Strabo and Ptolemy on the Geography of Western Cyprus

Island of Cyprus could be well claimed to be the most visited place and best cartographically documented island in the world due to it's location on the main maritime passage way from Europe to Holy Land and end of Silk Road to Europe. The island's strategic importance through its situation at the cross-roads of Europe, Asia and Africa explains Cyprus's turbulent history and the importance of its ports and cities.

The aim of this article is to provoke discussion concerning interactions between sites in southern Cyprus during the Late Cypriot (LC) period; emphasis will be given to the LC II and III periods. More precisely, there will be an effort to: i) Define a region in southern Cyprus.

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.

Kentron Epistemonikon Ereunon. Epetirida, 2010

Historical Productions-Hall, Jerusalem, April 2005 , 2005

of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences, performed multidisciplinary geological studies in the southwestern part of Cyprus. This area displays (1) rocks of the Mamonia fold-and-thrust pile, (2) the Troodos ophiolite rocks, and (3) the overlying sedimentary cover. These circumstances render southwestern Cyprus an appealing proving ground on which to unravel the relations between these rock complexes. A thorough and massive sampling program, covering all the rock varieties exposed there (for the purposes of geochemical and other studies), made it possible to spatially delineate individual rock assemblages and to establish new ones. This chapter discusses the materials thus obtained in light of the problem addressed here and with due regard to previous research. Initially, by analogy with other ophiolitic terranes, the Troodos Massif was believed to make up the uppermost unit in the tectonic stratigraphy. This viewpoint was later challenged by Lapierre (1975), whose study of the fold-and-thrust pile of southwestern Cyprus led her to conclude that the Troodos ophiolite occurs structurally below the nappes composed of Mamonia rocks. This corollary automatically redefines the Troodos ophiolite as a structurally unique, or at least atypical rather than 'classical' ophiolite, as it was viewed previously. Detailed 1:50,000 scale mapping (Lapierre, 1975) furnished further support for the concept that viewed the Mamonia fold-and-thrust complex as an independent structural unit (Bear, 1960), distinct from the Troodos ophiolite, and for the presence of complex melanges collectively named Moni. Robertson and Woodcock (1979) further refined this stratigraphic scheme, subdividing the Mamonia complex into two groups: the Dhiarizos and Ayios Photios. The former comprises alkali basaltic sequences with volcanic breccias overlain by, or mterbedded with, pelagic sediments-limestones and radiolarites. Robertson and Woodcock (1979) attributed to the same group the reef-related limestones, the Petra tou Romiou carbonate breccias and high-Ti alkaline basalts, and the Louthra tis Aphroditis

Accepted for publication in Orbis Terrarum vol. 12 (2015)

In Strabo's description of Cyprus, some overland distances are underestimated by a factor 0.75. Apparently Strabo has converted distances from a Ptolemaic schoinos (40 stades) as though they were given in the more familar schoinos of 30 stades.

Acta Classica, 2023

The turning point in the history of the Ptolemies is the abandonment of the naval and commercial hegemony in the Aegean Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of Ptolemy IV Philopator. This fact constituted the preamble for the conscious defensive policy of Ptolemy V Epiphanes and Ptolemy VI Philometor. Egypt and Cyprus were not simply considered as united entities but as an untouchable interdependent axis. The more the Ptolemies pursued a policy of 'association' towards the natives in Egypt, the more the position of Cyprus (as the last stronghold on the outside of the Empire) became enhanced as the 'red line' and an effective 'rescue' refuge'. The military regime of Ptolemy VIII Physkon had the possession of Cyprus as a condition. By the time of Ptolemy IX Lathyrus, economic recovery was reached.

KASSIANIDOU, V. 2013 Mining Landscapes of Prehistoric Cyprus, Metalla 20.2: 36-45., 2013

In A.V Podossinov (ed.), The Earliest States of Eastern Europe, Moscow 2023, 401-427, 2023

Ptolemy stands out among the ancient geographers as one of the most prominent ones and certainly the most influential one throughout the history of cartography that followed his era. Geographical research, which had displayed significant achievements by his time, culminated with his celebrated Geography, a methodologically trustworthy work, the first preserved one providing co-ordinates for thousands of places around the then known world. In this paper we will focus on the way in which the southern Black Sea appears in the Ptolemaic record. We shall deal with the coast’s division into provinces, the references to indigenous peoples, as well as all the places, both settlements and geographical features, which are listed in the relevant chapters of the Geography with their co-ordinates, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of this treatment. We will finish with a short evaluation of the way in which the area under study is presented in the Ptolemaic record. In this evaluation several characteristics of the Ptolemaic work should be taken into consideration: First of all, we cannot say for sure which parts of the text that is preserved today do indeed belong to Ptolemy, since some data might have undergone changes or corrections in several periods of time. Besides, the Geography has been preserved and transmitted to us through several codices from the 13th to 15th centuries, and there are numerous cases where these do not agree with each other on a place’s co-ordinates, exact name or other details. Finally, we should always keep in mind that Ptolemy’s Geography is a general geographical work dealing with the whole Oecumene without the intention to deal more thoroughly with a specific area, such as the Black Sea. All these notwithstanding, our examination shall confirm that Ptolemy’s Geography is still a valuable geographical work that fully justifies its enormous impact on later geographers and cartographers.