Don’t Be Fooled!

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For some decades now the scholarly world has been perpetuating a scam, one that has several times duped the editors of Archaeology Odyssey.

In “The Last Days of Hattusa,”^a for example, Trevor Bryce quotes an ancient letter from the king of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra on Syria’s Mediterranean coast) to the “king of Cyprus,” which could be taken to imply that around 1200 B.C. Cyprus was known by the name familiar to English speakers today. In fact, “Cyprus” comes from the Latin name for the island, which derives from the ancient Greek word kypros. Although the origins of this Greek term are uncertain, most agree that it was based on a Semitic word meaning “henna”—perhaps an allusion to the color of copper, the island’s most famous resource.¹

Bryce does not specify that the letter was written in cuneiform in the Akkadian language.^b The reference to “Cyprus” is not a translation but an interpretation of the Akkadian place name “Alashiya.”² What makes him (and many others)^c so certain that Alashiya and Cyprus are the same 036that he doesn’t need to provide any explanation or references?³

Over the last hundred years many attempts have been made to correlate Alashiya with a modern site and name in the eastern Mediterranean. Scholars have located it in several different parts of the Levant (as whimsically depicted in the late Henry Hankey’s drawing), but the one identification that has commanded overwhelming support is Cyprus.

The name “Alashiya” first appears in an Egyptian Middle Kingdom inscription, from about 1900 B.C., found in Memphis.⁴ It then appears in texts, dating about 1800 B.C., from Tell Siyannou (whose ancient name is not known for certain), on Syria’s Mediterranean coast,⁵ and Tell Hariri (ancient Mari), on the Euphrates in Syria. “Alashiya” subsequently turns up in records from the Syrian sites of Tell Atchana (ancient Alalakh) and Ras Shamra, as well as from the central Anatolian site of Boghazkoy (ancient Hattusa) and various Egyptian sites. The last historical reference to Alashiya appears in an 11th-century B.C. papyrus hieroglyphic document, called the Tale of Wenamun, which recounts the adventures of a traveling Egyptian official who is blown off course and lands on “Alashiya,” where he receives a less-than-warm welcome (unlike modern Cyprus).^d

By far the best-known documents are a cache of letters exchanged between the rulers of Alashiya and the Egyptian pharaohs, which were uncovered in the 14th-century B.C. capital of the heretic king Akhenaten at Tell el-Amarna in the Nile Valley.⁶ Unfortunately, these letters do not record the names of the correspondents. In 1994, however, archaeologists found Akkadian cuneiform tablets at Ras Shamra that mention a 12th-century B.C. king of Alashiya, Kushmeshusha, who wrote two letters to Niqmaddu, king of Ugarit.⁷

The only incontestable conclusion that can be drawn from all these texts is that Alashiya was not situated at Tell Hariri (Mari), Tell Atchana (Alalakh), Ras Shamra (Ugarit) or Boghazkoy (Hattusa), all of which have their ancient place-names firmly established. (For a number of reasons, no one seriously believes Alashiya was located in Egypt.) Normally, therefore, the identity of Alashiya would have remained an open question until further clarification were possible. But no one likes an unsolved puzzle. If Cyprus is not Alashiya, then the island remains unnamed in the ancient sources (at least as far as we know), and such a status is intolerable for specialists in Cypriot prehistory.

Yet no Akkadian documents have turned up in Cyprus, and the small number of Egyptian texts that have been found do not mention Alashiya. The only known cuneiform text from Late Bronze Age Cyprus, inscribed on a 12th-century B.C. silver bowl, is written in Ugaritic and does not mention Alashiya.⁸ The earliest possible Cypriot echo of the term “Alashiya” is the fourth-century B.C. epithet of Apollo Alasiotas from Tamassos in central Cyprus, 800 years after the last historical reference to Alashiya.⁹

All this, it would seem, should induce caution in assertions regarding Alashiya’s whereabouts. Paradoxically, however, the absence of irrefutable proof for identifying Alashiya with Cyprus has served only to strengthen the advocates’ conviction that the two names are synonymous.

There is an apt English word that describes the equation of Alashiya with Cyprus: “factoid.” A factoid is something accepted as factual simply 037because it has repeatedly appeared in print. Early on, tentative suggestions that Alashiya might be Cyprus gradually became assertions that the two were the same—even though no new evidence had been found.

A good illustration of this phenomenon is provided by the publications of Claude F.A. Schaeffer , the celebrated excavator of the Late Bronze Age city of Ugarit. When Schaeffer began excavating the Cypriot site of Enkomi, he hoped to find a magnificent city like Ugarit, complete with archives and rich historical associations. Stubbornly, however, Enkomi refused to yield tablets or inscriptions of a Near Eastern character, and to this day its ancient name remains unattested in documents found on the site.

Despite the lack of any evidence, or perhaps because of it, Schaeffer looked favorably on the French scholar René Dussaud’s suggestion that Enkomi may have been Alashiya. This association hardened into “fact” in the titles of his field reports, the first one tentatively called Enkomi-Alasia (1952) and the next one definitively called Alasia (1971). With four volumes already in this series, Alasia is now firmly embedded in the archaeological literature. Schaeffer entertained no doubts on this score: “The name of Alasia, 038already several millennia old, designates both the island of Cyprus, rich in copper deposits, and its capital [Enkomi] in the Bronze Age.”¹⁰

While most scholars equate Alashiya with Cyprus (or part of it), they are hesitant to follow Schaeffer’s lead and situate it at Enkomi. This dilemma is much in evidence in the catalogue that accompanied the splendid exhibition on “The Ugarit Kingdom and the origins of the alphabet” at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France.^e One of the contributors points to links between the royal families of Ugarit and of “Alasia, in Cyprus”—clearly implying that Alashiya is a Cypriot city. The catalogue’s map of the eastern Mediterranean labels Cyprus “Alasia” and shows only one Bronze Age site, at Enkomi, implying that Enkomi was the leading city, if not the capital, of Alashiya.

Not a single author in this catalogue, however, makes the association between Enkomi and Alashiya explicit. One of the more distinguished contributors, the Assyriologist Dominique Charpin, adds to the puzzlement by equating Alashiya with Cyprus in his description of an important tablet from Tell Siyannou, whereas elsewhere he specifies that Alashiya was definitely a city!¹¹

It is not hard to see the cause of this confusion: Although Enkomi is one of the few significant Late Bronze Age sites on Cyprus, it does not rise to the level of an Alashiya, which was known throughout the Near East. Jacques Lagarce, who took part in Schaeffer’s excavations at Enkomi, has observed that Enkomi’s ancient name is still unknown and that the city does not “give the impression of being the seat of an important centralized political power” in the Late Bronze Age:

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At the beginning of the excavation, Enkomi was the only ancient Cypriot city important enough to be a candidate for the title of capital of the island. The situation has changed; nonetheless, a palace worthy of the king of Alasia has still not appeared, and nobody has yet had the luck of finding the diplomatic archives of the supposed Cypriot kingdom.¹²

Nonetheless, the archaeological community, with few exceptions, continues to subscribe to the factoid that ancient Alashiya refers to a part or all of the island of Cyprus.

One challenge facing scholars of the ancient Near East is that only a small proportion of the texts that have been recovered have been fully published. Tens of thousands of tablets and other inscriptions from excavations during the 19th and 20th centuries in present-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq remain unstudied and locked away in museum storerooms throughout the world.¹³ Also, a number of important finds—such as the tablets mentioning the king of Alashiya by name that were uncovered by the French expedition to Ras Shamra in 1994—have not yet been fully published.

A second problem is the scarcity of scholars with a knowledge of all relevant languages. Whereas 19th- and early 20th-century polyglots like the French Egyptologist Sir Gaston C.C. Maspero, the British Egyptologist Sir Wallis E.A. Budge, and the American Orientalist William F. Albright could read Egyptian hieroglyphics, Akkadian cuneiform and other ancient Near Eastern scripts, few of their successors are as linguistically well equipped. As a result, the only way the historian A. Bernard Knapp could assemble translations of all the Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic and Egyptian texts referring to Alashiya (in his Near Eastern and Aegean Texts from the Third to the First Millennia B.C. [1996]) was to ask individual philologists to survey the material in their respective fields of expertise independently of each other.

The upshot of this piecemeal approach is that no one with any degree of authority has reviewed all the relevant texts dealing with Alashiya for their points of convergence and divergence and drawn judicious conclusions from the totality of the epigraphic information. This is why, for example, Knapp can deny that the Alashiya mentioned in the cuneiform texts was a city or town, even though Egyptian sources explicitly designate it as both a land and a settlement (see, for example, the Tale of Wenamun).

A third problem involves the experts’ lack of familiarity with Cyprus’s geography. Many of those who have upheld the identification of Alashiya with Cyprus, especially the philologists, have never visited the island and seen its historical topography for themselves. Even an eminent authority like Trevor Bryce, for example, can write (in his Archaeology Odyssey article, “The Last Days of Hattusa”) that the Hittites’ enemies toward the end of the 13th century B.C. “were probably seaborne marauders who had invaded Cyprus to use its harbors as bases for their attacks on shipping on the region.” Anyone familiar with the coastline of Cyprus would know that it has almost no natural harbors suitable for even small sea-going vessels. Piratical bands could hardly have considered Cyprus a strategic bonanza.

One of the main justifications for identifying Alashiya with Cyprus is the frequent association of this ancient place-name with copper supplies. Texts from 18th-century B.C. Mari refer to the import of copper and bronze from Alashiya. Trade with Alashiya for copper in ingot form is attested in 14th-century B.C. tablets from Tell el-Amarna as well as in a letter from the 040king of Alashiya to the king of Ugarit written in the 12th century B.C.

At least by Roman times, Cyprus was so famous as a source of copper that the Latin name for the island—Aes Cyprium, later simply Cuprum—became a common name for the metal.¹⁴ (From “Cuprum,” for example, derive the English “copper,” the French cuivre and the German Kupfer.) Copper ore was being worked on Cyprus as early as the 19th century B.C., and it is hard to believe that this early ore was not mined in Cyprus itself. There is also evidence that copper was being exported from the island in the form of ox-hide ingots by the 14th century B.C., but there is no comparable data to support an argument that it was being sent abroad earlier. It is extremely unlikely that around 1800 B.C. Cyprus exported copper directly to Mari, nearly 280 miles inland from the Syrian coast—especially since no Cypriot artifact of any kind has been found at the site and almost no exports from the island have been recorded on the Asiatic mainland at this time.

Recently, Tel Aviv University archaeologists Yuval Goren, Shlomo Bunimovitz, Israel Finkelstein and Nadav Na’aman published scientific analyses of the clay of the tablets from Alashiya in the el-Amarna archive.¹⁵ Their results, they claim, demonstrate a link between Alashiya and southern Cyprus. However, the petrographic database used for comparative purposes suffers from a lack of first-hand acquaintance with the geology of the northeastern Levant, particularly Syria and Cilicia, not to mention northern Cyprus. The study is flawed because it did not examine sufficient samples from across the zone outside the island to rule out any possibility of a mainland source of the clay.

Particularly troubling is the authors’ conclusion that the political and administrative center of Alashiya in the 14th and 13th centuries B.C. lay on the margin of the Troodos Mountains in the southern part of the island. This finding pays scant regard to the documentary evidence for the place’s geopolitical history.

According to Akkadian, Egyptian, Hittite and Ugaritic texts, Alashiya was a city lying near the seashore and inhabited from the 19th to the 11th century B.C. Everything we know about Alashiya suggests that it was a conventional Near Eastern city-state of longstanding importance on the periphery of the Egyptian and Hittite empires, in ready touch with other such centers in Syria and functioning in the same kind of political, cultural and commercial environment. In other words, it should have closely resembled Ugarit. Indeed, there are several texts from Ugarit/Ras Shamra mentioning Alashiya in terms that indicate an intimate knowledge of its people, economy and beliefs. Where, however, Ras Shamra differs from any Late Bronze Age site on Cyprus, such as Enkomi, is that it was inhabited from the eighth millennium B.C. down to the early 12th century B.C.

No place on Cyprus, with the possible exceptions of the cemeteries around Dhenia and Nicosia in the middle of the island (but certainly not Enkomi), shows traces of uninterrupted occupation from the 19th to 11th centuries B.C. Unless we invoke the theory of capital city migration, there is no way of accounting for the existence of Alashiya on Cyprus. This would involve, if we take the experts’ opinions at face value, placing Alashiya at some undesignated point on the north coast in the 19th century B.C., moving it clockwise round to Enkomi on the east coast between the 17th and 14th 050century B.C., and putting it somewhere in the south coastal region from the 14th century B.C. onwards. These mental gymnastics are made necessary by the factoid—Alashiya = Cyprus—that is the cause of our problems.

If Alashiya does not equal Cyprus, where could it have been? The obvious place is on the north Levantine coast, not too far from Ras Shamra. It is unnecessary to buy the specious argument that there’s no room left for a kingdom the size of Alashiya in this zone, since the historical toponymy of the littoral, especially around the Gulf of Iskenderun, is not so exhaustively and authoritatively established as to rule out the possibility of another significant settlement.¹⁶ In any event, the case for the identification of Alashiya is far from being definitively closed. Claude Vandersleyen, the well-known Belgian Egyptologist, for example, has recently rejected the equation and proposed locating Alashiya on the Asiatic mainland.¹⁷ Efforts should be renewed to find a universally agreed position. After all, as Hector Catling, a leading authority on Cyprus and a skeptic regarding the island’s identification with Alashiya, has remarked: “Its definite solution will be of the greatest importance for our understanding both of the island’s internal organisation and, more importantly, its place in the complex political structure of the Near East and Egypt during the 2nd millennium BC.”¹⁸

Continued insistence that Alashiya and Cyprus are the same, regardless of the absence of conclusive proof, also exposes our discipline to another occupational hazard. As a correspondent tellingly reminds us in the January/February 2005 issue of Archaeology Odyssey, “the historian Barbara Tuchman has pointed out that when writers deliberately omit facts that do not support their arguments, they are writing fiction.”

For some decades now the scholarly world has been perpetuating a scam, one that has several times duped the editors of Archaeology Odyssey. In “The Last Days of Hattusa,”a for example, Trevor Bryce quotes an ancient letter from the king of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra on Syria’s Mediterranean coast) to the “king of Cyprus,” which could be taken to imply that around 1200 B.C. Cyprus was known by the name familiar to English speakers today. In fact, “Cyprus” comes from the Latin name for the island, which derives from the ancient Greek word kypros. Although the origins of this […]