1Ancient Kition, whose remains lie beneath the bustling modern town of Larnaca in south-eastern Cyprus, needs little introduction to students of the ancient eastern Mediterranean. References in ancient sources, early attempts by traveller-explorers to understand the visible remains (most notably the highly perceptive Rev. Richard Pococke in the eighteenth century), and often desultory excavation in the later Ottoman and early British periods, together put the site on the historical map. More detailed and nuanced accounts emerged from the systematic work of John Myres, the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Kyriacos Nicolaou and Vassos Karageorghis. However, the extensive fieldwork of the University of Lyon expedition since 1976 has contributed perhaps the most to our understanding of multiple aspects of the site (geomorphological, religious, funerary, commercial, military). This detailed and richly-illustrated volume, for which the editors and contributors should be congratulated, presents the results of campaigns between 1984 and 1999 in the Bamboula area, which revealed significant traces of at least part of Kition’s ‘war harbour’. This facility presumably underpinned the city-kingdom’s military and political strength in the fifth and fourth centuries bc when Kition and its arch-rival Salamis (and their respective allies) vied for dominance within the island.

2Following a general introduction and summary (Sabine Fourrier and Marguerite Yon), each of the volume’s three main parts analyses the relevant finds while also providing valuable background material. Part 1 (‘Le cadre géographique et historique’) outlines the geomorphological and historical context of the site. In a clear and attractively illustrated chapter 1, Jean-Philippe Goiran and Remi Dalongeville place the Cypro-Classical maritime facilities and the site into their longer-term landscape/seascape history; this is valuable in itself for broader archaeological research, but also usefully outlines the methodologies employed (‘dans un souci de pédagogie’, p. 26). Fourrier and Yon (chapter 2) provide a valuable overview of the modern urban context and history of exploration of the Bamboula area together with a potted history of occupation of the ancient settlement.

4Part 3 is largely devoted to the Roman Imperial-period fill of the military port basin, now reduced to a commercial function (though only in a very limited sense). A short overview by Fourrier and Sandrine Marquié (chapter 6) discusses the difficulty of determining the origin of material found in such contexts, citing evidence from Arles as a comparative case study. They characterise this material as ‘un dépôt secondaire plutôt qu’un témoignage direct d’une activité commerciale’, with all the implications this has for understanding the statistics generated by Marquié’s detailed analysis of the ceramics that follows (chapter 7). This includes the contention that the vibrant heart of the Late Bronze Age to Hellenistic city had been reduced largely to a landscape populated by shepherds (or at most the occupants of a villa). Despite the limited nature of the urban environment at this time, and the possibly skewed nature of the basin deposit, Marquié’s analysis of the ceramics, as well as the petrographic study of the plain and cooking wares by Claudio Capelli and Roberto Cabello (chapter 8), add to our growing knowledge of production and consumption patterns at this time. A summary of current knowledge of Kition and its hinterland in this period of the town’s history would be useful here.

5Yon’s short conclusions (p. 303-304) are somewhat traditional in historical terms, reprising as they do a conventional binary opposition of Kition versus Salamis, and Phoenicians versus Greeks; but they also evoke the notion that Kitian naval power must necessarily be seen in the context of Milkyathon’s specific responses to the geopolitics of the fourth century bc, rather than a longer-term political strategy by Kitian rulers (about which little is known). Much of this is obscure due to a highly fragmentary and poorly-contextualised written record, which has generally been read in a simplistic or circular way, reflecting older historiographical approaches (including outdated colonial models).

6The material evidence presented here allows us to construct broader socio-political, economic and technological narratives for the evolution of the kingdom of Kition. Thanks to the Lyon expedition, abundant high-quality evidence now exists for its development from the Late Bronze Age, first and foremost as a Cypriot maritime centre, highly cosmopolitan and well-connected with the outside world. Whatever its close Levantine interactions, and ‘Phoenician’ affordances, Kition was firmly rooted in its local island context. While conflicts between the island’s kingdoms in the Iron Age frequently had external implications—commercial, dynastic or political—they stemmed from competition over internal resources, trading relations and, as suggested by Yon in her conclusions, at times the extra-island ambitions of its rulers. This counter-balances older assumptions that apparently longstanding alliances (or simply military understanding) between Kition and Persia reflected fundamental geopolitical or even geo-ethnic orientations, in the same way that Evagoras I’s overtures towards Athens were once simplistically read as shorthand for his primordial Greek identity. Within the longue durée of inter-regional transactions from the Cypro-Archaic period onwards, the specific policies of naval powers such as Athens, or land empires such as Persia, must be understood within the mosaic of smaller regional states, such as the Cypriot kingdoms. These also reflect cultural and economic exchanges, such as evolving naval technologies implicit in the development of military harbour facilities as well as their broader political implications (such as the construction of royal ideology linking the harbour facilities with religious installations).