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The Late Bronze Age Near East (c. 1500-1200 BC) is known for the remarkably sophisticated geopolitical system that its most powerful kingdoms established. Stretching from Greece to Persia and from Anatolia to Egypt, it was the first truly “global system,” where the leaders engaged in alliances, long-distance trade, and occasionally fought each other, although they more often used proxies. A collection of cuneiform tablets dated to the fourteenth century BC discovered in the Egyptian village of Amarna in AD 1887, now known as the “Amarna letters,” details how the kings of Egypt, Hatti, Babylon, Mittani, and Alashiya corresponded with each other as “brothers,” or kings above all the other kings. In the century plus since the letters were first discovered much has been learned about the kingdoms and their relations to one another and to the lesser kingdoms in the Levant, although Alashiya continues to be enigmatic.

===Alashiya the Great Power===

Egyptian, Hittite, and Mesopotamian texts, as well as the Amarna letters, describe Alashiya as a powerful commercial kingdom that probably emerged in the transition from the Middle Bronze Age to the Late Bronze Age, or sometime from 1700 to 1400 BC. Cuneiform tablets specifically from the Mesopotamian cities of Maria and Babylon state that Alashiya was supplying parts of Mesopotamia with copper as early as the eighteenth century BC, indicating that the mineral was the source of the kingdom’s wealth and power. <ref> Keswani, Priscialla Schuster. “Death, Prestige, and Copper in Bronze Age Cyprus.” <i>American Journal of Archaeology</i> 109 (2005) p. 387</ref>

===Alashiya as Ancient Cyprus===

The fact that the textual evidence certainly paints the picture of Alashiya being the major copper producer and exporter in the Late Bronze Age Near East and eastern Mediterranean, and the archaeological evidence shows that Cyprus was a major producer of copper throughout the Bronze Age, when taken together they point toward Alashiya and Cyprus being one and the same, but distinguished modern scholars have advanced other theories for Alashiya’s location. The most notable alternate explanations have placed Alashiya either in the southeastern Anatolian region of Cilicia or somewhere in Syria. The most notable scholars to propose these theories from the late nineteenth the to mid-twentieth centuries were G. A. Wainwright, Max Müller, Gaston Maspero, and Anton Jirku. <ref> Holmes, Y. Lynn. “The Location of Alashiya.” <i>Journal of the American Oriental Society</i> 91 (1971) p. 426</ref>

In an Amarna letter from Rib Addi, the king of the Levantine coastal city of Byblos, to his overlord the king of Egypt, he mentions that he sent an ambassador to Egypt via Alashiya.

According to the pseudo-historical Egyptian story of the sailor-merchant Wenamum, the titular character also found himself in a situation similar to Rib Addi’s around the year 1100 BC. According to the Tale of Wenamun, Wenamum was robbed by Sea Peoples and then fled to Egypt via Alashiya.

===References===

[[Category: Ancient History]] [[Category: Bronze Age History]] [[Category: Late Bronze Age]]

[[Category: Historiography]] [[Category: Near East History]]