The royal tombs of Kition

Alasiya was the Near East's name for what we now call Cyprus; its people were Ἀλασιώτας well into Classical times [doi /10.1515/kadmos-2020-0004]. Over the Bronze Age plenty of Ugaritic, Hittite, and (between those two) Egyptian trade went through there.

Peter Fischer from Göteborg reports that we may have their tombs, at the site "Hala Sultan Tekke". That's Dromolaxia-Vyzakia; near to Larnaca, Phoenician Kition. They're on the now-Greek-speaking side of the now-divided island, pretty much because the Turks won't let 'em up northeast.

In classical times Greeks and Canaanites shared the island like they shared Sicily. The Greeks had arrived in Mycenaean times and, after that civilisation failed, got marooned from their fellows back home. As a result the Cypriote (or Alasiote?) form of Greek maintained several "Arcadian" features not least the Linear B syllabary. The Greeks and Canaanites here would get along fairly well, well enough that Kition sided with the Ionian revolt against Persia.

But here we're dealing with the Bronze Age. There were already Greeks here, although we only get that in an illustration rather than in the text itself. Pictured is a fine vase of LH IIIB Greeks racing chariots. Looks like this krater, probably an urn. Or, closer to home, this one.

I hear that the K-T-Y root was known to the New Kingdom. This port was, I think, already Kiti[on] at the time of these burials.

One highlight is a cylindrical seal, which the excavators can read... but not understand. It comes from "Mesopotamia" and mentions figures known from the 18th century BC. That's the Hammurabi era in Babylon, maybe Zimri-Lim of Mari if it's all early enough. Given the mention of Amurru, here divinised, I'd look up the Euphrates river to Ebla. That would account for its language implicitly some Akkadian language and not [west] Semitic. They ask, what's it doing across the waves?

That seal certainly precedes the other material culture, which aligns with Nefertiti and her husband Echnaton meaning, as you can tell from the Swedish(!), the heretic Akhenaten of Dynasty XVIII. The translators seem inconversant with modern English orthography for Middle Egyptian as transcribed in the New Kingdom. (I recall pre-WW2 historians printing "Ikhnaton".) Anyway, tying this Pharaoh with the chariot genre of LH IIIB is of critical help in dating that whole genre. Did they do neutron-activation on the pot, to tell us where it was made?

Maybe they'll tell us after they run the DNA on where these people were made. Is this a family of Assyrians in exile?