The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

The Phoenicians created the Mediterranean world as we know it-yet they remain a shadowy and poorly understood group. The academic study of the Phoenicians has come to an important crossroads; the field has grown in sheer content, sophistication of analysis, and diversity of interpretation, and we now need a current overview of where the study of these ancient seafarers and craftsman stands and where it is going. Moreover, the field of Phoenician studies is particularly fragmented and scattered. While there is growing interest in all things Phoenician and Punic, the latest advances are mostly published in specialized journals and conference volumes in a plethora of languages. This Handbook is the first of its type to appear in over two decades, and the first ever to appear in English. The chapters (organized in four parts) are written by a wide range of prominent and promising scholars from across Europe, North America, Australia, and the Mediterranean world, who offer readers summary studies and new perspectives on key historical moments (such as the history of Carthage), areas of culture (organized around language, religion, and material culture), regional studies and areas of contact (spanning from the Levant and the Aegean to Iberia and North Africa), and the reception of the Phoenicians as an idea, entangled with the formation of other cultural identities, both ancient and modern.

Author(s):  
Odile Moreau

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.


Author(s):  
Элеонора Кормышева ◽  
Eleonora Kormysheva

The diachronic trends in socio-economic and cultural development of the societies in the Nile valley are revealed based on the materials from Giza necropolis (the 3rd millennium BC) and the settlement of Abu Erteila (1st century AD). The research made it possible to trace the typological similarities in the evolution of the studied societies in cultural and historical contexts. The main fields of the research were epigraphy, iconography, social history, and material culture. Many previously unknown monuments discovered by Russian archaeologists in Egypt and Sudan were introduced into scientific discourse. The basis was created for studying the Nile valley as a contact zone between the Mediterranean world and Africa.


1835 ◽  
Vol 125 ◽  
pp. 355-358 ◽  

The Fourth Memoir, published in my Zoological Researches and Illustrations, No. III. page 69, &c., having first made known the real nature of the Cirripedes , the key of which remained concealed in their metamorphosis, it might have been expected that some naturalist favourably situated to investigate the oceanic tribe of these animals, would have been the first to make the same discovery in regard to these, and thereby complete their natural history. It was scarcely to be expected that the honour of this discovery also should be reserved for the author, fixed to one spot, where none of them naturally exist, and are but casually thrown upon our shores by the waves of the Atlantic, attached to pieces of wreck, or brought into port fixed to the bottoms of ships returning from distant voyages. Fortunately, however, two ships of this description came into this harbour (Cork), one from the Mediterranean, the other from North America, which, not being sheathed with copper, had their bot­toms literally covered with Barnacles of the three genera of Lepas , Cineras , and Otion ; and having persons employed expressly for the purpose, numbers of these were brought alive in sea water, amongst which were many with the ova in various stages of their progress, and some ready to hatch, which they eventually did in prodigious numbers, so as to enable him to add the proof of their being, like the Balani, natatory Crusta­cea in their first stage , but of a totally different facies and structure; a circumstance which determines the propriety of the separation of the Cirripedes into two tribes, and evinces the sagacity of Mr. MacLeay in being the first to indicate that these two tribes, the Balani and Lepades , were not so closely related as generally supposed. The larvæ of the Balani , described in Memoir IV. under the external appearance of the bivalve Monoculi ( Astracoda ), have a pair of pedunculated eyes, more numerous and more completely developed members, approximating to those of Cyclops , and of the perfect Triton ; while, in the present type, or Lepades , the larva resembles some­what that of the Cyclops , which Müller, mistaking for a perfect animal, named Amymone , and which can be shown to he common to a great many of the Entomostraca ; or the resemblance is still more striking to that of the Argulus Armiger of Latreille, which, in fact, is but an Amymone furnished with a tricuspidate shield at the back.


Author(s):  
Mohamed Saleh

This chapter investigates a long-standing puzzle in the economic history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region: why do MENA’s native non-Muslim minorities have better socioeconomic (SES) outcomes than the Muslim majority, both historically and today? Focusing on the case of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the largest non-Muslim minority in absolute number in the region, and employing a wide range of novel archival data sources, the chapter argues that Copts’ superior SES can be explained neither by Islam’s negative impact on Muslims’ SES (where Islam is defined as a set of beliefs or institutions) nor by colonization’s preferential treatment of Copts. Instead, the chapter traces the phenomenon to self-selection on SES during Egypt’s historical conversion from Coptic Christianity to Islam in the aftermath of the Arab Conquest of the then-Coptic Egypt in 641 CE. The argument is that the regressivity-in-income of the poll tax on non-Muslims (initially all Egyptians) that was imposed continuously from 641 to 1856 led to the shrinkage of (non-convert) Copts into a better-off minority. The Coptic-Muslim SES gap then persisted due to group restrictions on access to white-collar and artisanal skills. The chapter opens new areas of research on non-Muslim minorities in the MENA region and beyond.


Author(s):  
Erin Maglaque

This chapter focuses on Cyurω‎, Giovanni Bembo’s Corfiote wife. It traces her experiences and encounters, in Venice and in the Mediterranean world. Cyurω‎’s social and cultural identities and sources of belonging were constantly in flux, as she moved between Venice and the Mediterranean, encountered Venetian aristocrats and Greek scholars and subjects, was subject and ruler. Tracing these changing ways of belonging shows that categories of identity could be wafer-thin, permeating the boundaries between governor and governed, between wife and servant, between exalted mother of aristocratic children and scorned outsider who threatened the integrity of the nobility.


Author(s):  
Jeremy Rutter

Mycenaean civilization takes its name from the hilltop citadel of Mycenae in the Argolid, celebrated in Homer’s epics as “rich in gold” and the capital of Agamemnon. In 1876, Heinrich Schliemann, fresh from his excavations at Troy, which in his view had established the historical reality of the Greeks’ legendary siege and sack of that city, unearthed five astonishingly rich tombs at Mycenae and claimed them to contain the burials of Agamemnon and his followers, thus inaugurating the study of Greece’s Late Bronze Age (LBA) past. One and a half centuries of subsequent fieldwork have exposed the remains of hundreds of settlements and thousands of tombs characterized by the distinctive material culture termed Mycenaean that flourished for over six centuries (c. 1700–1050 bce). This lengthy duration of the mainland Greek LBA (better known as the Late Helladic [LH] or Mycenaean era) is conventionally subdivided into three major stages of development: pre-palatial or early Mycenaean (LH I–IIB; c. 1700–1425/1400 bce); palatial (LH IIIA1–LH IIIB2; c. 1425/1400–1200/1190 bce); and post-palatial (LH IIIC; c. 1200/1190–1050 bce). The regions within which Mycenaean material culture was dominant changed significantly as a function of time, as did the culture’s external contacts within the Mediterranean world and continental Europe.


Author(s):  
Karen C. Britt

This chapter provides an introduction to early Christian mosaics that emphasizes the important role played by archaeology in improving our understanding of their geographical and architectural contexts. After a short discussion of the position of early Christian mosaics in the history of the medium, a brief review of the most productive methodologies used in research on mosaics is undertaken, followed by a survey of mosaic technology that includes the workshops and artists involved in mosaic production. In the rest of the chapter, a selection of mosaics in churches, martyria, chapels, and Christian mausolea located in various parts of the Mediterranean world is examined. The evidence from archaeology demonstrates that although early Christian mosaics share universal themes, the diversity reflected in their iconography and the presence of secondary themes rooted in local traditions necessitate a regional approach to their interpretation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-225
Author(s):  
Grace Huxford ◽  
Grace Huxford

On 9 November 2013 the Prisoner of War Network, in conjunction with the War and Representation Network (WAR-Net), brought together forty academics and researchers at the University of Warwick to discuss ‘Representations of Prisoner of War Experience’. In response to Paul Gready’s claim that ‘to be a prisoner is to be variously written’, scholars from across Europe and North America and a wide range of disciplines (including history, film, politics, literature, history of art and archaeology) discussed the fascinating work being done in the emergent field of prisoner of war studies, as well as the possible future directions and challenges for such research. Eighteen speakers approached the question of the representation of prisoner of war experience, both by the historical actors who underwent forced dislocation (captors and captives alike) and by researchers themselves. Image: David Thompson (flikr) 


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.G. Olvera-Vazquez ◽  
C. Remoue ◽  
A. Venon ◽  
A. Rousselet ◽  
O. Grandcolas ◽  
...  

With frequent host shifts involving the colonization of new hosts across large geographical ranges, crop pests are good models for examining the mechanisms of rapid colonization. The microbial partners of pest insects may be involved or affected by colonization, which has been little studied so far. We investigated the demographic history of the rosy apple aphid, Dysaphis plantaginea, a major pest of the cultivated apple (Malus domestica) in Europe, North Africa and North America, as well as the diversity of its endosymbiotic bacterial community. We genotyped a comprehensive sample of 714 colonies from Europe, Morocco and the US using mitochondrial (CytB and CO1), bacterial (16s rRNA and TrnpB), and 30 microsatellite markers. We detected five populations spread across the US, Morocco, Western and Eastern Europe, and Spain. Populations showed weak genetic differentiation and high genetic diversity, except the Moroccan and the North American that are likely the result of recent colonization events. Coalescent-based inferences releaved high levels of gene flow among populations during the colonization, but did not allow determining the sequence of colonization of Europe, America and Morroco by D. plantaginea, likely because of the weak genetic differentiation and the occurrence of gene flow among populations. Finally, we found that D. plantaginea rarely hosts any other endosymbiotic bacteria than its obligate nutritional symbiont Buchnera aphidicola. This suggests that secondary endosymbionts did not play any role in the rapid spread of the rosy apple aphid. These findings have fundamental importance for understanding pest colonization processes and implications for sustainable pest control programs.


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