Recherche par auteur > Eser Raphael A.

After the cities of Kition, Idalion and Tamassos have been more or less well studied over the years, the surrounding areas of these three capital-cities have still received little attention. Instead, the treatment of their potential territories has shifted to the level of hypothetical territorial reconstructions. Since the 1980s at the latest, this has resulted in several attempts to define the territories of the 7 to 15 Cypriot kingdoms of the Iron Age within their borders (Mitford 1980, Rupp 1987, Rupp 1989, Rupp 2001, Ulbrich 2008). However, this approach has been criticized several times in recent years.

Nevertheless, the surrounding lands of Kition, Idalion and Tamassos do not appear to be unexplored. Gaining little attention, the Cyprus Survey, which was launched in 1955 and continues to this day, has made many discoveries in the respective hinterlands. With the exception of Hector Catling's major treatise on Bronze Age settlement patterns (1962) and a brief outline of the ancient topography of the upper Yialias Valley (1982), data of the Cyprus Survey has never been analysed in detail for the potential territories of these three kingdoms.

The fact that the KIT project focuses on precisely these three kingdoms is all the more justified as Kition was first able to conquer Idalion in the Cypro-Classical period and integrate Tamassos into its kingdom shortly afterwards. The three states also represent different topographical and territorial conditions. Kition, which was apparently a city-state without a large hinterland in its early phase, contrasts with Idalion and Tamassos, which controlled large areas including the economically important copper mines of the eastern Troodos Mountains. However, as Idalion and Tamassos had no direct access to a port, the port of Kition was probably of extreme economic importance as a gateway for international trade in copper.

This paper presents the results of the development of the settlement patterns—especially of settlements, cemeteries, tombs, and sanctuaries—of the respective hinterlands of Kition, Idalion and Tamassos from the emergence of the Cypriot kingdoms in the Cypro-Geometric period to their end in the early Hellenistic period. Not only is the distribution of the individual sites per period dealt with, but these are also linked to the landscape and economic factors such as communication routes, mines, and access to portal gateways in the three areas. An open source GIS is used as a means of visualization and landscape archaeological analysis.