IX. GEOGRAPHY

It is commonplace that Cyprus forms a stepping-stone between Europe and Asia, and that her history holds a mirror to the sequence of great powers, now Asiatic, now European, who have dominated the lands of the Near East and the waters of the east Mediterranean. Such dominance has not always been in the same hands at the same time; a maritime power and a land power have more than once contended with each other to win control of an island whose strategic and mercantile importance has been quite out of proportion to its size. During the fifth century B.C., Athens strove unsuccessfully to wrest Cyprus from the control of Persia; in the sixteenth century A.D., Venice fought a losing battle against the Osmanli Turks to maintain ownership of the island and the key to the rich trade-routes of the Levant and beyond which it provided. This succession of foreign masters is conspicuous in the cultural history of Cyprus. That history is of some seven and a half thousand years duration, only for a part of which has the island occupied her neighbours’ attention. Before the development of comparatively reliable ships, Cyprus was left in unmolested isolation for centuries at a time. For a period of more than three thousand years, from early in the sixth millennium B.C. onwards, her relations with surrounding regions amounted to no more than three or four ethnic changes, each of which must represent an incursion of people from overseas. During all this long period there are the most meagre indications of foreign trading contacts. It is, therefore, during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods in Cyprus, between c. 5800 and 2300 B.C., and to a lesser extent during the Early Bronze Age, between c. 2300 and 1800 B.C, that it is possible to observe a series of cultural developments that are essentially Cypriot. From the Middle Bronze Age onwards, Cyprus became more and more involved in the ambitions and quarrels of her powerful continental neighbours; by the middle of the second millennium B.C, in the Late Bronze Age, this involvement was complete and the island had become one of the main clearing houses for the seaborne trade of the Levant and Egypt with the mainland of Greece and the islands of the Aegean.

With its area of 3584 square miles Cyprus is the third Mediterranean island.