Ancient CyprusAncient Cyprus

Glossary Archaeological method and dating

Absolute chronology

A chronology expressed in calendar years (BCE, CE or years before present), fixed by scientific dating or by links to written history.

Absolute dates come from two kinds of evidence. Scientific methods such as radiocarbon and tree-ring dating measure elapsed time directly, with a margin of error. Historical links borrow dates from cultures that kept king lists and records, above all Egypt, Assyria and later the Greek historians. Cyprus has almost no written history of its own before the first millennium BCE, so its prehistoric dates depend on these two routes.

The balance has shifted over time. Early schemes for the Bronze Age relied on synchronisms with Egypt and the Levant; radiocarbon has since pushed back the first Neolithic villages and places the Philia facies roughly between 2500/2400 and 2250 BCE. For the Iron Age, dated events such as the Assyrian and Persian presence on the island still anchor the sequence, as Cypro-Archaic Cyprus describes.

Related terms

  • Relative chronology

    An ordering of sites, layers or objects as earlier or later than one another, without fixing them to calendar years.

  • Radiocarbon dating

    A scientific method that dates once-living material such as charcoal, seeds and bone by measuring the decay of the carbon-14 it contains.

  • Synchronism

    A link showing that two cultures' sequences overlap in time, such as a dated Egyptian object in a Cypriot tomb or a Cypriot pot in a dated foreign layer.

  • Calibrated date

    A radiocarbon result converted into calendar years using a calibration curve, usually written cal BC, cal BCE or cal BP.

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