2007/06/01 by Michael Sommer · 52 citations
Social Sciences · #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #History #Ancient history #Iron Age #Geography
paper · doi:10.1080/09518960701539232
published in Mediterranean Historical Review 22(1), 97-111 (Taylor & Francis)
openalex publication_date 2007/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Regarding the Phoenicians' expansion in the Iron Age, controversy continues over chronology, areas affected, scale of migration, organization of trade, modes of interaction between Phoenician traders/colonists and the respective indigenous populations and means of maintaining contact and of transmitting information between ‘colonial’ settlements and the mother cities in the Levant. Critical problems arise from the textual evidence from the Phoenicians' neighbours; the archaeological material is also ambiguous regarding the ethnic and cultural identities of the populations involved. The paper uses available evidence to construct a model of how a diasporic network of commodity, population and information exchange could arise and be maintained in the power vacuum of the Early Iron Age Mediterranean, how it was adapted to political and economic change, so as to provide a tertium comparationis to the Greek model of ‘colonization’.