The study of the Cypriot Iron Age polities (kingdoms), whose existence is acknowledged by inscriptions, ancient texts and coins, tries since a long time to define the territorial extension and organisation of these political entities. These attempts are facing difficulties mostly due to fragmentary and uneven evidence. Moreover, their number and consequently the definition of the territories did change over the centuries, until their abolition at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, when the entire island came under Ptolemaic rule and administration.

In order to find new ways for looking into the physical (topographical) and administrative (political) organisation of the spaces of Cypriot polities, the project KIT (Kition – Idalion – Tamassos) is collecting and interpreting data related to these three kingdoms and their potential territories. The selection of these specific entities seems prolific, since they started as independent polities, with their own kings and coinage. During the Cypro-Classical period, Kition was able first to conquer Idalion and a little later to integrate Tamassos as well into its realm. Further, the three polities do represent different types of topographical and territorial situations. Kition was apparently originally a city-state without much of a hinterland, while Idalion and Tamassos controlled substantial territories comprising the economically highly important copper mines in the pillow lava layers of the Troodos mountains. But Idalion and Tamassos had no direct access to a port site, a gateway for the international trade of copper, without which its economic importance was quasi inexistent. On the other hand, Kition always was a highly important port of trade, one could even say that Kition was territorially oriented towards the sea for several centuries. Last but not least, Kition showed a strong Phoenician component, while the populations of Idalion and Tamassos were – according to the existing prosopography and inscriptions – mostly composed by people writing (and probably speaking) the Cypriot Greek dialect. Therefore, the important changes during the Cypro-Classical period must have resulted in bigger and smaller changes related to the spatial and administrative organisation of the territories, affecting different categories of daily live.

In the panel we would like to look on the one hand at the landscape archaeology of these areas, trying to identify changes in settlement patterns, religious topography and communication. On the other hand, we propose an analysis of the urban topography of the three major settlements (“capital-cities”), in order to detect particularities and changes. Besides elements from the GIS projects, fed with information related to nearly a thousand sites from the territories and the results of excavations focusing on the urban settlements, we propose to study the distribution of specific artefacts and inscriptions (material culture) likely to shed light on the entanglement of different lived spaces (political and cultural).