Of trade, empires and pygmy hippos

Otago Daily Times

09-07-2025

Did you know that Cyprus once had pygmy hippos? Of course you did.
But do you know what happened to them? We did. As I have just discovered in a little museum on the next-to-last day of a holiday in Europe.
Hippos found their way to Cyprus a couple of hundred thousand years ago, perhaps swept over with a flood from what is now Turkey. And having arrived they set about shrinking to fit their new home.
By the time human beings reached the island, some 190,000 years later, the average Cypriot hippo was about the size of a large dog. And that dog seemingly made good eating, because it wasn't long before the hippo was extinct.
There's a pygmy hippo skeleton in the museum, which I can study at leisure because I have the place to myself. Everybody else in this hot little tourist town is at the beach.
As it happens I mainly came in for the relief of air-conditioning, but while cooling down I took the chance to study a little of the story of Cyprus — and what an instructive thing it proved to be.
Cyprus is at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. As we tourists bask on the soft sand, or drink in the hot bars, or dive off boats into sapphire water, we tend to forget that this is the closest land mass to the miseries of Gaza and not that far from Iran which the Americans so love to bomb. This is a volatile part of the world, and always has been.
How the first people reached Cyprus is not known but it was probably on a raft of reeds. There's a reproduction of such a thing in the museum.
It does not look seaworthy, but then it only had to fluke the journey once, and that was Cyprus populated and the mini-hippo doomed.
The early people lived simply. They fished and ate hippos and got by in the warm climate for a few thousand years and wrote nothing down. Time simply passed and people lived and died.
Gradually more visitors arrived and settled. They developed pottery and learned to smelt copper. Links were established with the mainland of what is now Greece that prove fundamental to the island's identity. But Cyprus lay close to many different centres of power, and that proved both its glory and its curse.
The prize exhibit in the museum is a trading ship. It's a replica of one found on the sea-bed in the 1960s, along with its cargo of pottery amphorae, which would have been used to transport wine and olive oil.
Such vessels began to ply the eastern end of the Mediterranean about 3000 years ago and the first great sailors and traders to make use of them were the Phoenicians from what is now Lebanon.
But the Phoenicians didn't bring only trade. They brought empire.
Cyprus was just too juicy to resist, so they colonised it. And in doing so they set a pattern that has persisted.
After the Phoenicians, the Assyrians conquered Cyprus, followed by the Egyptians, then the Persians, then the Egyptians again.
Around the time of Christ, Cyprus inevitably became part of the greatest Empire the world has seen, and it remained more or less Roman until the Arabs overran it in the seventh century. Soon after that it became part of the Byzantine empire, run out of Constantinople, formerly Byzantium and now Istanbul.
In the 12th century the Crusaders took Cyprus by force, ostensibly for Christianity. Richard the Lionheart gave the island to the Knights Templar who sold it to the French who later lost it to the Venetians. Othello, the Moor of Venice, was commander of the garrison here, defending the island against the Ottoman forces.
In time, the Ottomans won and they held Cyprus until the outbreak of World War 1, when the British annexed it — which explains why Cypriots drive on the left and use British-style plug sockets.
Eventually the British handed it over to Greece, in accordance with the population's wishes, only for the Turks to invade in 1974 and occupy the northern half of Cyprus where they remain to this day, much to the resentment of most Cypriots.
And the moral of the story is that there is no moral of the story. It is simply a tale of take-what-you-can, of might-is-right, of endless greed and theft and violence from a species that, alone on this little planet, preaches the opposite.
Ask the pygmy hippos.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.