Alashiya a most likely candidate for Cyprus

by Damien F. Mackey “Few place-names have been the cause of so much scholarly study and argument as that of Alashiya. This site is mentioned in a number of second-millennium texts from Egypt, Ugarit, Mari, Alalakh, and Boghazkoy”. Shelley Wachsmann Authors Eleni Mantzourani, Konstantinos Kopanias and Ιoannis Voskos get straight to the point in explaining why ancient Alashiya must be the island of Cyprus: A Great King of Alašiya? The archaeological and textual evidence (4) A Great King on Alashia? The Archaeological and Textual Evidence | Konstantinos Kopanias, Eleni Mantzourani, and Ioannis Voskos - Academia.edu 1. The Identification of Alašiya as Cyprus The evidence from the Hittite, Ugaritic and Egyptian texts (Kitchen 2009: 8 10), as well as the recent petrographic analysis of tablets originating from Cyprus (Goren et al. 2003; 2004: 57 70; 2011: 696) leaves no doubt about the identification of Alašiya with the latter island. …. Previous attempts to locate Alašiya outside Cyprus, either in Cilicia or Syria, proved unrewarding. …. If Alašiya is not to be identified with Cyprus, then we are confronted with two insurmountable problems: firstly, this would mean that Cyprus, a copper producing and trade centre with exports in all of the eastern Mediterranean, was never mentioned in any of the existing Bronze Age Near Eastern texts (Catling 1975: 205). Secondly, we would have to assume that a copper producing centre, with a king who at times was considered to be an equal to the Egyptian king and superior to the king of Ugarit, was based somewhere on the mainland, but somehow managed to escape the attention of the Hittite, the Mitanni and the Egyptian armies (Kitchen 2009: 6). …. [End of quote] Shelley Wachsmann is somewhat less direct, and more tentative, in his argument for Alashiya as Cyprus: “… the identification cannot be conclusive”: Is Cyprus Ancient Alashiya? New Evidence from an Egyptian Tablet (5) Is Cyprus Ancient Alashiya? New Evidence from an Egyptian Tablet | Shelley Wachsmann - Academia.edu One of the most absorbing, and often perplexing, areas in the study of the ancient Near East is that of historical geography. …. Ancient texts mention numerous lands, cities, and other geographic entities. It has been possible to identify and locate many of these (with varying degrees of certainty), yet others remain elusive. We know that they existed but their locations remain problematic. …. The scholarly debate over the location of Alashiya began in 1895 when Max Muller first identified the ancient site with Cyprus. …. It is generally agreed that Alashiya was located somewhere in the northeastern region of the Mediterranean Sea basin but its precise identification varies from Cilicia in southern Turkey to north Syria and back to Cyprus. The literature dealing with this problem is voluminous. The purpose of this paper is to discuss one specific text whose significance for the location of Alashiya appears to have been overlooked in the past. el-Amarna Tablet 114 In el-Amarna text number 114 Rib Addi, the much embattled king of Byblos who lived in the fourteenth century B.C., complains to the Egyptian pharaoh of his precarious situation. According to Rib Addi, the sea route along the coast is held by his mortal enemy, Aziru. Rib Addi's ships are in danger of being captured: 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 Sumura, he seized in Yaclia. The ships of the people of Ty[re], Beruta (and) Sidon are all in Amurru. (lines 6-14) Following this Rib Addi writes: And, behold, now IapaC-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. (lines 15-20) The land routes are also closed to Rib Addi: Now, [erased 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 Sumura? All roads are cut off to him. (lines 32-38) Near the end of the letter Rib Addi emphasizes his isolation by reminding the pharaoh that he had to send the messenger, Amanmasha, to Egypt by way of Alashiya: My comment: Pharaoh is neither named, nor even mentioned, in this, and other of Rib-Addi’s many letters. Under the circumstances it goes very badly with me. Here is, the other, Amanmasha. Ask him if I did not send him (via) Alashiya to thee. (lines 49-53) Another el-Amarna text (number 113, lines 35-44) mentions that a person named Amanmasha had been stationed in Byblos. The last lines in text 114 raise the question of why Rib Addi considered this information supportive of his claim of distress and request for assistance from the pharaoh. Holmes (1969: 159) has correctly noted that in this text Rib Addi implies that things are going so badly for him that in order to send Amanmasha home to Egypt, he had to dispatch him by a route different from the normal coastal route between Byblos and Egypt. It is possible, however, to take this reasoning one step further: If Alashiya was located north of Byblos (either in the Syrian littoral or in Cilicia), then Rib Addi's strategy would be totally incomprehensible. Not only would Amanmasha be sailing in a direction exactly opposite to his destination, but this would also require him to sail along the Syrian coast -precisely the area that Rib Addi wanted the ship to avoid. If Alashiya, however, is to be identified as Cyprus or part of Cyprus, then Rib Addi's actions make perfect sense. To avoid enemy ships lurking along the coast, Amanmasha's vessel sailed west-northwest, striking out across the open sea from Byblos to Cyprus and from there, with the aid of the predominantly northwestern winds, to Egypt (Casson 1971: 272). Thus, on the basis of this admittedly circumstantial evidence, it seems necessary to locate Alashiya in Cyprus. The question as to whether the toponym defined all or only part of the island, however, remains. Wenamon's escape from the Sekels Robert R. Stieglitz has suggested to me that a parallel to Rib Addi's action may be found in the Egyptian tale of Wenamon (Goedicke 1975: 115-29). Wenamon, a priest of the Egyptian god Amon, was sent to Byblos around 1100 B.C. [sic] with the mission of bringing back timber for the holy barque of Amon at Karnak. While his ship was anchored at the city of Dor on the first part of the journey to Byblos from Egypt, the gold and silver that he had brought to pay for the timber was stolen. Subsequently, Wenamon stole back part of his losses from a ship belonging to the Sekels (a group of the Sea Peoples) of Dor. My comment: For a revised view on Wenamun [Wenamon], see my article: When Wenamun went to Byblos (4) When Wenamun went to Byblos | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu Later, after many trials and tribulations, when Wenamon was finally prepared to sail from Byblos with his timber, eleven Sekel ships arrived to capture Wenamon's ships. Sakar Baal, the king of Byblos, showed Wenamon a peculiar, yet well-known, type of Middle Eastern hospitality - he refused to let the Sekels molest Wenamon as long as he was anchored in the king's harbor - but suggested to the Sekels that they pursue Wenamon once he left it. When Wenamon left Byblos, he mentions that the winds drove him to Alashiya. Apparently, in this manner, he managed to avoid the lurking Sekel ships that had expected him to take the normal coastal route to Egypt. In doing this, whether intentionally or due to a storm that drove him off course to Alashiya, Wenamon avoided a hostile coastal course in the same manner that Amanmasha had done some two and a half centuries earlier. He was eventually able to return safely to Egypt. Conclusion Although information given in el-Amarna tablet 114 and the tale of Wenamon support the identification of Cyprus with ancient Alashiya, there are admittedly several remaining problems, not the least of which is that no epigraphic evidence connecting Alashiya with Cyprus has yet been discovered on the island. Until more evidence is developed, the identification cannot be conclusive. [End of quotes] In a brief debate on the matter, James D. Muhly has weighed in basically agreeing with Shelley Wachsmann, who, this time, appears to be far more definite, “… that categorically settles the matter”, while Robert Merrillees has concluded differently from the two of them: https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/article/alashiya-redux/ Alashiya Redux Was it Cyprus? 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. [sic] 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. …. 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. …. 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 [sic] 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. My comment: Of possible relevance to this, see my article: Hungarian academic in Nebraska deciphers Cretan Linear A (7) Hungarian academic in Nebraska deciphers Cretan Linear A | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu 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. [End of quotes] Suggested further reading: Bronze Age Mediterraneans mining in America (7) Bronze Age Mediterraneans mining in America | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu