This chapter looks at some of the experiments of international governance by the United Nations typically listed as cases of international administrations (West Irian, Namibia, Cambodia and Eastern Slavonia). These United Nations peace missions have been considered as international administrations by numerous scholars, in the same category with Kosovo and Timor-Leste and sometimes on par with these two experiments in terms of effective authority deployed by international officials. I will be arguing that contra this opinion generally based on the reading of the mandates, international officials have displayed only limited political authority over these territories. Through archival work conducted in the United Nations Archives, revealing in specific instances the hidden transcripts of the time, I will be analysing each of these cases in turn, and adding a few other cases as well including Cyprus, El Salvador, Mozambique, Western Sahara and Somalia.

The secularisation of British society was at odds with global developments. The resurgence of religion internationally affected the RAChD and the British Army in various ways. Despite its problems, such was the prestige of the RAChD that it helped mould Bundeswehr chaplaincy in the Cold War; chaplaincies in newly independent African nations; and chaplaincies in former Warsaw Pact countries. In the War on Terror, its mentorship was extended to the Afghan National Army. Meanwhile, the religious aspects of many contemporary conflicts involved chaplains in widespread ‘religious engagement’ with local populations. Significantly, religion proved to be a key dimension of the Cold War, of the ‘Emergencies’ in Kenya and Cyprus, of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, of the Falklands and Gulf Wars, of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and of the War on Terror. While British soldiers could and did recoil from their often-brutal ‘religious’ character, a strong anti-religious animus (which was widely stoked in ‘New Atheist’ circles) was probably forestalled by the support they received from their chaplains and by soldiers’ recourse to religion for personal protection and consolation.

The twelfth–eleventh centuries BCE mark the transition between the Late Bronze Age (LBA) of Cyprus and the very different social world of the Early Iron Age. The end of the LBA is marked by violent destructions, the abandonment of urban centers and rural communities, and a subsequent dramatic shift in settlement pattern. There is a clear break in material production on the island – especially in pottery production – and significant changes in funerary and ritual practice. Within the wider East Mediterranean, international maritime trade broke down, major palace economies and overarching empire states disappeared, and populations relocated. The direct effect on Cyprus is debated, particularly the presence of Mycenaean colonizing communities. The island’s copper trade apparently persisted, at a reduced scale from the LBA, and cultural and trading links continued with Crete and Philistine communities of the southern Levant. Using settlement and cemetery archaeology, this chapter explores the establishment of new communities on Cyprus ancestral to the Iron Age city kingdoms, the changing material world of the new settlements, contacts beyond the island, the earliest Phoenician activity on Cyprus, and the degree to which the island was a part of the emerging world of Iron Age Greece.

In 1974, É. Masson divided Cypro-Minoan inscriptions into four different scripts based on how their signs were drawn. Her divisions still persist, but have become increasingly controversial: are they really different scripts, or are they just variants of one script? In Chapter 10, the corpora of Masson’s three main divisions of Cypro-Minoan are analyzed against each other in an effort to determine whether they all encode the same language. As a control, three analogous corpora of Cypriot Syllabic inscriptions are analyzed against each other in the same way, with the results demonstrating an overwhelming probability that they all encode the same language (which we know they do, as Cypriot Syllabic is deciphered: it encodes Greek). The analysis of Masson’s three main divisions of Cypro-Minoan demonstrates a similarly overwhelming probability that they all encode the same language, and thus are simply variants of the same written language, not different scripts. The Cypro-Minoan and Cypriot Syllabic corpora are also analyzed against each other, demonstrating an overwhelming probability that the two scripts encode different languages—that is, that Cypro-Minoan does NOT encode Greek.

Although Cypriot Syllabic was mostly used to write in Greek, it was sometimes used to write in an unknown indigenous language now conventionally called “Eteocypriot.” Many have wondered whether Eteocypriot could be a descendant of the language behind the earlier Cypro-Minoan script. In Chapter 11, Cypro-Minoan is analyzed against Linear A and Eteocypriot in an effort to determine whether any of them encode the same language. As a control, Cypriot Syllabic is analyzed against Linear B in the same way, with the results demonstrating an overwhelming probability that both scripts encode the same language (which we know they do, as both scripts are deciphered: they both encode Greek). Cypriot Syllabic is also analyzed against Linear A and Eteocypriot, demonstrating an overwhelming probability that none of them encode the same language—that is, that Linear A (for a fourth time) does NOT encode Greek, and neither does Eteocypriot. The analysis of Cypro-Minoan against Linear A and Eteocypriot, however, demonstrates a similarly overwhelming probability that (a) though Cypro-Minoan and Linear A clearly encode different languages, (b) Cypro-Minoan and Eteocypriot do encode the same language.

Mycenaean pottery has a remarkable continuity. In LH I and LH II pottery is based on Minoan principles. MH styles continue but the lustrous paint technique is introduced from Crete first in Ayios Stephanos, Laconia in LH I, and the lustrous decorated style developed. Marine, Ephyraean and the monumental palace style mark the LH II. Gradually though naturalism fades, tendency to abstraction and standardization appear leading to the uniformity of the famous Mycenae ‘koine’. In LH III, often inspired by wall-paintings, the Pictorial style expanded, kraters representing mainly chariot scenes being the typical vessels. The revival of the pottery after the destruction of the palaces brings to the pictorial an explosion of new themes. Close and granary styles mark the end of the pottery sequence. Clay painted larnakes, rare in Greece, appeared first in Crete under bathtub or rectangular form; exception is a unique set discovered in Tanagra depicting in a realistic vivid way scenes related to death and funeral rites.

This introduction explains the socio-political context that led to the protest depicted on the cover of the book. This is an instance of an internal, ideological conflict which led to joint collective action of the two communities, one of the few historical instances of such an event in Cyprus that was the result of a process of valorisation of free movement across the divide that started with the opening of the checkpoints in 2003. It is argued that in order to understand conflict and its transformation in conflict and post-conflict settings, it is important to evaluate internal heterogeneity and the transformation from one position to another in the representational field of an ethnic conflict. An integrative framework of a social developmental psychology is then presented, which is sensitive to historical change and change at various time scales (microgenesis, ontogenesis and sociogenesis) and at different levels of analysis. The introduction ends with a preview of the book, its two parts and different chapters.

In this chapter I apply the theoretical framework developed in the previous chapters to the case of the Cyprus conflict. First, I offer a short narration of the Cyprus conflict as background knowledge to the analysis that will follow that concerns the ontogenesis of social representations of the Cyprus conflict in the context of evolving educational policies of collective memory and history teaching since 1974. In particular, I propose that students, depending on their developmental level, reconstruct a collective memory promulgated for years as a certain hegemonic historical narrative of collective struggle to undo the injustices caused by a collective trauma. I also present research findings from our lab spanning the years 2003-2023 regarding the evolution and crystallisation of significant structures of representation in this period touching upon issues of change, resistance and continuity.

In the Epilogue Christoforou offers an impressionistic essay on encounters with ancient Greek epic in modern Greek lands. In an alternative, personal perspective on the political account provided in Hanink’s chapter, he explores the problematic ownership of the past in Greece and how the central place held by Greek antiquity, and in particular epic, in the construction of western civilisation has created a strange distance between Greeks and the Greek past and its literature. Reflecting on his own experience as a Grecophone classicist, Christoforou shows how the story of Greekness and epic is now played out in the background of Greeks performing their Hellenicity in a world that does not always trust their inheritance.

An investigation of the Luvo-Hittite dammara- religious functionaries (male and female) and the borrowing of the term into Ahhiyawan (Ur-Aeolian) and, thence, European Mycenaean cult vocabulary as dumartes and its variant damartes (a scribal borrowing), and an exploration of the Anatolian source of the theonym Artemis. The intersection of both the cult title and divine name with Mycenaean dialect variation is carefully examined.

The investigation of Aeolian foundation myths continues in this chapter, with examination of traditions of the founding of Boeotian Thebes. Ancestral Indo-European tradition is again evident, as is an Anatolian stratum, one which foregrounds technological expertise of Asian origin.