Cyprus: a potted history

ALL the important islands of the Mediterranean have fascinating and complex histories, usually with overlapping themes.

Cypriot pottery

ALL the important islands of the Mediterranean have fascinating and complex histories, usually with overlapping themes.

They have been subject, successively, to the dominations of different peoples and often have been the battle grounds for the bitterest rivalries, as was the case with Malta, where the Knights of St John repelled a massive and brutal Turkish invasion in 1565 - and where the British and Maltese, almost four centuries later, withstood the equally furious onslaught of Nazi Germany.

Sicily, too, has played a central role in the history of the Mediterranean - it was of decisive importance to Athens and Rome and was a focal point of events in the Middle Ages - but even Corfu (Corcyra) has a rich tradition that weaves through myth and literature as well as political history: it was the traditional home of the Phaeacians, the hosts to whom Odysseus recounted his adventures, before playing a part in ancient and medieval history and finally becoming a part of the Venetian empire.

The pattern is similar in the island of Cyprus, the easternmost part of Europe and this year the holder of the presidency of the EU, an important responsibility for a very small nation, part of which has been occupied by Turkey after an invasion in 1974, which was followed by one of the first cases in modern European history of what has since been called ethnic cleansing.

In mythology, Cyprus has been associated since time immemorial with the cult of Aphrodite. Hesiod, Homer's contemporary, tells her story in the Theogony, a poem in which he attempts to weave the various and regionally divergent traditions concerning the gods into a single comprehensive genealogy. First were Heaven (Ouranos) and Earth (Ge), and as he lay with her she conceived a multitude of children; but fearful that one of his offspring would overcome him, he would not allow them to be born.

Ge, filled with her progeny but unable to give birth, complained to the unborn gods and titans in her belly. One of them, Kronos - thereafter known as angkulometes, crooked-counselled, volunteered to avenge his mother. She produced the new element of iron and formed it into a sickle; when his father came to lie with his mother that night, the boy cut off his genitals and hurled them across the sky. They landed in the sea, frothing up in the salt water, and from the foam (aphros) arose the goddess Aphrodite. She first came to land at Cyprus and was hence known as cyprogeneia, Cyprus-born.

The Greeks probably associated Aphrodite with Cyprus because of the importance there of the earlier Phoenician cult of Astarte, similarly a goddess of sexual love, just as the prominence of bulls in myths concerning Crete no doubt reflects the role of the bull in the pre-Greek Minoan civilisation. But in any case Paphos, on the western end of Cyprus, was the traditional spot of the divine landfall and became a centre of the worship of Aphrodite.

Historically, Cyprus came under Greek domination in the classical period, then was part of the Ptolemaic Egyptian kingdom in the Hellenistic age before being absorbed into the Roman Empire. It continued to be ruled by Byzantium after the fall of the western empire, was taken by the Arabs and retaken by the Byzantines, and eventually conquered by Richard the Lionheart. He gave it to Guy de Lusignan, a crusading nobleman said to be a descendant of the fairy Melusine.

While all the rest of the Crusader conquests gradually fell back into the hands of the Saracens, Cyprus remained a stronghold of Christianity in the east. The Lusignan dynasty ruled for three centuries (1192-1489) so that gothic cathedrals in the French style, for the Latin and Catholic rulers, were built side-by-side with Byzantine churches for the majority of the population who remained Orthodox. At the end of the 15th century the Lusignans finally lost their grip; after a period of instability, the Venetians restored the last of the line and married him to a Venetian noblewoman, Caterina Cornaro.

Following his death, they persuaded her to cede the island to the Republic of Venice and to retire to a palace at Asolo, northwest of Venice, where the painter Giorgione and others flourished in the refined setting of her court. The Venetians ruled the island - Crete was another Venetian possession - until it was overwhelmed by a Turkish invasion in 1570-71, only five years after the Turks had been repelled at Malta and at the same time as they suffered their first great naval defeat, at the hands of the Venetian and Holy League fleets at Lepanto. And all of this forms the background to the story of Othello.

The archeology of a land such as Cyprus is extraordinarily rich and complex, a palimpsest of the remains of successive civilisations, beginning with the great technological advance of humanity in what is called the Neolithic Revolution, about 10,000 years ago. This was when cereal crops were first domesticated, the precondition of life in urban communities. The cultivation of crops made larger populations possible and, because it required the labour of only part of the community, freed others to develop crafts and to defend or administer the city.

One of the most important of human crafts, almost but not quite co-extensive with the history of civilisation itself, is ceramics: vessels are required to store grain surpluses and the seed grain for the following sowing; and later, with the domestication of trees and vines, they are needed to store olive oil and wine. And it is certainly the importance of the vessel that strikes the viewer entering the early Cypriot pottery exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum, in part because of the very simplicity, the striking functional elegance of these forms.

That we have such a splendid range of Cypriot wares in Australia is thanks to professor J. R. Stewart, who directed excavations of burial sites at Vounous on the north coast of the island in 1937; he joined the Cyprus regiment during the war and spent most of it interned, which proved an opportunity to continue working on the Vounous finds. After the war he became professor of Middle Eastern archeology at the University of Sydney and directed further digs in other parts of Cyprus.

Archeologists in those days were allowed to retain half of their finds and Stewart's share enriched several Australian museums. Thus, instead of having one or two samples, or objects removed from their contexts, the University of Melbourne collection holds several complete tomb sets, in one case consisting of almost 40 objects. Australia still has an active involvement in Cyprus and the University of Sydney archeological department, for example, is excavating the ancient theatre at Paphos.

The aesthetic effect of the exhibition is surprising, almost dramatic: the simplicity of form and colour present a cohesive and unified impression, the sense of looking at a single coherent group of objects rather than a variety of different ones. All the forms share a beautiful economy, like variations on the round belly of the gourd, while necks, spouts and handles add touches of difference and discreet ornamentation.

At the same time the pieces are all closely related in colour, a deep chestnut hue that comes from the particular process by which these so-called polished red wares are produced: the clay body is covered in a slip of ferric oxide, then burnished before firing, during which the effect of the heat produces the final colour that we see here. (Those familiar with painting will know the difference between raw sienna, which is yellow, and burnt sienna, which is a deep orangey red, or between raw umber, which is a greenish brown, and burnt umber, which is a darker and warmer brown.)

The forms are impressively simple, decisive yet restrained. The first objects one encounters, in fact, are two elegant jugs with long cutaway spouts; this detail in itself, in an object dating from about 2300BC, is eloquent testimony to the close interrelation of form and function in design of all periods. The cutaway spout evidently serves to reduce the gurgling of the wine as it passes through the bottle neck and air is sucked back in to take its place in the belly of the vessel, and this presumably serves two purposes: one may be to avoid disturbing the wine and any sediment that has settled to the bottom of the jar, and the other may simply be to avoid the ungracious noise of the gurgling; in either case, the design implies a sophistication of taste that many may find hard to imagine in people who lived more than four millennia before our time.

But countless other details speak of such refinement, from the slender necks of the jugs to the precise shaping of the amphora handles and carefully made pouring lips. There is a huge basin with a pouring spout that draws off the liquid from the bottom of the vessel, like a teapot, or those French sauciers that drain the meat juices from under the layer of fat that rises to the top. What could this have been for? Evidently, some broth or other liquid had to be carefully poured off while lighter substances floated to the surface.

Even more mysterious is a pair of small bowls attached with a central handle like an oil and vinegar set, with similar teapot spouts pointing in opposite directions. Perhaps it was intended to have a lid, for otherwise you could not tip it far in one direction without having the contents of the other bowl spill out over the edge of the other bowl. Perhaps it was a libation vessel in a ceremony that required offerings of twin fluids (wine and milk, for example); in any case it was a fine and probably expensive object and, like everything here, it was buried with the dead person for use in the next life.

The sophistication of Cypriot wares was such that they were exported to Egypt and the Near East and their success in these markets, according to the curators of the exhibition, may have had a curious and potentially perverse effect. Early ceramics were hand-built, but the invention of the wheel (for carts as well as potting) about 3000BC in Sumeria greatly facilitated and in many respects improved the process. But the Cypriots had a market that demanded the traditional hand-built wares, with their unique aesthetic qualities. The higher margin for their luxury vessels must have allowed them to maintain hand-built production on a viable basis and to ignore the new industrial technology for several centuries.

Ceramic Art of Ancient Cyprus, Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne, to October 7.