The Late Bronze Age

For roughly six centuries, from about 1650 to 1050 BC, Cyprus stopped being a quiet island on the edge of things and became one of the engines of the eastern Mediterranean. Archaeologists call this stretch the Late Cypriot period. The kings of Egypt, Hatti, Babylon and Ugarit knew it by another name: Alashiya, the land that sent copper. The two are not certainly the same place, and a careful scholar still says "probably" when equating them. But the case is strong, and it rests on something more durable than philology. It rests on metal.

Cyprus sat on copper. The pillow lavas wrapped around the Troodos foothills carried sulphide ores that Cypriot miners and smelters learned to work at scale, and the island's name has been bound up with the metal ever since, through Latin cuprum back to a root that the Greeks and Romans associated with Cyprus itself. In the thirteenth century BC, at the height of the trade, copper left the island in a standardised form that has become the signature of the age: the oxhide ingot, a slab of roughly thirty kilograms cast with four protruding handles, shaped so a man could carry it on his shoulders or lash it to a pack animal. Lead-isotope work pioneered by Noel and Zofia Stos-Gale traced ingots found across the sea, from shipwrecks to Sardinia, back to Troodos ores. The metal in those slabs is, in a real sense, the island speaking.

This is the period that gives us the great cosmopolitan port-towns, Enkomi in the east and Kition in the south-east among them, where ashlar buildings, sanctuaries and metalworking quarters sat beside harbours that faced Ugarit on the Syrian coast. Goods and ideas moved both ways. Mycenaean pottery arrived from the Aegean and was buried in Cypriot tombs; Cypriot potters answered with their own wares and their own imitations. And here, uniquely on the island, scribes began to write, in a still-undeciphered script we call Cypro-Minoan, adapted from the Linear systems of Crete.

The collection holds about six pieces from this era, all of them ceramic, all of them in the wares that made Cypriot pottery a recognised brand across three continents: White Slip "milk bowls", Base Ring jugs and a bowl, a Mycenaean-style jar, and White Painted ware. They are modest objects beside the gold and ivory the same tombs sometimes held. But they are the objects that actually travelled, the ones an Egyptian or a Canaanite would have recognised on sight as Cypriot. Held together, they let you handle the Bronze Age as ordinary people did: pouring, drinking, storing, offering.