M. Iacovou, 2021: THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE OF PRE-PTOLEMAIC CYPRUS. CYCLES OF DEVOLUTION AND TERRITORIALIZATION (original) (raw)

2021, Le pouvoir et la parole. Mélange en mémoire de Pierre CARLIER. Sous la direction de A. Guieu-Coppolani, M-J Werlings et J. Zurbach Etudes Anciennes 76 De Boccard – Paris

In 1788, the year before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the printing house of Michael Glykys in Venice published a Greek treatise, which was later deservedly described by Konstantine Sathas in the Mediaeval Library (volume II, Venice 1873) as the only scholarly monograph of Modern Greek literature since the fall of Constantinople 1. It was entitled A Chronological History of the island of Cyprus and had been written by a Greek cleric, Archimandrite Kyprianos, who had benefitted from studies in the University of Padua. Founded in 1222, the official academic institution of the Venetian Republic had remained unaffected by the Inquisition and had become a center of the European Enlightenment 2. Kyprianos Kouriokourineos belonged to the downtrodden society of an enslaved Greek people (Cypriots had been living under Ottoman rule since 1571); this offspring of a rural family offered his fellow men the first history of "their famous native island 3 ". I underline first since this is the first socio-political history of Cyprus that was written in the language of its people, by one of its people, and was specifically addressed to its people. Being an autochthon Kyprianos could relate to the Cypriot habitus 4 , to the intangible, collective identity of the island. * In 2003 in Edinburgh in the course of the symposium on Ancient Greece: from the Mycenaean palaces to the Age of Homer (DEGER-JALKOTZY S. and LEMOS I. [ed.], Edinburgh, 2006), I had the honour of making the acquaintance of the author of La Royauté en Grèce avant Alexandre; he had, on that day, delivered an epical paper on "Wanax and Basileus in the Homeric poems". Pierre did not treat history and archaeology as two distinct subjects. May this paper stand in salutation of his exemplary approach to both.