Description
Book SynopsisOffering new insights based on recent archaeological discoveries in their heartland of modern-day Lebanon, Mark Woolmer presents a fresh appraisal of this fascinating, yet elusive, Semitic people. Discussing material culture, language and alphabet, religion (including sacred prostitution of women and boys to the goddess Astarte), funerary custom and trade and expansion into the Punic west, he explores Phoenicia in all its paradoxical complexity. Viewed in antiquity as sage scribes and intrepid mariners who pushed back the boundaries of the known world, and as skilled engineers who built monumental harbour cities like Tyre and Sidon, the Phoenicians were also considered (especially by their rivals, the Romans) to be profiteers cruelly trading in human lives. The author shows them above all to have been masters of the sea: this was a civilization that circumnavigated Africa two thousand years before Vasco da Gama did it in 1498. The Phoenicians present a tantalizing face to the ancient
Trade ReviewExtremely exciting – beautifully designed intellectually. * Helen Castor, Fellow in History, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UK *
Table of ContentsList of Maps and Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations Preface Timeline Introduction 1. Historical Overview 2. Government and Society 3. Religion 4. Art and Material Culture 5. Overseas Expansion Epilogue Further Reading Notes Index
