The Oxford Handbook Of The Phoenician And Punic Mediterranean

The Phoenicians created the Mediterranean world as we know it-yet they remain a poorly understood group. In this Handbook, the first of its kind in English, readers will find expert essays covering the history, culture, and areas of settlement throughout the Phoenician and Punic world.

The Phoenicians created the Mediterranean world as we know it, yet they remain a shadowy and poorly understood group. This handbook provides a current overview of the study of these ancient seafarers and craftsmen, bringing together all things Phoenician and Punic, from scholars from across Europe, North America, Australia, and the Mediterranean world. Summary studies on key historical moments (such as the history of Carthage), areas of culture (organized around language, religion, and material culture), regional studies and areas of contact (spanning from the Levant and the Aegean to Iberia and North Africa), and the reception of the Phoenicians as an idea, are included.

The Phoenicians created the Mediterranean world as we know it--yet they remain a poorly understood group. In this Handbook, the first of its kind in English, readers will find expert essays covering the history, culture, and areas of settlement throughout the Phoenician and Punic world.

“An important new book...offers a powerful call for historians of the ancient Mediterranean to consider their implicit biases in writing ancient history and it provides an example of how more inclusive histories may be written.” —Denise Demetriou, New England Classical Journal “With a light touch and a masterful command of the literature, López-Ruiz replaces old ideas with a subtle and more accurate account of the extensive cross-cultural exchange patterns and economy driven by the Phoenician trade networks that ‘re-wired’ the Mediterranean world. A must read.” —J. G. Manning, author of The Open Sea “[A] substantial and important contribution...to the ancient history of the Mediterranean. López-Ruiz’s work does justice to the Phoenicians’ role in shaping Mediterranean culture by providing rational and factual argumentation and by setting the record straight.” —Hélène Sader, Bryn Mawr Classical Review Imagine you are a traveler sailing to the major cities around the Mediterranean in 750 BC. You would notice a remarkable similarity in the dress, alphabet, consumer goods, and gods from Gibraltar to Tyre. This was not the Greek world—it was the Phoenician. Propelled by technological advancements of a kind unseen since the Neolithic revolution, Phoenicians knit together diverse Mediterranean societies, fostering a literate and sophisticated urban elite sharing common cultural, economic, and aesthetic modes. Following the trail of the Phoenicians from the Levant to the Atlantic coast of Iberia, Carolina López-Ruiz offers the first comprehensive study of the cultural exchange that transformed the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Greeks, Etruscans, Sardinians, Iberians, and others adopted a Levantine-inflected way of life, as they aspired to emulate Near Eastern civilizations. López-Ruiz explores these many inheritances, from sphinxes and hieratic statues to ivories, metalwork, volute capitals, inscriptions, and Ashtart iconography. Meticulously documented and boldly argued, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean revises the Hellenocentric model of the ancient world and restores from obscurity the true role of Near Eastern societies in the history of early civilizations.

The role of the Phoenicians in the economy, culture and politics of the ancient Mediterranean was as large as that of the Greeks and Romans, and deeply interconnected with that 'classical' world, but their lack of literature and their oriental associations mean that they are much less well-known. This book brings state-of-the-art international scholarship on Phoenician and Punic studies to an English-speaking audience, collecting new papers from fifteen leading voices in the field from Europe and North Africa, with a bias towards the younger generation. Focusing on a series of case-studies from the colonial world of the western Mediterranean, it asks what 'Phoenician' and 'Punic' actually mean, how Punic or western Phoenician identity has been constructed by ancients and moderns, and whether there was in fact a 'Punic world'.

This Handbook aims to serve as a research guide to the archaeology of the Levant, an area situated at the crossroads of the ancient world that linked the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The Levant as used here is a historical geographical term referring to a large area which today comprises the modern states of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, western Syria, and Cyprus, as well as the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. Unique in its treatment of the entire region, it offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the current state of the archaeology of the Levant within its larger cultural, historical, and socio-economic contexts. The Handbook also attempts to bridge the modern scholarly and political divide between archaeologists working in this highly contested region. Written by leading international scholars in the field, it focuses chronologically on the Neolithic through Persian periods - a time span during which the Levant was often in close contact with the imperial powers of Egypt, Anatolia, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. This volume will serve as an invaluable reference work for those interested in a contextualised archaeological account of this region, beginning with the 'agricultural revolution' until the conquest of Alexander the Great that marked the end of the Persian period.

Carefully selected examples from texts and dialects of the whole Phoenician-Punic period bring to life the grammatical description of this language. Included are fully vocalized Punic and Neo-Punic inscriptions of Roman Tripolitiana in Latin orthography as well as the literary fragments of Punic drama as found in Plautus' comedy Poenulus. This classical descriptive grammar of the Phoenician-Punic language (1200 BCE - 350 CE) presents the reader with a full picture: its phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and usage. Its history and its various dialects are dealt with in an introduction. Hebraists and Semitists will find the description of the verbal system of particular interest to them, especially that of the literary language, which holds that tense and aspect reference of a given form of the verb is largely a function of syntax, not morphology. Much of this grammatical material is presented here for the first time.

Who were the ancient Phoenicians, and did they actually exist? The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the “Phoenicians” never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies—and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources. Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and communities these people really constructed for themselves in the ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices. She traces how the idea of “being Phoenician” first emerged in support of the imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized as a component of modern national identities in contexts as far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon. In Search of the Phoenicians delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays, painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to twenty-first century Tunisia.

Examines the history, people, culture, civilization, and achievements of the Phoenicians, whose supremacy in shipbuilding and navigation enabled them to be masters of the ancient world for three hundred years.

"Offers six exemplary case studies of Greeks and Romans at war, thoroughly illustrated with detailed battle maps and photographs"--Provided by publisher.