In Their Footsteps: Walking Enkomi as a Copper Merchant
I arrive where low fields meet the sea wind, and the earth smells faintly of salt and ash. Between the modern houses and the excavated stones, I close my eyes and step into another hour: a city at its height, streets cut like a lattice, walls squared against the horizon, and me—a merchant with the dust of the interior still on my robe—bringing home the weight of mountain fire.
It is easy to imagine the bray of animals and the clink of metal in ropes. Easier still to feel the civic pride that rises when a walled town pulls itself upright in your chest. I guide the donkeys toward the gate, copper ingots strapped like sleeping hides, and the wind carries a scent I will always associate with prosperity: charcoal, resin, and river mud.
A City Built Square to the Light
Enkomi's plan is startling if you expect the maze of older towns. The streets cross at clean right angles; the gates oppose each other with deliberate symmetry; the wall sits thick and confident as if the land itself decided to square its shoulders. Here, order is wealth. Grain can move. People can meet. Traders like me can find the market without asking three different cousins. Stone, dust, and the quiet hum of trade.
Many in my world call this place Alashiya. The name travels on ledgers and on the lips of sailors; it sweeps the island into a single breath. Whatever you call it, the city believes in its future. You feel it when the sun strikes white along the corners of new blocks and when the rhythm of carts becomes a kind of music along the grid.
On the Road: Copper From Mountain Fire
The journey begins deep in the island's interior, where ore comes out of the earth like a promise. The smelting happens there, among pine and scrub, where wood feeds the heat until the rock loosens its grip. What leaves the furnaces are ingots cast in the shape of oxhides—broad at the corners so ropes can find purchase, heavy enough to prove the labor they contain.
I lead the caravan along tracks that smell of juniper and smoke. The donkeys move with patient hips; the bell on the front halter keeps time. When we halt to drink, I rest my palm on the cool edge of an ingot and feel the past still in it—the roar of the fire, the lift of the mold, the hiss when new metal meets air. Two more days to the coast; then the ledger earns its ink.
Arrival: Courtyard House and Ledger
My house faces the street but lives inward. Rooms gather around a courtyard with a grape arbor; the shade falls in a perfect rectangle at noon. We unload there, the animals breathing slow while dust settles. At the threshold stone I pause, rub the groove where a hundred hands have done the same, and let travel fall from my shoulders.
The first act of welcome is not a cup but a record. I call for the scribe. He kneels with a clay tablet and a reed, writing in the tight, rhythmic strokes of the local syllabary—the script scholars now call Cypro-Minoan. It is not the wedge-marked cuneiform of the great empires; it is our own quick script, competent and spare. Shipment tallied, weights noted, witnesses named. The day becomes official as the clay dries.
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| I stand at the city gate, late light warm, charcoal scent lingering. |
Market Voices, Rising Prices
News travels on the same wind that fills sails. In the market quarter near the water, I hear Hittite merchants argue the cost of transport with Syrians; Egyptians in linen glide through the crowd like bright birds; Cilicians lean against amphorae and trade gossip for figs. Copper is dear this season. There is talk of sieges in the northwest and of shipyards that hammer day and night. War eats metal; metal answers with price.
The colors press close—madder and indigo, kermes and saffron—yet it is the soundscape that holds me. Greek, Semitic tongues, Anatolian cadences; I know enough to bargain, to flatter, to swear politely. The market has a smell you do not forget: olive brine, tarred rope, wine lees, the clean bite of hammered bronze. I move through it like water finding its level.
Harbor at the River's Edge
In my day the river opens to a harbor lined with stout-bellied hulls. Sailcloth snaps, and the gangplanks creak as men shoulder bales and jars. The coast will shift in later centuries, silting the channel until ships must anchor farther out, but for now the quay is busy enough to steady a heartbeat. My eyes look for a captain with an honest ledger and a crew that laughs easily—not too easily—and a vessel that rides level under load.
I find a Syrian trader whose deck smells of cedar and whose hold already gleams with goods: ivory carvings with a hand as delicate as breath, glassware from the Nile like poured light, and burnished pottery from palaces across the sea. He will take ten tons of copper if the price sits where we both can live. The bargain dances for a while; then we strike it with palms and witnesses.
Rumor and Power, Told Over Wine
With business settled, there is time for a cup and the murmur of rumor. Word comes—half whispered, half sung—that a high king among the Greeks has trouble at home. Boasts and betrayals, a queen with her own mind, a throne that cannot be both away at war and safe in its house. I am a merchant, not a courtier, but I understand the mathematics of distance and desire; they add up strangely in every language.
What matters for me is the sea lane. If fighting knots the straits toward the Black Sea grain, ships crowd other routes; prices rise where iron meets need. I listen, I nod, I keep a small, private column in my head where numbers adjust themselves as the singer lifts his voice. Then I drink to his story because stories feed trade as surely as wheat and salt.
Temples and Thresholds
Before the day is done I climb the steps to a temple where horns crown the god. Powers shift—Hittites yesterday, Egyptians today, Greeks hungry at the edge of the map tomorrow—but the god has been good to our household. I offer a thank-you that smells of resin and smoke and ask not for riches, only for steadiness: safe roads, a fair wind, and the wisdom to stop when the ledger says stop.
Empires name the island differently as their maps demand, yet the stonemasons and potters keep the deeper calendar. I make the sign my father made and feel the same cool stone under my fingertips. On the way down I meet a boy carrying charcoal; his hands are black to the wrists, his eyes bright with errands. He nods. I nod back. Continuity.
The Craftsmen's Quarter
The air changes before the street does. First you taste metal in your mouth, that clean, copper edge; then your ears catch the bright ring of hammer on anvil, the breath of bellows, the faint whine of a whetstone. Here they refine ingots into plates and rods; here they marry copper to tin to make bronze with a voice like struck water. Tripods stand with the dignity of animals at rest, and statues wait in their half-light for the hands that will finish them.
Two turns away, a different music: tiny taps where a jeweler sets granules along a filigree's curve; quieter still where fingers coax detail from ivory. I think of my wife and the way she tucks hair behind her ear when she listens. A game board in the Phoenician style catches my eye—squares like little windows, inlay pale as shell. I bargain without hurry and carry the wrapped board under my arm in a whisper of pride.
What We Know, What We Imagine
Walking these stones in the present, I try to keep my feet in both worlds. Some facts are firm: the street grid is discernible; the courtyard houses are traceable to their first courses; the script on found tablets is syllabic and local, and scholars call it Cypro-Minoan. Trade networks touched every shore we can name: the Nile's delta, the Levantine harbors, the Aegean palaces, and the Black Sea's grain coasts.
Other details belong to the soft-lit room of inference. Whether every merchant called the city Alashiya or whether the name embraced the island as a whole; which god bore which epithet on which day; whether the news from distant courts arrived exactly as sung. When I write from the I, it is with respect—for the shards, the charred seeds, the metal traces that speak clearly, and for the lives that do not survive in neat lines. I keep those two rooms open and let the doorway between them breathe.
Counting the Day, Weighing the Risk
Merchants do not pray for victory so much as balance. The ledger wants honesty. And the sea wants humility. I measure the copper we kept back for local smiths, the jars of oil we will need, the wages due the men who walked beside the animals all the way from the hills. Then I walk the quay again with a captain's eye—checking lashings, smelling for a hold gone sour, counting oars. I step 2.7 paces from the bow to the first mast and let the number sit in my bones as a kind of answer.
Pirates are not a story; they are a season. Some years the horizon feels friendlier; some years it bristles. You guard by choosing company as carefully as cargo. You guard by knowing which coves are too quiet and which harbors hold a different kind of risk—the risk of comfort, of spending the profit before the journey home.
Evening in the Courtyard
By the time I return, the shade in the courtyard has softened into late light. My wife laughs when she sees the bundle under my arm, and the sound runs along the walls like water. I bow at the threshold where the ancestors sleep—a gesture my son now copies when he thinks I am not looking—and then I wash grit from my hands at the basin.
Our meal is simple and exactly what a day like this asks: bread still warm at the center, fish grilled until the skin blisters, olives glossy as if remembering the tree, figs opened like small stars, wine that tastes faintly of resin and summer. We eat without hurry. Somewhere beyond the wall a donkey stamps and settles. Dust and salt.
Walking the Ruins Today
When I return to the present and step over the low strings that demarcate the excavations, the air tastes the same, only quieter. The plan of the city is still legible to a careful eye; the courtyards still draw the sun into tidy rectangles; the streets still invite measured footsteps. To walk here is to practice attention. Let your phone rest. Read the interpretive signs. Notice how the smallest change in elevation makes a room.
Practical notes help. Arrive when the heat is kinder and the light low enough to reveal texture—morning or late afternoon serves the stones. Wear shoes that can find grip on dust. Stay where the paths ask you to stay. If you can, bring a small notebook and mark the way the wind moves; no one but you needs to understand your drawing. Respect the quiet. The ground beneath you held bread, bargains, and grief. Walk like you know that.
Why This Story Still Works on Me
Every time I imagine the caravan and the ledger, I am asking an old question in a new voice: how do we build economies that can hold both trade and tenderness? The answer I find in Enkomi is unsentimental. Repair the road. Pay the porter. Keep the script local enough to write quickly and clear enough to audit later. Invest in the temple and in the dock. Honor your ancestors with a bow and your workers with wages. And when rumor comes singing, listen for what it does to the price of grain and the price of peace.
I keep the small comforts, too. The way grape leaves make shade into a green room. The smell of a new game board when you lift the lid. The steadying weight of a hand on a gate stone that has learned the history of a palm. These details do not change empires, but they teach a person to stay human inside them.
Closing the Gate
Night leans in. I walk once more to the threshold and listen to the lane. Somewhere a hammer rings twice and then is done. In the morning, ships will go out again with holds divided among metal, stories, and promise; the math will begin anew. I step back and pull the door leaf until it rests in its groove, feeling the city's confidence thrum through the wood.
In the present, I take one more turn among the stones and lift my face to the same wind. The world is larger now, the maps broader, the news faster, the risks renamed. But the basic bargain survives: to bring the work of the interior to the edge of the sea, to trade honorably, and to go home in time to eat. Let the quiet finish its work.