Phoenicians in Spain

Esta ponencia aborda un caso histórico de contacto cultural y movilidad a lo largo de varios siglos. Nuestro encargo se centra en examinar la costa oriental de la península ibérica, y especialmente el área del sureste peninsular, desde el final de la Edad del Bronce hasta la segunda guerra púnica, buscando una perspectiva cronológica amplia que permita advertir cambios históricos a largo plazo.

EDITORIAL
Ida Oggiano
This issue of the Rivista di Studi Fenici happily coincides with a number of significant developments in the magazine’s long history: new management, a new scientific and editorial committee, a new design and, not least, a monograph dedicated to one of the greatest exponents of the discipline in which the Rivista is the most important scientific organ.
The launch of this volume of the Rivista, then, forms part of a renewal that is located within a solid tradition of study – that devoted to the Phoenician and Punic civilizations – founded by Sabatino Moscati. Indeed, this new deal intends to follow the path marked out in the course of the 43 years of the Rivista, but at a different pace, dictated by the natural evolution of a discipline characterized by constant change. New themes, new regions, new chronological scopes and, above all, new kinds of methodological approach give ever greater topicality and interest to the study of the history of the Mediterranean of the first millennium BCE from the Phoenician perspective. Today this increasingly means highlighting the indistinct rather than the clearly defined: seafarers, founders of “colonies”, heirs and propagators of the Syro-Palestinian traditions, early assimilators of the traditions of others and, therefore, representatives of an identity in a continuous state of renewal.
It is in this spirit that the members of the scientific committee have been chosen, scholars from diverse backgrounds and from various countries which, since ancient times or more recently, have played a role in the history and the study of the Phoenician and Punic world. The aim is to make the Rivista di Studi Fenici a meeting place for the multiple new realities that today nourish and strengthen the discipline. It is a discipline whose raison d’être is still valid precisely because it has been able to reinvent itself beyond the confines of academic categories by concentrating on the study of the Mediterranean context which, thanks to the movement of the Levantine populations, has expanded both geographically and chronologically. Following the early days of the discipline, when the focus was on finding the “Phoenician” elements that had hitherto been ignored in studies, often deliberately, a mature phase in the research has been reached which aims to investigate the interaction between the diverse peoples of the Mediterranean rather than the outcome of that phenomenon, i.e. the birth of cultural characteristics thought to be specific to each particular group. The plasticity of the identity of the phonikes, often viewed negatively, can now be regarded as a quality of extraordinary topicality that sees the fil rouge of their history (formed from an amalgam of language and cults, objects and images) become interwoven with the histories of other peoples, changing colour and at times unravelling, across locations and time.
With this issue, we hope that the Rivista di Studi Fenici can become a reference point for high-level contributions on the history of the Phoenicians, the Punics, and all those who came into contact with them and contributed to enriching their shifting identity. The pages of the Rivista will thus be an ideal space which, as a result of dialogue between scholars of diverse backgrounds and nationalities, will be a locus for academic debate that is free of the political and cultural boundaries that so dramatically mark these sad times in which we live.