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Selected and rare materials, excerpts and observations from ancient, medieval and contemporary authors, travelers and researchers about Cyprus.
 
 
 
 
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GIOVANNI MARITI
Travels in the Island of Cyprus
page 27

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сн. ш] Of the ancient City of Citium 2 3 Hamburg, 1837] which shows clearly the enclosed port which Strabo places near ancient Citium. I had written so far when I had the luck to light on a description of Cyprus by Ascanio Savorgnano, a Venetian gentleman [published by J. P. Reinhard in the Beylagen to Vol. п. of his Geschichte des Konigreichs Cypern, pp. 33—53, 4to, Erlangen, 1768]. Speaking of the position of Salines, he writes : "in ancient times there was a city there called Citium, of which the remains are clearly visible. In this place there is no height which could be other than serviceable as the site of a citadel (a thing of little cost, if one used up part of the city ramparts, now destroyed) which would command the place as far as that height where there was formerly a castle, now a windmill. One sees a channel, showing that there was once a port there ; and were this channel to be a little deepened one might create a perfectly safe harbour." This being the case those maps which took for their guide the Chorograffia of Lusignan should be corrected. [Cf. de Mas Latrie, Notice &c. 1847: " Le bassin que j'ai vu combler pendant mon séjour à Larnaca, mais dont on trouve le dessein dans Mariti et Drummond était certainement le port fermé (λιμήν κλειστός) dont il est question dans Strabon."] It is quite certain that the city of Citium was not such that its position would not be clearly marked, for it was one of the most famous in the island, and the home of Zeno, the Stoic : of another Zeno, a rhetorician or poet : Apollodorus and Apollonius, physicians : Isigonus, who wrote On Things Incredible : Persaeus, son of Demetrius, an illustrious Stoic. Thothmes III, a King of Egypt of the XVIIIth Dynasty, took the city from the Assyrians, and destroyed it together with other cities in Cyprus, but he rebuilt this and the rest. Apries, the Pharaoh Hophra of Jeremiah xliv.- 30, defeated the Cypriots and Phoenicians in a naval combat off Citium, B.C. 588. We now get the guidance of Herodotus, who tells (11. 182)

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