A hoard of gold treasures reveals the true power of a mysterious Bronze Age civilization
The trove of grave goods includes diadems and gold mouthpieces and show merchants on Cyprus were extremely well-connected during the Late Bronze Age.
Ancient merchants in Bronze Age Cyprus went out in full bling, with gold crowns and mouthpieces that might make even modern “Grillz” rapper Nelly jealous.
New archaeological research has revealed that a series of family tombs in the port city of Hala Sultan Tekke were filled with fancy jewelry, pottery and other artifacts from powerful surrounding kingdoms in Egypt, Mycenae, and Anatolia.
“The Cypriots amalgamated various cultures’ designs,” says Peter Fischer, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “By this amalgamation, they created something of their own.”
These newly described discoveries reveal not only how well-connected Cyprus was with its peers, but how elite merchants from the island demonstrated their success. “They are the most spectacular finds that have ever come out of the ground in Cyprus,” says Bernard Knapp, who worked for decades in Cyprus as an archaeologist with the University of Glasgow in Scotland and was not involved in the new work.
(Inside the search for Cyprus’ lost city of copper.)
Cyprus’ role in the Late Bronze Age
Cyprus sat in the middle of several important eastern Mediterranean civilizations during the region’s Late Bronze Age, which lasted from the 17th to 12th century B.C. To the south, Egypt’s New Kingdom saw a large expansion with great pharaohs like Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ramesses II. To the north, the Myceneans controlled much of Greece. To the east, the Hittites controlled large swaths of Anatolia and parts of the Levant.
But without Cyprus, the Mediterranean Bronze Age wouldn’t have existed. To make bronze you need copper, and Cyprus had plenty of it. “The Cypriots were sitting on a mountain of copper,” Fischer says. “If you count all the mines in Europe and in the Ural in Russia and in Great Britian, they produced less copper than Cyprus alone.”
Yet Cyprus during this period isn’t as well known as its neighbors. This is partly because scholars have yet to decipher the writing system used at the time on the island, which somewhat resembles the also undeciphered script of the Minoan civilization on Crete. Most historical knowledge of the island comes from Mesopotamian accounts that mention Cypriot kings on equal footing with other major ruling civilizations, but details are sparse on the inner workings of the island kingdom.
(This ancient script has remained unsolved for over a century.)
The British Museum began excavating at Hala Sultan Tekke in the 1800s, finding tombs and absconding with some artifacts, Fischer says. Archaeologists conducted piecemeal investigations at the port city starting in the 1960s and 70s. In 2014, Fischer and his team discovered a cemetery at the site and began excavating burial chambers, returning for 16 consecutive years.
The tombs at Hala Sultan Tekke, also known as Dromolaxia-Vyzakia, are oddly shaped—they look roughly like the number eight, with two connected circular chambers each about 6-10 feet in diameter. Some graves contain dozens of people—one has more than 60 individuals buried inside. Fischer’s team has examined DNA from the remains and their unpublished results reveal that the individuals were siblings, mothers, fathers and grandparents, with several generations of people buried on top of each other. “These were family tombs,” Fischer says.
Golden cemetery “crowns” and “grills”
In a recent study published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, Fischer describes the grave goods found in some of these family tombs. The most luxurious include nine golden diadems or crowns covered in patterns with spirals, flowers, ibexes, wild cats and bulls. Two individuals were buried with golden mouthpieces—essentially mouth grills that resemble the dental jewelry popularized by hip-hop artists. Graves also contained precious stones, ivory, rings, earrings and toe rings of gold and silver, as well as some silver figurines, deity pendants, and beautiful pottery made with a tin glaze called faeince.
The diadems were status symbols and show evidence of wear, indicating they were likely used in life as well as laid to rest with the dead, Fischer says. The mouthpieces, in contrast, show little sign of wear. They were also quite thin—less valuable—leading Fischer to conclude they were only placed on the dead.
Marian Feldman, an art historian in Near Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland who was not involved in Fischer’s study, says that the mouthpieces are common across many cultures. “It almost feels like a quasi-universal need to show the deceased is no longer breathing and no longer speaking and no longer eating,” she says.
The diadems and mouthpieces sometimes carry motifs from other cultures, such as bull figures common in Egypt. The gold used to make them likely came from Egyptian controlled Nubia, but like many other locally-adapted versions of motifs that originated abroad, Fischer suspects that they were likely produced locally. Feldman agrees with this assessment: Bull motifs in Late Bronze Age Cyprus had become “entrenched,” she says, speaking to a local character.
The elite and specialized merchants of Bronze Age Cyprus
While some of these artifacts were made on Cyprus, many were not. Each grave tends to favor a unique cultural collection, says Fischer. One grave with multiple individuals buried together, for example, mostly held artifacts made in Egypt.
Fischer believes that based on these foreign goods and the fact that Hala Sultan Tekke was a port town, the burials were likely elite merchants, each who specialized in trading with a particular region of the Mediterranean.
“The site is of exceptional archaeological importance,” said the Cyprus Department of Antiquities in a statement. “The material uncovered there also offers clear testimony to Cyprus’s active participation in extensive long-distance exchange networks.”
Some goods came from neighboring cultures. Silver figurines and flasks were likely imported from Anatolia. Greek goods include bronze knives with ivory handles, mugs and other ceramics—the most striking being a rhyton, a type of drinking flask.
Other material comes from further abroad, including ceramics from the Nuragic culture based in modern-day Sardinia, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, carnelian from India, and Baltic amber. Fischer says that some of these goods from farther afield likely arrived indirectly, not through direct trade.
For Feldman, the ostentatious graves offer more evidence that Cyprus wasn’t just a minor player in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean. “We often overlook Cyprus but it’s really crucial, it’s really right there in the center of everything,” she says. “It’s mediating a lot of these exchanges but it’s also developing its own local culture at the same time.”
Knapp agrees that signs are pointing to a bigger role for the island kingdom. “The more we know about Cyprus, the clearer it becomes that it wasn’t just a go-between,” he says.
