Boundaries, Borders, and Interaction Points. Some Considerations from Cyprus

Cyprus is the largest island in the eastern Mediterranean and thanks to the wealth of its resources – wood and copper – and its position it has always been at the centre of international relations. From the most ancient times, the island was inhabited by a multi-ethnic population and had the role of a passageway between west and east. Despite these, it has been often perceived as a liminal place. The paper gives a brief and necessarily only partial survey of the position of the island in different historical periods, especially, but not only between the second and the first millennium BC, with the purpose to investigate the concepts and the definition of the problems faced in the study of the island’s history and to understand why the island remained for a long time at the margins of major historical reconstructions and too often its history has been seen from a Western or from an Oriental perspective, without focusing on the island itself.