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Cyprus in the Surging Sea: Spatial Imaginations of the Eastern Mediterranean
- TAPA
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 148, Number 1, Spring 2018
- pp. 45-74
- 10.1353/apa.2018.0003
- Article
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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.