basis for concluding the existence of a sovereign state that controlled the whole island. Such cultural production of symbolic resources may well be equated with maintenance of elite status which, while important for the cohesiveness and shared identity of LBA society, speaks to the existence of a complex society, but not the details of its political organisation (cf. Wright 2004, 77–78). Cyprus lacks the more explicit evidence, well attested on the mainland, of palatial centres, dynastic regalia and iconography of a ruling ideology that would more convincingly sustain the argument for a centrally administered state (Manning and De Mita 1997, 108–109). And yet, an entity that was internationally recognised in documentary sources as a highly ranked kingdom, the equivalent of what by convention are called states elsewhere, did exist on Cyprus.

In sum, there is a disjuncture between traditional expectations from the texts and material culture patterning, a lack of fit between archaeology and evolutionary constructs, one that prompts re-consideration of the models that have often provided the interpretive frameworks for socio-political narratives of LBA Cyprus (cf. Fischer 2007, 48–49). Two critical aspects that have informed models and shaped narratives are our notions of what constitutes an archaic state and the textual evidence.

The archaic state

Disenchantment with the regularities of neo-evolutionism, the growth of archaeological information and more elaborate analyses have increasingly led to questions about the usefulness of the term “state” for an understanding of what conventionally pass for archaic or early states. After ranging widely over the concept, and especially its material manifestations, A. Smith abandons the term altogether in preference for “early complex polities” (Smith 2003, 94–111; cf. Adams 2006 for “early complex societies”). He is not the first to do so. And yet the term archaic state is retained for its heuristic value in a wide-ranging review of the concept by archaeologists, even though some amongst them are driven to describe certain ancient complex societies such as the Indus Valley civilization as a “non-state” (Feinman and Marcus 1998; Possehl 1998). There is an enormous literature on early states, but rather than get snared in typological boxes, many scholars acknowledge the broad spectrum of early complex polities and now prefer to ask questions like “what did early complex societies actually do” (Smith 2003, 25). There are numerous approaches. Campbell, for exa...