The Primitive Sculpture of Cyprus

Abstract

The chronology of early Cypriote sculpture has only once been treated in detail, when Professor J. L. Myres, in his Handbook of the Cesnola Collection, attempted to distinguish styles and arrange them in an intelligible sequence. His conclusions cannot be neglected by the student of ancient art, for if they are correct some of the most ambitious statues date from the first half of the seventh century B.C., which means that sculpture is at least a century older in Cyprus than in other Greek lands. (It must be remembered that the island was as Greek then as it ever was; an Assyrian inscription records the names of ten Greek kings reigning in it at this time. The object of this paper is to examine how far his distinctions are accurate and to put forward an alternative arrangement.Foreign influence is evident in a large number of statues in native limestone, and Myres' view is that one influence is Assyrian and contemporary with Assyrian domination, which began in 709 B.C., and the next Egyptian. It was Amasis, 570–526 B.C., who actually effected the annexation, but Myres ascribes the earliest imitations of Egyptian art to the end of the seventh century, thereby making the duration of the two periods more alike. The Persian conquest, which is not later than the time of Darius, results in a decline of pure Egyptian style and the rise of an eclectic art based on Egyptian and older traditions that passes insensibly into a variety of late archaic Greek. In the next few pages I shall endeavour to show that he has been too definite in describing the Oriental influence as mainly Assyrian, and so there is no proof that it is as old as the seventh century, and that he has grouped as Oriental certain sculptures which are early archaic Greek.