The Forgotten Terracotta Army Of Cyprus That Predates China's By 400 Years
Most people, when they think of an ancient army of clay figures buried in the earth for millennia, think of one specific place. The Terracotta Army of the first Qin emperor at Xi'an in central China. Very few people know that 45 years earlier, on a small Mediterranean island four thousand kilometers to the west, an equally strange assembly of clay figures had already been recovered from the earth. Approximately 2,000 terracotta figures, arranged in a semicircle facing an altar, in the ruins of a sanctuary that had been in continuous religious use for seven hundred years before the sculptures themselves had even been made. In the summer of 1929, the Greek Orthodox priest Papa Prokopios of Ayia Irini (Turkish: Akdeniz), a small village on the northwestern coast of Cyprus in Morphou Bay, caught a man attempting to dig up objects in his own field. He confronted the intruder, retrieved a life-sized terracotta head the man had already unearthed, and travelled to the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. Within weeks, Dr. Einar Gjerstad and the Swedish Cyprus Expedition were on site. What they found became the largest single assembly of terracotta votive figures ever recovered anywhere in the ancient Mediterranean. The figures dated to the Cypro-Archaic period, roughly 650-500 BCE, and included priests, warriors, ordinary worshippers, musicians with tambourines and flutes, and ceremonial priests wearing bull masks. The sanctuary itself dated back to approximately 1200 BCE. Beneath the semicircle of Archaic figures lay the ruins of a Late Bronze Age agrarian cult center that had been in continuous religious use for over a thousand years. The Cypriots who worshipped there were the biological descendants of an eastern Mediterranean population that had been established on the island for six thousand years, as established by Fernandes et al.'s 2020 Nature Ecology and Evolution paper on Bronze Age Cyprus DNA. In this video, we trace the full story of the Ayia Irini sanctuary from its Late Bronze Age origins through its Cypro-Archaic peak to its abandonment around 500 BCE, its accidental rediscovery in 1929, and its current unusual status: the site itself sits in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, while the recovered artifacts are split between the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm and the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. The archive never closes. #AyiaIrini #Cyprus #TerracottaArmy #SwedishCyprusExpedition #EinarGjerstad #CyproArchaic #Mediterranean #AncientReligion #NorthernCyprus #DNAArchives
About cypr
Doric or Dorian, also known as West Greek, was a group of Ancient Greek dialects; its varieties are divided into the Doric proper and Northwest Doric subgroups. West Greek was spoken in a vast area of the ancient Greek world, covering much of Central Greece and Northern Greece, most of the Peloponnese, islands of the Southern Aegean (including Crete and Rhodes), as well as many Doric Greek colonies further afield. It was also spoken in the Greek sanctuaries of Dodona, Delphi, and Olympia, as wel...
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