The Phoenicians

2020 ◽  
pp. 170-193
Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak

Often reviled in the Bible as overly wealthy traders and false worshipers, the Phoenicians appear in the biblical accounts under the label of their principal cities, Tyre and Sidon. Native inscriptions and new archaeological efforts provide information on Phoenician royal politics, religion, and colonial ambitions as far west as the south of Spain and the far northwestern African coast. The name “Phoenicians” first appears in the Homeric corpus in the eighth century BCE, though it is never clear that any particular group called themselves “Phoenicians” during the Iron Age. Nevertheless, the cities of Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, and others constitute a coherent group of city-states that comfortably fit under the Phoenician label. Though excavation has been sparse at key sites, new research has revealed a plethora of data on Phoenician burial customs, art, and architecture.

Author(s):  
Guy Bunnens

A coherent history of Phoenicia between 1000 and 550 bce is difficult to write. The internal development of individual city-states is almost completely unknown. We can only get a glimpse of their foreign relations. Owing to geographical constraints, Phoenician cities were split into a northern group, from Arwad to Byblos, and a southern one, essentially Tyre and Sidon. These two cities may have been associated in one political unit from the ninth to the late eighth–early seventh centuries bce. A Phoenician presence is noticeable in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean, with political control of Tyre on part of Cyprus. Tyrians and Sidonians also had interests in North Syria and in the Euphrates River valley. All Phoenician city-states adopted an accommodating policy toward foreign powers, especially Assyria, and, despite violent clashes from the mid-eighth century bce onward, they could manage to preserve their role as middlemen in the trade relations of the ancient world.


2018 ◽  
Vol 605 ◽  
pp. 37-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
RA Weston ◽  
R Perissinotto ◽  
GM Rishworth ◽  
PP Steyn

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 611-621
Author(s):  
Sára Horváthy

SummaryEgeria, a 4th century pious woman from the south of present-day Spain, retold, after visiting Palestine with the Bible in hand, her observations to her sisters. If the linguistic aspects of her letters are quite well-known, much less is known about its stylistic value, inappropriately called “simple”.What seems to be boringly the same again and again, is in fact a constantly renewed and perfectly mastered “variation on a theme”, just as in a well-composed piece of music. Her apparent objectivity is indeed a wish to focus on what she considers the most important, namely to tell her community, as closely to reality as possible, what she observed during her pilgrimage. However, Egeria’s latin is also a testimony of the christian lexicon in construction and of the social changes that were in progress by that time.Linguistics and stylistics work together here, the choice of a word or a grammatical formula reveals hidden information about the proper style of an author who, despite her supposed objectivity, had real personal purposes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-136
Author(s):  
Oliver Good ◽  
Richard Massey

Three individual areas, totalling 0.55ha, were excavated at the Cadnam Farm site, following evaluation. Area 1 contained a D-shaped enclosure of Middle Iron Age date, associated with the remains of a roundhouse, and a ditched drove-way. Other features included refuse pits, a four-post structure and a small post-built structure of circular plan. Area 2 contained the superimposed foundation gullies of two Middle Iron Age roundhouses, adjacent to a probable third example. Area 3 contained a small number of Middle Iron Age pits, together with undated, post-built structures of probable Middle Iron Age date, including a roundhouse and four and six-post structures. Two large boundary ditches extended from the south-west corner of Area 3, and were interpreted as the funnelled entrance of a drove-way. These contained both domestic and industrial refuse of the late Iron Age date in their fills.


Author(s):  
Pascale Chevalier

For nearly 270 years, between the end of the Roman Empire and the advent of the Carolingian dynasty, the Merovingian territories experienced an intense flowering of religious construction, which recent archaeology has documented with increasing detail. This chapter sheds light on new research and recent discoveries; however, rather than reviewing all of the sites and studies of Merovingian churches and the contemporary sources mentioning them, it gives some new clues and reflections about so-called Merovingian architecture and the broad vision of an architectural form that was expressed in quite simple but majestic designs. These structures, constructed of stone (or wood), reveal a society progressively Christianized under the leadership of bishops, clerics, and monks, as well as by the Merovingian sovereigns. Without any break with classical antiquity, the Merovingian centuries fit into a continuous legacy that transformed the monumental landscape in both cities and countryside. The various forms of Christian monuments of the fifth to eighth century thus illustrate this heritage, sometimes through an extreme simplification of antique patterns and sometimes through the enrichment of aesthetic forms brought by the arrival of immigrant populations. Within a changing world, religious buildings appear to have been a catalyst for cultural exchanges as places of visibility and gathering, as witnesses of the building fever of the period. Our understanding of religious architecture in Merovingian Gaul is gradually becoming more accurate. We now know an increasing amount about the establishment, planning, forms and sizes, construction techniques, ornamentation, and liturgical and functional content of all these structures. These structures, which were so varied in size and use, reveal extensive artistic plurality.


Author(s):  
Gerald O. West

Liberation biblical interpretation and postcolonial biblical interpretation have a long history of mutual constitution. This essay analyzes a particular context in which these discourses and their praxis have forged a third conversation partner: decolonial biblical interpretation. African and specifically South African biblical hermeneutics are the focus of reflections in this essay. The South African postcolony is a “special type” of postcolony, as the South African Communist Party argued in the 1960s. The essay charts the characteristics of the South African postcolony and locates decolonial biblical interpretation within the intersections of these features. Race, culture, land, economics, and the Bible are forged in new ways by contemporary social movements, such as #FeesMustFall. South African biblical studies continues to draw deeply on the legacy of South African black theology, thus reimagining African biblical studies as decolonial African biblical studies—a hybrid of African liberation and African postcolonial biblical interpretation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 567-587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitka R. Golub

In this study, I investigated all personal names with the element שלם in the Land of Israel during the Iron Age ii period. I collected the names from archaeological and biblical sources, analyzed and compared their distribution according to geography, chronology, and political affiliation. The results show that while שלם is a popular element in Judah from the eighth to the early sixth centuries, it is absent from Israel. The element שלם in unvocalized names from archaeological sources is interpreted mostly as ‘replacement, substitute’ (for the deceased child). However, the popularity of the element שלם solely in Judah may indicate that שלם was used more often than we assume as a divine name referring to YHWH, as do all other Judean popular names. In addition, the comparison between the names from archaeological and biblical sources may be interpreted to indicate that the Bible reflects Judean and not Israelite onomastic traditions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 599-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdou L. Dieng ◽  
Saidou M. Sall ◽  
Laurence Eymard ◽  
Marion Leduc-Leballeur ◽  
Alban Lazar

In this study, the relationship between trains of African easterly waves (AEWs) and downstream tropical cyclogenesis is studied. Based on 19 summer seasons (July–September from 1990 to 2008) of ERA-Interim reanalysis fields and brightness temperature from the Cloud User Archive, the signature of AEW troughs and embedded convection are tracked from the West African coast to the central Atlantic. The tracked systems are separated into four groups: (i) systems originating from the north zone of the midtropospheric African easterly jet (AEJ), (ii) those coming from the south part of AEJ, (iii) systems that are associated with a downstream trough located around 2000 km westward (termed DUO systems), and (iv) those that are not associated with such a close downstream trough (termed SOLO systems). By monitoring the embedded 700-hPa-filtered relative vorticity and 850-hPa wind convergence anomaly associated with these families along their trajectories, it is shown that the DUO generally have stronger dynamical structure and statistically have a longer lifetime than the SOLO ones. It is suggested that the differences between them may be due to the presence of the previous intense downstream trough in DUO cases, enhancing the low-level convergence behind them. Moreover, a study of the relationship between system trajectories and tropical depressions occurring between the West African coast and 40°W showed that 90% of tropical depressions are identifiable from the West African coast in tracked systems, mostly in the DUO cases originating from the south zone of the AEJ.


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