Philia Period (Early BronzeAge): 2500-2200 BC

Around 2500BC, new settlers from Anatolia (South Turkey) brought new technologies and animal species to Cyprus. They may have been refugees from Indo European invasions. (In Anatolia these conflicts led to the Accadian empire of Sargon the 1st.). The Philia culture, as it is now called, quickly moved from the North coastal plain into the foothills of the copper-rich Troodos mountains. They introduced copper smelting but it is unclear whether the resultant preponderance of arsenic bronze was through deliberate choice of arsenic rich ores. Cyprus has no tin deposits, so it was only much later that tin bronze was substituted.

They introduced ploughs and sickles and the warp-weighted loom and had mud-brick houses, or compounds, built on stone footings (rectangular rooms arranged around a courtyard). Pit and rock-cut chamber tombs were outside the walls. They brought in donkeys and re-introduced cattle to the island in large numbers. These animals pulling their new ploughs allowed larger areas to be taken into cultivation, which started an expansion of the population that continued through the Early and Middle Bronze Ages.

The Philia also made flat-bottomed red polished ware pottery (often with broken-line incised decoration). There are strong similarities with Anatolan Red Burnished ware (eg from Tarsus and Troy), though the latter had dishes and sometimes used the potters wheel - neither of these introduced in Cyprus. However the famous Philia large jugs with cut-away spout have parallels in western Anatolia.

The quite uniform Philia culture took a long time to occupy the whole island and the process appears to have been peaceful. The native Chalcolithic culture hung on in the South West and East till possibly as late as 2300 BCE. The Early Cypriot I culture which took over from them spread similarly slowly, starting at about the same time, and again the process seems to have been assimilation rather than conquest.

It is only recently with the work of Webb and Frankel that the Philia period has been accepted as predating Early Cypriot. The dates of Cypriot Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age periods tend to be regularly revised. Most knowledge comes from cemeteries and there has been limited digging of stratified occupation sites of this period, partly due to the 1974 Turkish invasion and occupation of the North, which led to a UNESCO ban on archaeological co-operation.