The Punic Mediterranean: Identities and Identification from Phoenician Settlement to Roman Rule

British School at Rome Studies

by Josephine Quinn (Editor), Nicholas C. Vella (Editor), Jonathan R. W. Prag

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'.

Genres: History

414 pages, Hardcover

First published November 24, 2014

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps a bit unfair to rate this book (a conference book with papers from a wide range of authors must be uneven for the reader, if only because some things are more interesting than others, and that all depends on who is reading it). Some of the papers were great, some of them got lost in details or intense semantic discussions that took up more space than the issue perhaps deserves - I'm an outsider, and I read the book as that (I can understand how central the question is if this is your field of work, but if it's not it makes for a boring read after a while).

But without a doubt 5 stars to the summarising Afterword by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill - short but really well done.