The Punic 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 the state of the art in 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 is the first volume in any language to address the questions of what 'Phoenician' and 'Punic' actually mean, how 'Punic' or western Phoenician identity has been constructed by ancients and moderns, the coherency of Punic culture, and whether there was in fact a 'Punic world'.