Phoenician and Punic Studies

The origins and ethnogenesis of a cultural entity, people, and territory referred to as "Phoenician" in later biblical and Classical sources and modern scholarship remain a topic of debate. This chapter examines the textual and archaeological sources relevant to the northern and central Levantine littoral during the Proto- (Late Bronze) and Early (Iron I) Phoenician periods (ca. fourteenth-eleventh centuries BCE). What emerges out of the ruins of the Late Bronze Age is a resilient Early Iron Age coastal culture centered on the commercial interactions of maritime city-states, which survived the demise of the Hittite and Egyptian empires, as well as the collapse of international trade at around 1200 BCE. Autochthonous Canaanite traditions dominate Iron I Phoenician cultural assemblages, but intrusive Aegean-style "Sea Peoples" and Cypriot influences are also present. Together they reflect the dynamic interplay of maritime cultural and commercial exchanges characteristic of the northern and central Levantine littoral during the final centuries of the second millennium BCE.

A ninth-century Phoenician mold-made terracotta mask of an idealized, bearded adult male was found recently during archaeological excavations at Tel Akko. Similar masks have been found at other sites in the Levant and on Cyprus. The context of the Akko mask is a secondary fill in the area of the tel with a long tradition of metalworking. Items recovered with the mask include fragments of figurines and other cult-related items, as well as pottery. This paper provides a discussion of the mask, its archaeological context, and ways in which it may have been used.

The ancient Israelites who produced the Hebrew Bible lived within a rich context of geography, language, politics, religion, and culture. This context profoundly shaped Israel, and indeed it was through the influence of the neighboring people of West Asia along the Mediterranean Sea that Israel defined its own identity. Thus, these neighbors helped forge the very shape of Biblical religion. Though larger nations like Egypt and various Mesopotamian empires loom large in the narratives, Israel’s close neighbors in the Levant appear more frequently in the Bible and prove decisive at crucial moments. The Bible casts the Edomites to the southeast as the “brother” of Israel in the form of the Jacob and Esau narrative. The Philistines are presented as Israel’s first true national political enemy, stealing the ark and battling kings Saul and David. The Moabites violently confront the escaped Hebrew slaves on their way out of Egypt, yet also provide the great-grandmother of King David in the person of Ruth, a Moabite refugee. Though the Bible’s presentation of these neighbors has profoundly shaped our imagination of them, the Bible’s story is but one perspective.

To complicate matters further, though the Bible casts many of these neighbors as villains, its story about them is actually more intricate. Even the Edomites, reviled in the Bible as participators in the sacking of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, have familial ties with Israel in the book of Genesis, and the Aramaeans, political enemies of Israel in the book of Kings, occupy a mysterious place near the heart of Israel’s own journey in Deuteronomy 26:5: “A wandering Aramaean was my ancestor…”

Moreover, the biblical story never presents the identity of these groups as pure “history,” but rather as a complex mix of legend, storytelling, political invective, and memory. We are left wondering how the biblical portrayal might have distorted our thinking about these people as historical groups, and who they actually were.

In this book, I will explore both the biblical portrayal of the smaller groups surrounding Israel—the Philistines, Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Arameans—and what we can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. Learning what we can about who these various peoples were in their own right can deepen our awareness of Israel’s close neighbors. By uncovering the identity of the Philistines as settlers along the coast at the same time that early Israel carved out their place in the land, for example, we can better understand the social turmoil and political maneuvering that lies just beneath the surface of the biblical narrative, and we can see more clearly just how the authors of the Bible saw themselves in the face of others. Through its overview of these surrounding groups, this book will demonstrate in a direct and accessible manner the extent to which ancient Israelite identity was fluid and forged both within and against the identities of its close neighbors. Animated by the latest and best research, yet written for students, this book will invite readers to embark on a journey of scholarly discovery to reveal the unfamiliar world of Israel’s place among its neighbors.

The study of a funerary complex inevitably involves the collaboration between many different but complementary disciplines. As for the north-western necropolis of Nora, the synergistic work between archaeology, taphonomy and bioarcheology led us to the reconstruction of the funerary record of two hypogeum graves excavated by the University of Padua during the 2016-2017 archaeological campaigns. Unfortunately, information about the other necropolises belonging to the site are so far not available, even though the assessment of biological information through anthropological analysis represents a fundamental standard for every reconstruction or interpretation of funerary complexes and the underlying social complexity. The aim of this study is hence to provide the very first anthropological information about the ancient inhabitants of Nora.

scanner and analysed by applying image analysis techniques to measure 26 morphometric features. By applying stepwise linear discriminant analysis, a morphometric comparison was made between the archaeological fruitstones of Prunus and the modern ones collected in Sardinia. These analyses allowed identification of 53 archaeological fruit-stones as P. spinosa and 11 as P. domestica. Moreover, the archaeological samples of P. spinosa showed morphomet-ric similarities in 92.5% of the cases with the modern P. spinosa samples currently growing near the Phoenician and Punic site. Likewise, the archaeological fruitstones identified as P. domestica showed similarities with the modern variety of P. domestica called Sanguigna di Bosa which is currently cultivated near the village of Bosa. Currently, these findings represent the first evidence of P. domestica in Italy during the Phoenician and Punic periods.

In the middle of the 18th century, Barthélemy and Swinton almost simultaneously deciphered
Phoenician writing. This outstanding event in the history of the West Semitic epigraphy has once
again led to a dispute between two scholars for the primacy in this discovery. Would Barthelemy’s
dechipherment have been so quick and successful without the work that had been done by his
predecessors, including Swinton?
Key words: Barthélemy, Swinton, Phoenician alphabet, Melitensis prima, Cippi Melqarti, Citiensis
secunda.

The objective of our work was to proceed to make a detailed review of the texts in Punic and Neo-Punic characters on coins in the Iberian peninsula, as regards their reading and identification, and to attempt to establish as reliably as possible the form adopted by the toponym in its Phoenician adaptation. To do this we attempted first to determine the graphic features of the brief coin texts, in addition to establishing the general rules by which the Iberian toponyms adapt to Semitic phonetics. *

Abstract: The archaeological research carried out in the ancient settlement of Sulky during the last decades is
fundamental to understand the size of the first Phoenician population in the Sulcis area. Even the most ancient
ground levels clearly show the Eastern origins of the family groups that occupied this area from the beginning
of the 8th century BC, but it is also evident the presence of an indigenous component with whom the Levantines
lay the foundation of the first settlement. Among the most interesting findings, we are examining the
remains of an oven of the type called tannūr or tabouna, characteristic of the near eastern tradition of baking
bread, together with some elements of material culture representing the ways of cultural integration on the
site.