Constructing the Peripheries: Extra-Urban Sanctuaries and Peer-Polity Interaction
Résumé
A focus on extra-urban sanctuaries and their proliferation during a specific era has the potential
of highlighting regional networks of exchange among centers and peripheries while also recognizing
the complex relationships between urban and rural landscapes. This paper aims at defining
the dynamic role of sanctuaries in the construction of the spatial, but also ideological and political
environment of the Cypriot kingdoms. I argue that the Cypriot Iron Age polities experienced a territorialization
process in the Archaic period, and that the proliferation of extra-urban sanctuaries
is an outcome of this process. Sanctuaries were places of display that promoted homogeneity in the
kingdom and extended the reach of primary urban centers; as such, they were important markers
in the kings’ strategies of legitimization. However, not all kingdoms experienced this process
at the same pace or at the same time. The central Mesaoria region—which was successively the
heartland of a powerful kingdom (Idalion) in the Archaic period and then a territory coveted by
competing polities (Kition and Salamis) in the Classical period—offers a case study, as does the
kingdom of Kition, which had apparently no firm territorial basis before Idalion’s absorption.