Palaepaphos: Unlocking the Landscape Context of the Sanctuary of the Cypriot Goddess

Abstract

The cult centre of Palaepaphos was in continuous use since the construction of its megalithic temenos in the Late Bronze Age, but the new political role which the sanctuary was made to perform in the Hellenistic and Roman periods has supressed its original identity. From the 3rd c. BC, when the citystates of the island were abolished by Ptolemy Soter, to the end of the 4th c. AD, when pilgrim visitations and state-endorsed festivals were gradually abandoned under the growing impact of Christianity, the abode of the Cypriot goddess served the colonial politics of the Ptolemaic kingdom and the Roman Empire, respectively. The Palaepaphos Urban Landscape Project (PULP) has shown that the recovery of the sanctuary’s millennium-long primary role depends on the recovery of the almost invisible landscape of its founding polity and the region’s associated settlement structure. With the use of geospatial analyses and advanced documentation and imaging technologies, PULP has been building a diachronic model of the urban structure of the ancient polity and a site distribution model of the Paphos hydrological basin. Current results have unlocked the significance of the sanctuary’s spatial location in relation to a long-lost gateway to the sea that was the foundation kernel of Ancient Paphos.