The Punic Mediterranean

A revisionist exploration of identities and interactions in the 'Punic World' of the western Mediterranean.

This is a collection of essays bringing the most exciting work in Phoenicio-Punic studies to English-speaking readers. They ask what 'Phoenician' and 'Punic' really mean in ancient and modern contexts, and offer in response a rich series of case studies of Phoenician identity and activity from sites across the Mediterranean.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'.