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This chapter concerns the presence of the Phoenicians and Near Easterners in the Aegean, with a special focus on the Early Iron Age and dealing sporadically with later periods. Divided into two parts, the chapter discusses first the picture that emerges from the written sources in antiquity regarding the Phoenicians (or more generally, easterners) and what we can reconstruct through the tangible, archaeological data we have today. Especially in relation to the material evidence, definitions of exotica and Phoenician artifacts are offered in a short introduction and then the chapter discusses the possible direct or indirect presence of Phoenicians in the Aegean regions, starting from Crete, the eastern Aegean, and the Cyclades, Attica and Euboea, and ending in the northern Aegean. The picture suggested by excavations and the interpretation of the finds to date show that the dynamics of the circulation of Phoenicians in the Aegean, at least in the earliest stages, passed through Cyprus and the Cypriots, as well as through Euboeans and the Cycladians.

Agriculture played a crucial role for the Phoenicians. Systematic study of the rural Phoenician world goes back only a few decades, thanks to archaeological surveys and excavations of non-urban structures and settlements. Despite our increasing knowledge of the subject, it is still difficult to define a single model. Still we can speak of some constant features. The chapter gives a view of coastal settlements producing an easily exported agricultural surplus, as well as husbandry, especially cattle, ovicaprids, and pigs. This was followed by a period of systematic occupation of the land, not necessarily welcomed by the native groups. Nevertheless, this occupation established organized and systematic exploitation and expansion of the “Mediterranean triad” (wheat, olive, wine). The success of this agricultural activity had a crucial role in the development of Phoenician-Punic cities.

The alphabet employed by the Phoenicians was the inheritor of a long tradition of alphabetic writing and was itself adapted for use throughout the Mediterranean basin by numerous populations speaking many languages. The present contribution traces the origins of the alphabet in Sinai and the Levant before discussing different alphabetic standardizations in Ugarit and Phoenician Tyre. The complex adaptation of the latter for representation of the Greek language is described in detail, then some brief attention is given to likely—Etruscan and other Italic alphabets—and possible (Iberian and Berber) descendants of the Phoenician alphabet. Finally, it is stressed that current research does not view the Phoenician and other alphabets as inherently simpler, more easily learned, or more democratic than other writing systems. The Phoenician alphabet remains, nevertheless, an impressive technological development worthy, especially by virtue of its generative power, of detailed study ranging from paleographic and orthographic specifications to social and political contextualization.

St Petersburg, founded in 1703 and now the second largest city in Russia, has always been considered as a ‘new city’. However, it was not founded on a barren site. The land in the mouth of the Neva has been inhabited since the Neolithic era. In the middle ages, it was home to Ingrian and Russian settlements. Constant military conflicts over this territory both in the Middle Ages and in post-medieval times have left their traces—the remnants of the demolished Swedish fortresses, Landskrona (fourteenth century) and Nyenschantz (seventeenth century). During the 300-year history of St Petersburg, many fortifications, engineering structures, and architectural sites have been lost, and their history and remnants are becoming a target for thorough architectural research.

This chapter deals with the archaeology of the Phoenician cities of the motherland, highlighting mainly recent results from Lebanon. It gives an overview of the available archaeological evidence resulting from surveys and excavations. The chapter presents the physical characteristics of the Phoenician cities: their location, size, distribution, and results of the investigation of their harbors. It discusses in detail the recent findings regarding the development of their building techniques and their domestic and religious architecture. These findings indicate that there is no characteristic Phoenician house or temple plan but, rather, a wide variety of them. The chapter ends with the discussion of funerary architecture and practices. After a brief presentation of the various types of burials, an overview of Phoenician practices relating to both inhumation and cremation is presented. Our understanding of the latter practice was substantially enhanced by the recent evidence from the Tyrian cemetery of al-Bass.

The fourth to seventh centuries were formative in the art and culture of Armenia. This era witnessed the conversion of the land to Christianity, the invention of the Armenian alphabet and the consequent development of a literary tradition, the formulation of a specific understanding of the nature of Christ, and the emergence of a striking and robust visual tradition. The architecture, stone sculpture, and mosaic pavements produced during this era attest to the integration of Armenians within the broader Mediterranean and Iranian worlds, and to the development of distinctive artistic forms and practices. This material thus offers powerful testimony of contemporary beliefs, social structures, and political conditions of Armenians living both within the historical homeland and in communities abroad.

Rooted in Late Bronze Age Levantine traditions, Phoenician art emerges in the early first millennium bce, spiced with new elements adopted and adapted from contemporary Egyptian models, while also permeable to influence from artistic trends popular with neighboring cultures and overseas recipients of Phoenician luxurious exports. During its acme between the late ninth and early seventh centuries bce, the art shared a common repertoire of motifs among sculptors, metalsmiths, ivory carvers, and seal cutters in a predominantly Egyptianizing style. Mass-produced terracotta plaques, figurines, and the minor arts displayed a more diversified array of autochthonous characteristics. In line with the evolution of sculpture, the Cypriot component was definitely replaced by Greek idioms from the later sixth century bce onward. If Punic art cannot possibly be defined as a mere perpetuation of the Phoenician production, and was impacted by more complex patterns of cultural interaction (e.g. North Africa, Iberia), the latter’s heritage is undeniable in many artistic media.

In this third introductory chapter, the author looks back at the formative years of the study of the Phoenician and Punic worlds, taking a cue from a paper written fifty years ago by the person who can arguably be called the most influential scholar in the field during the second half of the twentieth century, Sabatino Moscati. Against the background of Moscati’s work, in particular the limitations of and opportunities provided by his field projects, the author then moves on to propose eight particular ways in which the field can move forward: a geography of knowledge; recognition of difference; life histories of objects’ contextual approach; food, cooking, and social ideas; people, collaboration; and publication.

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.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to how the historiographical development of Roman studies, since mid-twentieth century decolonization, has altered our understanding of the developments which took place in North Africa following the destruction of Carthage in 146 bce. The reader is introduced to literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources of evidence, which have traditionally been used to argue for either cultural change or continuity. After an initial examination of the immediate aftermath of the Third Punic War, Roman land appropriation and taxation, the focus is on sources of evidence usually described as “Punic,” “neo-Punic” or “Late Punic,” covering the spheres of municipal institutions, language use, and religious and funerary rituals. The vibrant multiculturalism and regional diversity of the Mediterranean and especially North Africa, both before and after the Roman conquest, is the dominant theme. This is used to shift emphasis away from grand explanatory paradigms based on essentialist identity categories, and toward a more nuanced picture of the complex and multivariate processes of cultural development and integration.

This photo essay outlines the experimental work undertaken in summer 2007 in Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, Turkey, while the author was the artist in residence. The work done in this Neolithic settlement led to the discovery of a sun clock, i.e. a beam of light present in each dwelling entering from the roof and drifting like a sun dial to different areas of the house. The parallelogram of light produced by the beam created a pattern of light and shadow, showing the archaeological importance of shadows and their power to reveal aspects of people’s lives in the settlement. Based on the study of the shadows observed and filmed in Çatalhöyük indoors and outdoors, this chapter examines the functions and purposes of selected shadows that show how approaching archaeology from an artist’s viewpoint can enhance interpretation, understanding, and the production of knowledge.

Carthage in 479–265 bce reached a size and prosperity equaling any leading Greek city-state. Despite its defeat in Sicily in 480 bce, its economic reach across the Mediterranean grew, and so did its indirect hegemony over North Africa’s coasts almost to Cyrenaica in the east and the edges of Numidia in the west. Carthaginians’ openness to external cultural influences—Greek, Egyptian, and native Libyan—made them effectively a multicultural society, as archaeological and historical evidence makes clear. Although little written evidence from Carthaginian sources survives, the probably genuine Periplus of Hanno the King, composed around 500–450 and extant in a perhaps shortened Greek translation, throws light on the city’s readiness to extend its reach even beyond the Straits of Gibraltar (a reach confirmed by Herodotus and others), while the three treaties with Rome preserved in Greek by Polybius, dating probably between ca. 500 and 279, illuminate Carthaginian interstate relations in the central and western Mediterranean. The physical city spread beyond its archaic limits, with residential housing appearing between the hill of Byrsa and the shoreline (in place of artisanal workshops), as well as another residential quarter to Byrsa’s west and a massive seawall built along the eastern shoreline as far as the swampy lagoons that much later became the city’s famous hidden ports. One of these newer sectors may be the “New City” in Diodorus’s account of the abortive coup of Bomilcar in 308. During the fifth century, Carthaginian hegemony was imposed on neighboring Libyan communities, and by 310, the fertile Cape Bon peninsula was intensively cultivated by Carthaginian proprietors, as Agathocles’s invading forces noted. Even renewed and repeated conflicts with Syracuse and other Siceliot states from 410 onward rarely set back Carthage’s prosperity and power.

The coins of the Phoenician city-states were struck in the fifth and fourth centuries bce. Influenced by coins struck in Greece and eastern Greece, Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, and Aradus struck coins in silver and bronze. These coins functioned as the “small change” for the gold coins struck by the imperial mint of Achaemenid Persia. The production of these coins aided in everyday commerce and in the collection of tariffs and taxes. Early studies of these coins were inevitably connected to the great royal collections of Europe in London and Paris. Major studies of these coins appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recent archaeological discoveries in Lebanon have included an inscription which expanded knowledge of the king list of the Phoenician city of Sidon in the fifth and fourth centuries bce. New historical sources such as this inscription published by Maurice Dunand in 1965 have enabled scholars to propose new and more accurate chronologies for the earliest coins of the Phoenicians. Sidon was the largest of the Phoenician mints, with coins struck between the late fifth century and the coming of Alexander the Great in 332 bce. Tyre, Aradus, and Byblos also struck coins, and together with those of Sidon, provided the denominations required to fuel the Phoenician (and therefore Persian) economy of the period. These coins enabled the Phoenician city-states to compete more favorably with their Greek and East Greek neighbors to the west. The coins of Tyre undoubtedly inspired the Tyrian colony of Carthage to strike coins beginning late in the fourth century bce.

This chapter concentrates on the Phoenician presence in the island of Cyprus in the Iron Age (from the eleventh until the end of the fourth century bce). After a brief overview, it addresses the question of identification of the Cypriot Qarthadasht and the issue of a supposed Phoenician colonization in Cyprus. The political and cultural history of the Cypro-Phoenician kingdom of Kition also receives particular attention. At the same time, the widespread and multifaceted aspects of Phoenician presences on the island are underlined: Phoenician presence was not confined to Kition and Phoenician influence did not exclusively spread in the island from Kition.

The history of the first centuries of Carthage can only be sketched out, given the paucity of literary sources, which are also of variable quality, and so far as the Greek and Roman sources are concerned, often biased. Exploiting the Classical sources, the result of archaeological research, and epigraphic studies, it is nevertheless possible to paint a picture of a cosmopolitan, dynamic, and ambitious city, which grew rapidly and integrated the trade networks of the western Mediterranean. Thanks to its accumulated resources, its policy of alliances, and its recourse to military action, Carthage succeeded in establishing itself as the key power in the central Mediterranean from the second half of the sixth century bce.

This chapter surveys cultural developments in the European part of the Russian Federation. Geographically this landscape varies from coniferous forests in the north, to steppe and semi-desert in the south, the Urals forming a natural eastern border to Europe. Chronologically the chapter covers the period from 900/800 BC through to the Great Migration of the third/fourth centuries AD. Although the pace of technological advance varied in different regions, the transition to iron was everywhere accompanied by the formation of new cultural and social types. Three principal cultural spheres existed: (1) the nomadic world, which greatly influenced Iron Age cultural and social developments elsewhere; (2) the forest cultures of the upper and middle Volga, Oka, and Dvina rivers; and (3) the world of Cis-Ural forest zone. Their major technological, economic, social, political, and ideological components are analysed, together with internal and interregional interactions and movements.

This chapter reviews evidence for the exploitation of animals in Medieval northwest Russia, highlighting the evidence from the town of Novgorod and its hinterland. The zooarchaeological evidence from this region has been complemented by other sources of archaeological and documentary evidence. Most faunal assemblages are dominated by cattle, which were of small stature and exploited mainly for their meat and milk. There is evidence that pigs became less important in later periods. Sheep and goat were poorly represented on most sites, but with goats forming a higher proportion of the sheep/goat remains than on many other European sites. Evidence for fur trade in the region comes mainly from sites deep in the forest zone. Horsemeat was consumed, although horses were mainly valued as transport animals. The high-status site of Ryurik Gorodishche produced evidence for organized carcass-processing, ritual deposition of horse skulls, and the import of exotic species.

This chapter explores the funerary rites in the Phoenician-Punic world from a comprehensive point of view, and it focuses on the common points arising from a large amount of data. The concern for burying their deceased and the belief in the soul’s afterlife show that the Phoenicians considered death as a transformation rather than as the end of a person’s life. Through our access to archaeological remains and written sources, we can reconstruct the existence of a meaningful burial program that was destined to provide a “good death” and afterlife. Funerary rituals, thus, are the actions or gestures to achieve this goal. The aim of this chapter is to explain the rites that family members undertook once someone died, in order to transform correctly the deceased person into an otherworldly being, the ancestor. The social implications of the data arising from burials are also briefly considered.

This chapter focuses on the connection between Tyre and its colony Gadir via the foundational figure of Melqart and his respective temples in these cities, a relationship which is well-known thanks to historiographical and literary testimonies dating to the Roman period. The chapter also draws a comparison with the case of the other main Tyrian colony of Carthage. This comparison allows us to note, among other things, that the religious and cultural axis which united Gadir with its metropoleis was not restricted to the colonial period itself (ninth–sixth centuries bce) but, rather, continued to actively develop until at least the fourth century bce.