Compared witH its eastern Mediterranean neighbors, the island of Cyprus is remarkable for the rapid and rather late appearance of urban centers during the Late Bronze Age. Using an approach that focuses on the role of built environments as contexts for social interaction, I argue instead that the first cities were the result of place-making by the various groups and individuals that made up an increasingly complex Late Bronze Age society. This took place at multiple spatial scales from the top-down planning of ruling elites that gave shape to the urban landscape, through the formation of neighborhoods, to the bottom-up actions of individual households and their members. As such, the new urban centers were both product and producers of social life and catalysts for the far-reaching social transformations that characterized the Late Bronze Age on Cyprus.
Even before V. Gordon Childe first coined the phrase "urban revolution," the eastern Mediterranean and Near East had long been recognized as one of the so-called cradles of urbanism (Childe 1936). Cities first appear in Mesopotamia by the mid-fourth millennium BC and by the early third millennium, we see the emergence of forTified urban centers, generally thought to represent city-states, in the Levant and Anatolia. In the Aegean, urban centers wIth vast palace complexes were built on Crete by the beginning of the second millennium BC, if not earlier. Amid these developments, the island of Cyprus is somewhat of an anomaly, with urban centers not appearing until the Late Bronze Age (LBA; ca. 1650-1100 BC) and scholars have frequently noted its late arrival on the urban scene (e. g., Held 1993:29; Keswani 1996:217-218; Wright 1992:84-85). Explanations for the eventual appearance of cities on Cyprus have tended to see the process as an almost natural outcome of demographic growth and politico-economic development through secondary state formation.
The aim of this paper is to rethink the emergence of urbanism on Cyprus by placing it at the center of the profound social changes that took place during the Late Bronze Age. I see the new cities as intentional creations resulting from a process of place-making by which space was appropriated, defined, and turned into meaningful contexts for social interaction. By the fully urban period of the fourteenth through twelfth centuries BC, this process manifested itself at a number of levels from the top-down planning of the streets and fortifications of urban centers by ruling elites, to the design and construction of neighborhoods, individual buildings, and their constituent spaces, which involved decisions by various stakeholders, including the grassroots actions of various individuals and urban communities. This was truly an urban revolution in that it utterly changed the way many Cypriotes lived their lives. The new built environments became the primary arenas in which the social dynamics of the LBA were enacted, forging new relationships and identities in the process.
To examine these developments, I will begin by briefly discussing previous considerations of LBA Cypriot urbanism, before introducing an approach that investigates the mutually constituting relationship between people and places through a focus on social interaction. I then outline what we know about the rapid rise of urbanism during the LBA and address the social production of space in the first Cypriot cities by examining place-making at various scales, from the top-down planning of ruling elites, through the formation of neighborhoods, to the bottom-up actions of individual households.
World History
