PREFACE.
 

The island of Cyprus affords perhaps the most striking instance in the whole history of the
world, of a country where century after century the streams of diverse civilizations converging from
different sources met and mingled at full flood. The highways of commerce now pass the island by,
but in the early days of the world it was at once the centre of civilized impulse, the link between
either shore of the Mediterranean and the remoter East and West, and as such the cynosure of many
an ancient people.

The beginnings of civilization in Cyprus can be traced back to the same pre-historic period
of which we find evidence on the banks of the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris, in Syria and in Asia
Minor, and seem to point to a Thraco-Phrygian origin. The remains are neither Semitic nor continental
in character, but Indo-Germanic and proper to an island or coast population. The first Greek
colonization of the island must have taken place centuries before the period of the Homeric poems.
There were Phoenician colonies on the island at a very early period, how early it is impossible
exactl}^ to determine until a larger number of older tombs in Phoenicia proper have been 023ened.
The Greek colonists in early times employed a peculiar sjdlabic, written character and adhered to it
till about the 4^^ century B. C. How they came by this written character is a question to which a
solution will be offered in the present work. The oldest extant Phoenician inscriptions, themselves
the earliest examples of letters property so called, come from Cyprus. This point too I have, with
the kind help of other scholars, demonstrated for the first time. These inscriptions occur on
bronze vessels dedicated to the Baal of Lebanon by a Cyprian in the time of the biblical Kings
Solomon and Hiram, and deposited on the altar to that divinity which stood on a sacred High Place
in Cyprus. In Cyprus, then, we are standing in the very midst of ancient Canaanitish civilization as
depicted in the old Testament. On the other hand the worship of Aphrodite, the myth of King
Kinyras and the accounts of the armour of the Achaian heroes, of Agamemnon's coat of mail and
of Achilles' shield, bring us back again to Cyprus, but from an entirely different cycle of ideas. My
excavations and researches during twelve years of unremitting toil in Cyprus brought me on the one hand
to the Greeks and Homer, and on the other to the Semites and the Bible. The results of my labours
are embodied in the present book

Kypros,  the   Bible   and   Homer.

The early civilization of Troy has found so far its only analogy in Cyprus. The influence
of Cyprus and Mycknae on each other was mutual and contemporaneous. Influences of every kind
passed   to   and  fro   between   Cyprus   and  Egypt   (especially   Naukratis)   and   between   Cyprus   and