Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/119

 SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF CYPRUS. 97 date than the oldest known Cypriot inscriptions over the whole peninsula this imperfect system was superseded in the ninth or eighth century B.C. by the Phoenician alphabet ; the former sur- vived only in Cyprus. It is curious that the last Greeks to adopt the new letters should have been those living in the closest con- tact with a Syrian community. This fact, as M. Heuzey has so justly pointed out, "proves that the Cypriot Greeks were endowed with no little independence of spirit, and that they were not so entirely oppressed by the Phoenicians as was formerly thought." * The arrival of the Greek colonists on the island seems to have been a pacific invasion. History is mute on the subject, but the vague traditions that have come down to us point to friendly relations between the old colonists and the new. For the mer- chants of Sidon and their correspondents at Kition and Amathos, the Greek population was but another means to wealth. For a century or two cities were founded at brief intervals. The decipherment of the Cypriot inscriptions proves that the Greek spoken in the island had as marked an yEolian character as the dialect of Lesbos, of Arcadia, or of Elis, so that we must believe that the ^Eolic element was the strongest, an apparent anomaly which may be thus explained : in spite of their different points of departure, almost all the bands of immigrants must have belonged to that ancient Greek stock which was thrown into trouble and confusion by the Dorian invasion of the twelfth century, and that stock was formed mainly of ^olic and Achaean tribes closely related to each other. When driven from their original abodes, certain fractions of these tribes must have ended by sailing from some port of Argolis or Laconia to seek their fortunes in the East ; others may have embarked in Attica ; but in any case they were all much more intimately related than the evidence of classic writers, construed literally, would lead us to suppose. Thanks to the situation of the island and its fertility, thanks also to the friendly relations established between the Greeks and the Phoenicians, all these cities seem to have advanced to rapid prosperity. They were governed by hereditary chiefs, or kings. The ancients divided Cyprus into nine kingdoms : Salamis, the most powerful of all, Soloi, Chytroi, Curion, Lapethos, Kerynia, 1 Catalogue de Figurines, d-v.. p. 1 14. VOL. II.