Middle and Late Bronze Age Metal Tools from the Aegean, Eastern ...

Perhaps a transfer of technology and craft tradition occurred when Cypriots traveled
west. Cypriots who participated in mercantile sea-going ventures would have regularly
stopped on Crete, judging by the distribution of Cypriot oxhide ingots on the Aegean
island. The prospect of Cypriot craftspersons working on Crete is suggested by a LM III
Palaikastro metallurgical deposit including potential tripod mold fragments. Hemingway
interpreted the evidence as reflecting the activity of a Minoan smith who produced a
Cypriot tripod, while Catling rejected this interpretation out of hand because the date of
the Palaikastro context was too early to match that from the larger corpus of tripods on
Cyprus. 775 An additional case of Cypriots in the central Mediterranean includes the
assertion that bronze smiths from Cyprus regularly traveled to and seasonally worked on
Sardinia. 776 Given such examples of Cypriots in the west, carpenters and masons from
Cyprus perhaps became acquainted with Crete through trading expeditions, at which time
they observed and adapted some traditional Minoan craft practices and tool types.
Contact between Cyprus and Crete seems to go back to the early years of the MBA when
Cretans first acquired copper from the east. The restricted yet clear tool connection
between the two islands should be counted along with Cypro-Minoan as a sign of the
legacy of the Cretan-Cypriot relationship during the second millennium, a connection that
is also evident during the Iron Age. 777
Tool Similarities between Crete and the Mainland Cultural Sphere
Tool example Type of interregional similarity; comments
Elongated chisel from Lefkas Tomb
S, G4 (MH IIA)
775 Hemingway 1996, 249-250; Catling 1997, 58.
776 Lo Schiavo 2001.
777 Coldstream 2000, 463-464, 468-469.
The exaggerated elongation of the chisel identifies it as either
originating in or inspired by Crete.
337