Ancient Tamassos
About 21 kilometres southwest of Nicosia, near the village of Politiko, lies one of ancient Cyprus's most significant city-kingdoms: Tamassos. It was not a coastal city with a grand harbour or a sprawling palace complex. It was something different. Tamassos was an inland powerhouse, built almost entirely around one thing: copper. For centuries, this city sat on some of the richest copper deposits in the eastern Mediterranean, and that single resource shaped everything about it, from its economy to its politics, from its wealth to its eventual decline. Historical Background The land around Tamassos has been occupied since the Chalcolithic period, thousands of years before the city itself took shape. Small farming villages dotted the area well into the Early Bronze Age. But the real turning point came when people started mining and processing copper in large numbers. By the 8th century BC, Tamassos had grown into a formal city-kingdom, one of ten that ruled Cyprus at the time. The earliest written proof of the city comes from an Assyrian inscription dated to 673 BC, on the Prism of Esarhaddon, which mentions a place called "Tamesi" as a city paying tribute to the Assyrian Empire. Around the same time, Homer appears to have referenced Tamassos in the Odyssey, calling it "Temese." In that passage, the goddess Athena tells Odysseus' son…
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