Cyprus in the surging sea: Spatial imaginations of the eastern mediterranean

Abstract

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.