How many Alashiyas were there?

Alashiya was a major Late Bronze Age kingdom known as a major producer of copper and ships. It was treated as a peer of the great kingdoms of the ancient world - Egypt, the Hittites, and Babylon. Not all that long ago scholars came to consensus that this kingdom was on Cyprus. However, the textual sources and the archaeological data seem to be at odds - with the texts pointing to one great kingdom but the archaeology pointing to possible two sizable kingdoms but certainly several smaller polities. So how do we rectify these data sets? Was there only one Alashiya? Or better how did there come to be only one Alashiya?

Note: Some of the text images are blurry, we apologize. Some of these we scanned a long time ago and the image quality doesn't translate well to this format. We have provided the full bibliographical information for the blurry images (plus others) below.

#cyprus #bronzeage #ancienthistory #alashiya #archaeology

Music: Epidemic Sound

Some Sources:

Sherratt, S. 1998. ‘Sea Peoples and the economic structure of the late second millennium in the eastern Mediterranean’, in S. Gitin, A. Mazar and E. Stern (eds.), Mediterranean Peoples in Transition: Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries B.C.E., Jerusalem: 292-313. (BLURRY IN THE VIDEO)

Goren, Y. Bunimovitz, S., Finkelstein, I., and Na'aman, N. "The Location of Alashiya: New Evidence from Petrographic Investigation of Alashiyan Tablets from El-Amarna and Ugarit," AJA (2003): 233-255. (BLURRY IN THE VIDEO)

Himmelhoch, L. “The Use of the ethnics a-ra-si-jo and ku-pi-ri-jo in Linear B texts,” Minos Revista De Filologia Egea (2009): 91-104

Bubenik, V. “Evidence for Alašija in Linear B Texts” Phoenix (1974): 245-250.

Knapp, A Bernard, Held, Steve O., and Manning Sturt W. “The Prehistory of Cyprus: Problems and Prospects,” Journal of World Prehistory Vol 8 No 4 (1994): 377-453.

R. S. Merrillees, “The Early History of Late Cypriote I,” Levant (1971): 56-79. (BLURRY IN THE VIDEO)

Michael Gareth Brown, LANDSCAPES OF SETTLEMENT IN SOUTH-EAST CYPRUS THE LATE BRONZE AGE ORIGINS OF A PHOENICIAN POLITY INCORPORATING THE RESULTS OF FIELDWORK BY THE AUTHOR AT PYLA-KOKKINOKREMOS 2007-2009,” Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2011.

Knapp, A Bernard, “KBo 1 26a: Alasiya and Hatti,” Journal of Cuneiform studies 32 (1980): 43-47.

Keswani, Priscilla Schuster, “Models of Local Exchange in Late Bronze Age Cyprus,” BASOR 292 (1993): 73-83.

Keswani, Priscilla Schuster, “Hierarchies, Heterarchies, and Urbanization Processes: The View from Bronze Age Cyprus,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 9.2 (1996): 211-250.

Hector Catling, “Patterns of Settlement in Bronze Age Cyprus,” Opuscula Atheniensia (1953): 129-169.

Mantzourani, E., Kopanias, Konstantinos and Voskos Ioannis, “A Great King of Alašiya? The archaeological and textual evidence,” in From ‘LUGAL.GAL’ to ‘WANAX’ Kingship and Political Organization in the Late Bronze Age Aegean. Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2019: 95-130. (BLURRY IN THE VIDEO)

Masson., O., 1964, 'Notes d'onomastique Chpriote', Kypiakai Spoudhai 28: 3-12.

Knapp, A.B. (ed.), 1996, Sources for the History of Cyprus: Near Eastern and Aegean Texts from the Third to the First Millennia BC vol. II (Altamont: Greece and Cyprus Research Center).