Alashiya: The Copper Kingdom That Fueled the Bronze Age

Cyprus is a geological accident of the most fortunate kind. The island sits at the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean, roughly forty miles south of the Turkish coast and sixty miles west of Syria. It is not especially large — about 3,500 square miles, roughly the size of the state of Connecticut — and it is not especially well-watered by Near Eastern standards. Its summers are long and hot and dry. Its forests, which in antiquity were considerably more extensive than they are today, grow on a landscape of limestone and igneous rock that rises to nearly 6,500 feet in the Troodos mountain range at the island's center.

It is the Troodos that matters. The range is one of the largest exposed ophiolites in the world — a section of ancient oceanic crust that was thrust upward by tectonic forces onto the surface of the land. Ophiolites are geologically extraordinary objects, and the Troodos ophiolite is particularly rich in copper sulfide deposits. The Greeks would later name the island Kypros, and from Kypros would come the Latin cuprum, and from cuprum would come the modern English copper. The island did not borrow its name from the metal. The metal borrowed its name from the island.

Copper had been worked on Cyprus since at least the fourth millennium BCE, but the scale of extraction expanded dramatically in the Late Bronze Age, roughly 1700 to 1200 BCE. At sites like Politiko-Phorades, Mathiatis, and the mines of the Troodos foothills, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of industrial copper production on a scale that was, for its time, without parallel in the Mediterranean world. Smelting furnaces, slag heaps measuring hundreds of meters in extent, ceramic tuyères — the clay tubes through which bellows forced air into smelting fires — and the characteristic oxhide ingots in which the finished copper was cast and shipped: all of these have been found in quantities that make clear Cyprus was producing copper not for local use but for export.