Alashiya Redux

YES

By James D. Muhly

Virtually all references to ancient Alashiya refer to copper, which is found in abundance on Cyprus. If Alashiya is not Cyprus, no one would be able to identify the source of the principal metal (with tin) of the Bronze Age.

I first entered the Alashiya debate by delivering a paper at the First International Conference of Cypriot Studies, held in Nicosia in April 1969. At the time, I was at the beginning of my academic career and had no idea what I was doing to myself. Robert Merrillees also gave a paper on Alashiya at that conference, and we have been attacking each other ever since with great vim and vigor. I cannot imagine a more delightful or dedicated opponent. [In “An Odyssey Debate: Was Ancient ‘Alashiya’ Really Cyprus” (September/October 2005), Robert Merrillees argues that Alashiya was not Cyprus and Eric Cline argues that it was. —Ed.]

Does it matter where we place the kingdom of Alashiya? Yes, it does. If it turns out that Alashiya is not Cyprus, almost all of us would be forced to revise everything we have written about the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age. This is true because our history of Late Bronze Age Cyprus comes almost entirely from references to Alashiya in Akkadian, Hittite, Ugaritic and Egyptian texts.

The good news, however, is that such a revision is not necessary.

We now know of about 600 copper oxhide ingots (and fragments) from all over the Late Bronze Age world. They come from Cyprus, Crete, the Greek mainland, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and the island of Lipari. They come from the southern coast of France, southern Germany and Romania, the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea and the shores of the Sea of Marmara. They have been found on Greek islands (Keos and Chios), in the cargoes of the Cape Gelidonya and Uluburun shipwrecks off southern Turkey, at ancient Ugarit on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, at the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusas in central Turkey, on the Nile Delta, and even at the ancient Kassite capital of Dur-Kurigalzu near modern Baghdad. Scientific analysis of these ingots indicates that almost all of them are made of Cypriot copper. There has been much debate over this conclusion, one that has gone on for many years, but scholars have now reached a general agreement regarding the identification of Cypriot copper. The identification is based upon the ratios of the four isotopes of lead in the original copper ore. The copper ores of Cyprus have a distinctive lead-isotope signature (or fingerprint), and that is the signature found in the great majority of analyzed copper oxhide ingots.

A decisive study of lead isotopes appeared last year in the European Journal of Archaeology (April 2004): “Chemical Composition and Lead Isotopy of Copper and Bronze from Nuragic Sardinia.” The authors—F. Begemann, S. Schmitt-Strecker, E. Pernicka and F. Lo Schiavo—combine the best in archaeometry and in archaeology. Begemann was, for many years, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, and Schmitt-Strecker has been his research associate for many years. Pernicka was at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics at Heidelberg, then at the Institute for Archaeometallurgy in Freiberg, and now at the University of Tübingen. Lo Schiavo was, for some 25 years, the Italian official in charge of the archaeology of Northern Sardinia and the world’s leading authority on the archaeology of that island. Prior to writing this article, all authors believed that the copper oxhide ingots from Sardinia could not possibly have been made of Cypriot copper. I shared this belief, and have said so in print. After extensive analytical work on the metal finds from Sardinia, the authors realized that their results duplicated the earlier work carried out at Oxford University, by Noel Gale and Zofia Stos-Gale, and that the archaeological conclusion was unavoidable: The oxhide ingots from Sardinia were made of Cypriot copper. For me, this represents the end of the debate. Case closed.

Virtually all textual references to Alashiya are associated with copper. This is true in Mesopotamian texts going back to the 18th century B.C. In the Amarna letters (inscribed clay tablets, found at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt, representing the diplomatic correspondence between the pharaohs Amenophis III [1390–1353 B.C.] and Akhenaten [1353–1336 B.C.] and other Near Eastern potentates), the king of Alashiya sends vast quantities of copper to Egypt and, as Eric Cline points out, it now seems to be established that the Alashiya tablets themselves were made of Cypriot clay. The Hittites and the Babylonians obtained copper from Alashiya, as well as the Egyptians. It is only logical to associate all of these textual references to copper from Alashiya with the hundreds of copper ingots now known to be made of Cypriot copper. Simply put, copper from Alashiya is copper from Cyprus.

But if Alashiya is not Cyprus, then where are we? In big trouble. We would have to come up with another major source of copper in the Mediterranean world, one that, at present, we know nothing about. If such copper mines existed, they would have been sampled long ago by scholars involved in lead-isotope research and we would have a lead-isotope signature for the copper from these mines. We have no such thing. And if copper from these mines was being shipped all over the Mediterranean world and its environs, as the textual references to Alashiya demand, then where are the copper ingots made from this mysterious non-Cypriot Alashiyan source of copper?

Robert Merrillees is fighting a losing battle. Will he throw in the towel? No, because we have yet to find the “smoking gun”—a tablet made from Egyptian clay found on Cyprus with text like the following: “To my brother the king of Alashiya, greetings from your brother the pharaoh of Egypt.” I would love to find such a tablet; it is the dream of every Cypriot archaeologist.

It seems proper to conclude by quoting the British scholar Hector Catling, one of our greatest living Cypriot archaeologists: “If anyone doubts the subjective nature of archaeological interpretation, let them give their attention to Late Bronze Age Cyprus for a while.”

YES

By Shelley Wachsmann

The journey of the Egyptian envoy Amanmasha from Byblos to Egypt, as told in an Amarna letter, makes no sense unless Alashiya is Cyprus.

In arguing that Alashiya should not be equated with Cyprus, Robert Merrillees ignores a piece of literary evidence that categorically settles the matter.

In one of the Amarna letters (EA 114), the king of Byblos (on the coast of present-day central Lebanon), Rib-Addi, complains to the Egyptian pharaoh that he is in such difficult straits that his future survival may depend on Egyptian intervention. Rib-Addi says his mortal enemy, Aziru of Amurru, controls the coast and that land routes are closed to him:

May the King, my Lord, be apprised that Aziru is hostile to me and has seized twelve of my people, and has placed a ransom between us of fifty (shekels) of silver. And the people whom I had sent to Ṣumura he seized in Ya’lia [ll. 6–12].¹

Rib-Addi repeats this thought later in the letter:

Now, [personal name], m[y] messenger, I have sent again and again. How many days (times) have I sent him without his being able to enter into S.umura? … All roads are cut off to him [ll. 32–38].

The king’s enemies have also mounted a nautical blockade, capturing any of his ships that dare to venture out:

And behold, now Iappa-Addi has become hostile to me, in league with Aziru, and he has actually seized one of my ships and, behold, thus he is sailing forth upon the sea in order to capture my (other) ships [ll. 15–20].

Now, in a previous letter (EA 113), we learn that an Egyptian official named Amanmasha, who had been stationed in Byblos, had left to return to Egypt. In EA 114, Rib-Addi says he assumes Amanmasha has arrived safely in Egypt, and he indicates just how he tried to ensure the envoy’s safe passage: “Ask him [Amanmasha] if I did not send him (via) Alashiya to thee” [ll. 51–53].

Rib-Addi’s strategy would be incomprehensible if Alashiya had been located north of Byblos around the Gulf of Iskenderun, where Merrillees prefers to place it. Not only would Rib-Addi have been sending Amanmasha directly into harm’s way, along the coast guarded by his enemy, but Amanmasha would have been sailing in the opposite direction of his ultimate destination of Egypt. This makes no sense.

There really is only one way to understand Rib-Addi’s last comment. The Syro-Canaanite coast is guarded by his enemies, and so any ships he sent out would be in danger of capture. So Rib-Addi resorts to an unusual strategy: Instead of having Amanmasha’s ship follow the normal coastal route to Egypt, he has the ship strike out on a deep-water passage to Cyprus, avoiding the shores patrolled by his enemies. From Cyprus, Amanmasha’s ship could then have made her way safely on the open sea to the Nile Delta.

Unless one argues that Alashiya lies along the Levantine coast south of Byblos, the only possible conclusion is that Alashiya equates in some way with Cyprus.²

My question to Robert Merrillees is, Would he please explain to Archaeology Odyssey’s readers how he would rationally reconstruct Amanmasha’s voyage?

NO

By Robert S. Merrillees

Ancient references to Alashiya can be endlessly debated, but there is simply no archaeological evidence to support the assertion that Alashiya is Cyprus. In the absence of facts, we should remain silent.

Now I know how the Alashiyans felt when the Sea Peoples loomed over the horizon! But I don’t give up easily, and I couldn’t wish for more doughty and worthy, if misguided, opponents than Jim Muhly and Shelley Wachsmann. Muhly is at least right about two things: Hector Catling is one of the most knowledgeable and judicious authorities on the Cypriot Bronze Age, and I won’t even consider capitulation until someone points that “smoking gun” in my direction. Why would Muhly want to put a premature end to this gripping 35-year-old duel?

First, Cyprus doesn’t need written sources to have a history. Aboriginal people lived in Australia for 60,000 years without writing and still have a history of their own, even if it isn’t the same kind as Muhly’s and mine. There are Cypro-Minoan inscriptions from the Late Bronze Age in Cyprus, though they cannot yet be read and, to judge by their format, seem unlikely to shed much light on political events of the time. In the revised edition of The Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge, 1966), Catling was able to reconstruct the whole prehistory of Cyprus without relying on any documentary evidence, which shows it can be done if you try.

Second, from Muhly’s argument you’d be forgiven for thinking that Cyprus was the only source of copper in the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East during the Bronze Age. Even he doesn’t believe that. As Catling has observed, “The copper which Alashiya had to send as tribute has been given undue prominence, not only because there were other sources of copper besides Cyprus, but because the items of tribute cannot necessarily be identified as local produce.” And I would not stoop so low as to suggest that Muhly’s conversion from scepticism to belief in the infallibility of lead-isotope analysis had anything to do with the convenience of the Gales’ scientific results for his view that Alashiya and Cyprus should be equated.

Shelley Wachsmann, whom I have had the pleasure of knowing for 20 years, is a mariner at heart. From Keftiu vessels to the Jesus boat, he has specialized in ancient ships and sailing and has established an enviable reputation for expertise in the field. On this occasion, however, he is, like Amanmasha, all at sea. Even without GPS I can tell that Cyprus is northwest of Byblos, in the opposite direction of Egypt. The real question is why Amanmasha had to return to the Nile Delta via anywhere else, never mind Alashiya, instead of striking out to sea well away from the coast and then heading south, which he would in any case have had to do if coming from Cyprus. No wonder that Catling considers this reference “puzzling.”

One wonders why Muhly and Wachsmann are so preoccupied with texts to the exclusion of the archaeological data? The data themselves suggest, as Catling writes, that “it is doubtful, in fact, whether Cyprus had achieved an appropriate degree of importance by the date of the Amarna letters [to be named in contemporary documents].” I couldn’t agree more.

YES
By James D. Muhly

Virtually all references to ancient Alashiya refer to copper, which is found in abundance on Cyprus. If Alashiya is not Cyprus, no one would be able to identify the source of the principal metal (with tin) of the Bronze Age.