"Cyprus in the Islamic medieval cartography"

TAPA, 2018

summary: Cyprus was a principal venue in classical antiquity where Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern worlds encountered one another, and yet it remains a type of backwater, excluded from dominant historical narratives of the first millennia b.c.e. and c.e. I argue that this construct reproduces ancient otherings of the island, which developed via persistent yet fluid topoi of liminality. Three registers of etic spatial imaginations – location and distance, economic geography, and royal, urban histories – reveal how its enigmatic depictions endured. I conclude by addressing their durability in modern scholarship, which situates Cyprus outside the ambit of the classical world.

Symbolae Osloenses, 1999

Though very different in style, Strabo's and Ptolemy's descriptions of Western Cyprus have a number of points in common which indicate the use of a common source. A critical reading of both descriptions leads to the conclusion that the currently accepted locations of Arsinoë and Cape Zephyria on the southwest coast of the island need reevaluation: Arsinoe is a duplication of Arsinoë (Polis tou Khrysoukhou) on the north side of the island, while cape Zephyria/Zephyrion is modern day cape Lara.

Responses to the 12th Century BC Collapse Edited by Mait Kõiv and Raz Kletter www.zaphon.de Responses to the 12th Century BC Collapse MWM 10 Melammu Workshops and Monographs 10 Recovery and Restructuration in the Early Iron Age Near East and Mediterranean, 2024

Responses to the 12th Century BC Collapse Recovery and Restructuration in the Early Iron Age Near East and Mediterranean. Proceedings of the 9th Melammu Workshop, Tartu Edited by Mait Kõiv and Raz Kletter Responses to the 12th Century BC Collapse Melammu Workshops and Monographs 10

Proceedings of the International Cartographic Association, 3, 2021

The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing project that combines historical cartographic and economic sources on Cyprus through the employment of geospatial analysis. The main sources are: the 1883 trigonometrical survey of the island by Horatio Herbert Kitchener; the 1572 fiscal survey and 1832/33 property survey by the Ottomans; and the 1931 British agricultural census. The Ottoman and British censuses, different though they are and separated by three and a half centuries, provide vital information on production, economic activity, population, and toponymy. The project correlates this data with the detailed recording of topographical, hydrological, and land use features of the Kitchener map, which constitutes an extremely close depiction of Ottoman conditions given that the transformation of the countryside witnessed during the British colonial period was not yet initiated. This allows the identification of certain constants in the Cypriot environment and landscape. ...

WIT Transactions on the Built Environment, 2005

The island of Cyprus could well claim to be the most visited and best cartographically documented island in the world due to its location on the main maritime passage way from Europe to the Holy Land and the end of the Silk Road to Europe. The island's strategic importance through its situation at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa explains Cyprus's turbulent history and the importance of its ports and cities. Since the Phoenicians (10 th to 8 th Century B.C.), Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Ptolemies, Romans, Byzantine, Arabs, English (Richard I the Lion Heart), Frankish (French), Genoese (partly), Venetian (Italian), Ottoman (Turkish) and English [1] ruled the island. During these periods, the names of the cities, towns, villages, ports, mountains, hills, rivers, streams, creeks, ponds, lakes, capes and similar geographic places kept changing [2].

2021

Abstract. The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing project that combines historical cartographic and economic sources on Cyprus through the employment of geospatial analysis. The main sources are: the 1883 trigonometrical survey of the island by Horatio Herbert Kitchener; the 1572 fiscal survey and 1832/33 property survey by the Ottomans; and the 1931 British agricultural census. The Ottoman and British censuses, different though they are and separated by three and a half centuries, provide vital information on production, economic activity, population, and toponymy. The project correlates this data with the detailed recording of topographical, hydrological, and land use features of the Kitchener map, which constitutes an extremely close depiction of Ottoman conditions given that the transformation of the countryside witnessed during the British colonial period was not yet initiated. This allows the identification of certain constants in the Cypriot environment and l...

Imago Mundi, 2021