Chapter 4

The World of Tyre in the Seventh Century B.C.E.

The seventh century in mainland and diaspora Phoenicia was a fine time of synthesis, syncretism, and consolidation. A major impulse was the inspiration of Assyrian hegemony and the sense of living in a unified world under a supreme, transnational God. Tyre acquired control of the eastern Mediterranean and slowly relinquished its interests in the western Mediterranean basin to the settlements there, which enjoyed increasing independence in the Carthaginian nexus. Greeks were established as their suppliers and connoisseurs. Sidon and Byblos learned to survive in the thrall of a worldwide Tyrian economy and, rattling along in their once cooperative systems, were more or less satisfied with managing a few assets in Palestine and overseas. Native peoples, who had been caught up in the whirl of Phoenician invention, began to assert themselves. Cities, countries, and patronal states became distinctive by working together in the international concert. Everything the world had learned from the Phoenicians took shape in new and appreciative social and cultural constellations. The seventh century turned out to be the epicenter of the Orientalizing revolution.

Tyre and Its Worldwide Economy

Tyre, with the connivance of Egypt and Assyria, and by profiting from their conflicting self-interests, weathered all the storms of the seventh century and was regarded on the mainland and abroad as the seal of wisdom, wealth, and good taste. It had the cooperation of many and very little competition and came to monopolize international trade. Sidon was crushed in 677 B.C.E., when it tried to free itself from constant Assyrian interference in its trade and commerce. Its king was beheaded; Esarhaddon (680–669 B.C.E.) imposed an embargo on the city and built a new port, named after himself, which took over its ancient trade networks. Esarhaddon then made a treaty with Baʿal, king of Tyre, giving him the ports and inland routes that until then had belonged to Sidon and Byblos. In 674, Esarhaddon invaded Egypt but was defeated, and Tyre took advantage of this failure to “put his trust in his friend,” Pharaoh Taharqa (690–664 B.C.E.), who had campaigned in Judah and visited the Levantine coast about ten years earlier.1 Tyre stopped paying regular tribute to Assyria.2

However, Esarhaddon forced Tyre to submit and went on to attack Egypt again in 671 B.C.E., successfully this time, but Tyre, persisting in its good relations with Egypt, once more refused to pay tribute to Assyria. Esarhaddon prepared another invasion but died on his way to Egypt, and Tyre was free until forced to submit when Ashurbanipal (668–627 B.C.E.) launched another successful campaign against Egypt in 666 B.C.E. In 664 B.C.E., after still another Assyrian invasion, Psammetichus I succeeded Taharqa. For the rest of the century, but especially after the decline of Assyria late in Ashurbanipal’s reign, Tyre and the southern Levant increasingly aligned themselves with Egypt, and some towns such as Ushu, on the mainland opposite Tyre, and ʿAkko, a Tyrian port farther south, openly revolted against Assyria. Tyre, in effect, remained fairly unscathed and grew more prosperous as these mighty neighbors battled for its friendship and loyalty.

Tyre’s treaty with Assyria3 had more benefits than constraints, and its text reveals some interesting features of the city’s social, religious, political, and economic structure in the seventh century. The treaty was made with Esarhaddon by the king of Tyre, Baʿal, and by the people of Tyre. The people were represented by a council of elders. The king was subject to the authority of an Assyrian royal deputy, three of whose prerogatives are listed: he assisted at the deliberations of the council; as ambassador, he was the first to receive and read the letters sent from the Assyrian king to Baʿal; and he had to be present when Baʿal did business or talked with the captain of any foreign ships docked in Tyre.

The merchant ships of Tyre belonged either to the king or to the people, but their captains and crews were not necessarily from the city itself: one of the treaty stipulations was that the cargo of a Tyrian ship wrecked off the Philistine or the Assyrian coast, by that fact became the property of the king of Assyria; however, the persons on board the ship were to be returned to their own country. The Philistine coast may have extended south from Joppa or may have included only the area from Ashdod south to Ashkelon and Gaza. The Assyrian coast included, presumably, all the Phoenician ports north of Philistia and north of Tyre. This presumption is based on other stipulations that gave Baʿal access to ports south and north of Tyre, ports that the treaty describes as belonging to Esarhaddon.

To the south, Baʿal acquired the right to trade in ʿAkko, in Dor south of the Tyrian border at Mount Carmel, and as far as Philistine territory, so perhaps in Joppa. Because all of these were immemorial friends and allies of Tyre, they were now assigned by the treaty to its official jurisdiction. To the north, where thanks to Esarhaddon Tyrian territory included Sarepta, his rights extended past Sidon, now known as the Port of Esarhaddon, as far as Byblos and all the towns in the Lebanon. Along with access to these ports, Baʿal and the people of Tyre also received the overland trade routes that led to them, but because these were in Assyrian territory (Dor was in the province of Dor, ʿAkko probably in the province of Megiddo, Sidon and Byblos perhaps in the province of Sidon), they had to pay the usual taxes and tolls.

The treaty is under the auspices of Assyrian, Syrian, and Phoenician Gods4 and is protected by a series of nasty curses. The purpose of these, of course, is to uphold the law—the mutual oath and the legal obligations—and in this sense, they are consistent with the treaty’s concern for justice and fairness, in the case of shipwrecked sailors, for instance, who are not to be harmed, or of hired merchant marines to whom no injustice shall be done. On the Assyrian side, only Goddesses are invoked: Mullissu, wife of Ashur, the Great God, and patroness of Nineveh, the capital; Ishtar of Arbela, mother, the source of mercy, forgiveness, and inspiration; Gula, the great healer; the seven sisters (Sebetti) of the Pleiades. The Syrian Gods are Bethel and ʿAnat-Bethel, the male and female principals of immortal Memory, symbolized by stone baetyls or steles at home in Syria and North Israel.5 They are not unknown as symbols at Tyre but are not attested at Sidon and are familiar simply as ʿAnat at Byblian sites in Cyprus.6 On the Phoenician side of the treaty oath sworn by Baʿal of Tyre, there are Gods of seafaring, the metropolitan Gods of Tyre and Sidon, and the Goddess Astarte.

The first of the seafaring Gods is the Storm God Baʿal Šamem, “The Lord of Heaven,” the God of the sky, of thunder and lightning, who presided over the Byblian pantheon in the tenth century B.C.E., who, along with El (the God of the Earth) and the Sun (the God of the Underworld), administered the curses at eighth-century Karatepe, and who in the archaizing mood of later days became the object of popular devotion in the colonies.7 The second is Baʿal Malage, otherwise unattested, whose name makes him “Lord of the High Seas,” of the open seas, or what the biblical text with reference to Tyre’s overseas voyages calls “the heart of the seas.”8

The third God is Baʿal Sapon, “Lord of Mount Saphon,” the dwelling place of the Gods in North Syria where the Orontes flows into the sea, and a beacon and safe haven for ships. He is mentioned along with Baʿal Ḥamon, “Lord of the Amanus,” on a mid-sixth-century amulet from Tyre and in a contemporary Phoenician letter sent to Saqqara from a merchant at the Tyrian outpost at Daphne, just east of the Egyptian Delta.9 The curses for noncompliance with the treaty that are associated with these Gods correspond exactly to their meteorological and maritime attributes:10 “May they raise an evil wind against your ships”—this is Baʿal Šamem; “may they undo your moorings and tear out your mooring pole”—these are the doings of Baʿal Saphon; “may a strong wave sink you in the sea, and a violent tide rise against you”—this means Baʿal Malage.

The metropolitan Gods include only Melqart of Tyre and ʾEshmun of Sidon but not the God of Byblos, which was identified earlier in the treaty as one of the cities belonging to Esarhaddon. Because Tyre had taken control of Sidonian territory, and because its king, Baʿal, governed with the consent of the people represented by their elders, the basic curses invoking these Gods are destruction of the land and deportation of the people. The king, curiously, is exempt. Because Tyre was famous as the purveyor of the good life, particularly as the merchant of purple and crimson robes, destruction of the land includes in particular lack of food and clothing and of oil for their anointing. Deportation is mentioned twice and turns out later in the story of Tyre to be a favorite Assyrian form of intimidation.

Although the treaty was not especially onerous (it was, on the contrary, overly generous), Baʿal of Tyre was encouraged by his friendship with Taharqa of Egypt to disregard it, and Assyria, predictably (and in the name of the Gods), always retaliated. There is not much evidence for a belligerent Tyre. Walled cities and fortified outposts at home and abroad are more symptomatic of its aloofness. However, the treaty’s invocation of Astarte, the Goddess of Love and War (she is often portrayed in Egyptian lore naked, astride a charger) makes it clear that siding with Egypt entailed, from the Assyrian perspective, readiness for battle as much as, from the Tyrian point of view, luxurious living, commercial savvy, and a raw determination to bolster a traditional and now-burgeoning market. Astarte is called upon to break Tyre’s bow in the heat of battle, to make the people crouch at the feet of their enemy (which corresponds to the standard portrait of the pharaoh smiting a defenseless prisoner who cringes at his feet), and, of course, to divide their precious goods among their enemies.

Something like these and the other curses in fact happened to Tyre in Assyrian times but not nearly so dramatically. When Baʿal rebelled (which meant not paying taxes and tribute) during the reign of Esarhaddon, he was forced, by a siege depriving the city of food and water, to pay his debts, to give dowries to his daughters, whom the king deported to Nineveh, and to let the Assyrians reorganize his land and take control of some of his towns.11

It was essentially the same story when Baʿal rebelled again in the reign of Ashurbanipal: a siege, involving siege works, road closures, and a naval blockade forced him to submit and surrender his daughter and his son to deportation.12 This fulfilled the curses, but it was just standard procedure, and Assyria was not really interested in doing damage to Tyre or its foreign relations.

Much the same befell Egypt when Esarhaddon defeated Taharqa, Tyre’s mainstay in Africa: he deported the queen and her attendants, and the heir to the throne, as well as gold, silver, and linen, but he spent more time reorganizing the country, installing kings and governors, harbor-masters, and administrators who would promote trade and good relations with Assyria.13 Ashurbanipal was even more lenient with Baʿal of Tyre, restoring his son and heir, Yaḥimilk, who was expected to cooperate with Assyria but who was too inexperienced because he “had not yet crossed the sea” to Cyprus or the far western colonies.14

The treaty, by referring to the rights of the king, of the people, who were represented by a council of elders, and of the merchant marines recognized that trade and commerce were in the hands of the court and a civic corporation and of the individuals or syndicates whom they hired to outfit and man their ships.15 Although being allowed to do business in all the ports from Philistia to Syria also gave them access to the roads that led to these ports and along the coast, nothing more is said about these roads and who traveled them, or about overland trade or who managed it or how it worked. Similarly, although the treaty concentrates on shipping and ports, it is silent about where the ships came from and where they went, with whom they did business in the mainland ports, and what commodities were traded. But there are other texts, in the annals of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, that together with some biblical texts help in sketching a rough map of Tyre’s seventh-century world.

Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal are proud to list among their subjects and tributaries kings of the mainland, the seashore, and the islands.16 There are 22 of them, listed in a fixed order, and apparently taken from a master list that kept track of any changes in government. The list always begins with Baʿal of Tyre, but Sidon, because it had become an Assyrian province and had no king, is not mentioned. Second, and aligned with Tyre is Manasseh of Judah, who was specially favored by Assyria and had supplied laborers to help build the port of Esarhaddon in Sidon and the arsenal palace in Nineveh. He would also provide troops for Ashurbanipal’s Egyptian campaign, and his sisters were at the royal court in Nineveh.17

The next two are the kings of Edom and Moab, included in this position because of their relations—not least in overland trade—with Judah. Next, and possibly as the guardians of the ports where some of this trade debouched, are the king of Gaza, Sillibel, and the king of Ashkelon, Mitinti—the former with an Assyrian name, the latter with a good Phoenician name. The seventh and eighth are the kings of Ekron, with the Greek name Ikausu, and of Byblos, with the name Milkʾasap, which is common among kings of this city: they are linked in the list as they seem to have been in cultural and commercial reality, and Ekron follows naturally on the preceding Philistine cities.

Next are the kings of Arvad and Samsimuruna: Arvad was the port in Northern Syria that supplied the Assyrians with a navy and, together with Samsimuruna, was once a Sidonian confederate. The last two kings of the mainland are from Ammon in Transjordan and from Ashdod on the coast, which were in the network of kings but remained independent of each other and of the whole group. The rest of the 22 are the 10 kings of Cyprus, most or all of whom have Greek names and ruled in kingdoms scattered all over the island, mainly on the coast but also inland. The map of the Tyrian world, from the perspective of Assyria, included only countries and kings that were under Assyrian dominion, and only those that cooperated and were active in the system of international trade.

The same map, from a Judean perspective, is filled out with the names of places on long-distance overseas and overland trade routes, so that the world of Tyre seems much bigger and somehow boundless. This map was drawn late in the sixth century and inserted into an earlier, but still sixth-century portrayal of Tyre as a ceremonial bark whose captain, the king of Tyre, naturally saw himself as the God for whom the bark was constructed.18 It was the seventh-century world and, like the network of kings in the western confederacy, it was the creation of Assyrian political, economic, and cultural policies, made possible by Tyrian ingenuity and ambition.

The list of places on the map begins with Tarshish and ends with voyages of the ships of Tarshish. At the beginning, Tarshish is Tarsus in Cilicia, supplying Tyre with silver, iron, tin, and lead in exchange for its expensive wares. At the end, the ships of Tarshish distribute Tyre’s merchandise on voyages to the western Mediterranean where the same products were available. In between, there are four groups of five countries that did business with Tyre. The first includes Ionia, Cappadocia (Tubal in Hebrew, Tabal in Assyrian texts), Phrygia, Armenia (or Bet Togarmah), and Rhodes and the islands, where Tyre traded in slaves, bronze vessels, horses, war horses and mules, ivory tusks, and ebony.

In the second group, Syria dealt in emeralds, coral, agate, purple, embroidered work, and linen. Judah and the “land of Israel” (not called the “Kingdom of Israel” because it was now an Assyrian province) had wheat, oats, honey, and oil for sale; Damascus had wine of Helbon and white wool; and Cilicia (named “Dan,” as in the Hassan Beyli inscription) and a country called “Outer Ionia” (yawan meʾuzal) had wrought iron, calamus, and cassia.

The third group includes places in North and South Arabia and their merchandise: saddlecloths from Dedan; lambs, rams, and goats from North Arabia and Qedar; spices, precious stones, and gold from Sheba and Raʿamah. The fourth group comprises cities in Assyria—Haran, Canneh, Eden, Ashur, and Chilmad—where there was a brisk business in clothing and carpets. The map leaves out the coastal cities (these are mentioned in the description of the building and sinking of the good ship Tyre) and moves counterclockwise from north to west to south, and back to Assyria in the east, where the power lay. By listing specific goods in particular places, it gives Tyre economic control of the known world in the eastern Mediterranean and, from the perspective of a seafaring empire, in the lands adjacent to it. It gives a significant nod in the direction of Tarshish in the western Mediterranean, and the clear implication is that Tyre inhabited a much larger world.

The story of the ship of Tyre into which this map was inserted describes its construction, the reaction of the Mediterranean world to its foundering, and the tragic fate of its captain, who went down with his ship.19 The story is told in poetic form, beginning with a hymn of praise, then turning into a lamentation, and ending with a complaint and a critical aside. It expresses in the awe and admiration of the poet the fundamental and amazing influence that Tyre had on a world largely of its own creation.

The poem begins with Tyre’s declaration “I am perfectly beautiful,” on which the poet then elaborates by attributing her beauty as she rides at anchor to the artistry and devotion of those who built her: “Your hull was laid in the heart of the seas, your builders made you perfectly beautiful.” This praise, which suits Tyre as the ceremonial ship, and Tyre as the famously beautiful island city, naturally leads into the names of the builders and a detailed list of the precious materials they used. Her planks were of fir from Mount Hermon, her mast was a cedar of Lebanon, her oars were of oak from Mount Bashan (all three of these mountains were habitations of the Gods), and her deck was made of ivory inlaid in pine from the coast of Kition in Cyprus. Her sail and ensign were embroidered linen from Egypt, and her awning was blue and purple fabric from Elisha in Cyprus.

With the ship built and outfitted, the poet turns to her company and crew, all of whom were from prestigious Phoenician cities: her rowers were from Sidon and Arvad, her pilots were from Tyre itself, and old salts and skilled men from Byblos were the shipwrights who kept her trim. And so the poem lauds Tyre as a wondrous monument to Phoenician, Cypriot Greek, and Egyptian cooperation, and the prelude ends by repeating in awe, “These are the ones who made you perfectly beautiful.”

The lamentation, alluding to the sixth-century collapse of foreign trade when relations among the 12-member kingdoms of the western confederacy were disrupted by Babylonian invasions under Nebuchadnezzar20—Judah was captured, Transjordan subjected, Syria harassed, Philistia destroyed, Tyre besieged for more than a decade, distant Egypt left to its own devices—begins with the sinking of the ship and records the reaction of the Mediterranean world. The ship was beautiful at anchor, magnificent in the open seas, but when it sailed into the high seas it foundered in a mighty east wind. At the shouts of her crew and the roar of the waves, all the other ports, the rowers, sailors, and pilots abandoned their ships, spread the awful news and, staying on dry land, performed mourning rituals (crying bitterly, pouring dust on their heads, rolling in ashes, shaving their beards), and raised the lament, “Who was ever like Tyre, now dumbfounded in the midst of the sea.” The sinking of Tyre was a tragedy that immobilized the whole Mediterranean world, just as her brilliance had been its impetus to greatness.

In the next part of the poem, the sinking of Tyre is blamed on its captain. The apology maintains the exuberance and admiration that characterized the description of the ship, the ceremonial bark, by comparing the captain to Melqart, the God of Tyre, whose insight, ingenuity, and bold adventures constantly benefited his people, a mortal who achieved divine status by dying (Ezek 28:1–10). The criticism, however, is attributed to Yahweh, the God of Judah, and this sense of wonderment is creased by the bitterness of parti pris. The apology begins, as does the story of the bark, with a bold announcement: the captain declares, “I am a God (ʾEl), I sit on the throne of God (ʾElohim) in the heart of the sea.” The criticism begins with Yahweh’s retort, “But you are a man (ʾAdam) and not a God (ʾEl), although you think your mind is like the mind of God (ʾElohim).”

The poem elaborates on this retort by comparing the captain to Daniel, proverbially wise, interpreter of dreams, and revealer of divine secrets but still a man, and the argument becomes more ironic by drifting from the captain’s divine pretensions to the mundane and mercantile realities of Tyre’s greatness: “By your wisdom and understanding, you became wealthy, you amassed silver and gold in your treasuries. By your great wisdom, by your trade, you became very rich, grandiose in your wealth.”

But then the argument, because it can only ridicule but not disprove the belief that Melqart, the captain, is a God, turns into a petty ad hominem: because the captain’s divine pretensions are based, the argument goes, on the wealth he gained through trade, he can be deflated simply by bringing against him “aliens and the most terrible of nations, who will draw their swords against the beauty of your wisdom and will defile your splendour.” The captain’s wisdom, in the drift of the argument, is as beautiful as his ship and founders with it when it sinks, but the storm turns out to be the Babylonians, and he dies by their sword.

Thus the argument ends when death by the sword (unlike death by immolation that assured Melqart’s, the captain’s, divinization and divine status) proves that he is just a man: “Will you say, ‘I am God (ʾElohim)’ in the presence of your murderers—although you are a man (ʾAdam) and not a God (ʾEl)—in the hands of those who wound you? At the hands of strangers, you will die the death of the uncircumcised.” The criticism that crept into this valedictory for Tyre was attributed to Yahweh, the God of Jerusalem, and was meant to magnify him, but first it reveals Judah’s total intricacy in the world of Tyre and its jealousy of an incomparable sister city and its disappointment at not being on board the ship, or at least among those on shore who lament her.

The poem relieves this disappointment by ending with a lamentation for the king of Tyre. He is Baʿal, namesake of Melqart, who is the Baʿal (“Lord”) of Tyre and, as an inscribed seal reveals, the “king of the Tyrians.”21 According to the poem, the king was in fact the seal, symbol of merchants and traders, in the signet ring worn by God in the Garden of Eden (Ezek 28:11–19). The ring is pure gold. The stone, cleverly wrought and beautiful, stands out in a list of nine precious stones, all of them found in Cyprus, all of them actually used in signet rings. The king is in the Garden of Eden, protected by a cherub, that magnificent four-winged mythical creature so often engraved on seals and, as pictured on the inscribed seal, walks on stones of fire on the mountain of God. But pride in his wisdom, beauty, and vast trade was his downfall, and he was thrown out of the garden of God into the world. There the fire that emanated from him and that was intended to divinize him merely incinerated him and left him as dust on the earth.

And so the lamentation comes back to the claim that the king of Tyre really is a God, and agrees with it, and is filled with sorrow at his mortality. The lamentation, as the whole poem, is intrigued by the heroic role that Melqart played in Tyre’s commercial and colonial exploits (the image of the labors of Heracles, whom the colonials in the sixth century identified with their God) and by the glory of Tyre, in which Judah and the rest of the known world was pleased to share in the seventh century.

This representation of Tyre, as long as it enjoyed the favor of the Assyrians and before it was absorbed into a dwindling Neo-Babylonian Empire, is confirmed by all the historical evidence. It was a brilliant, independent city, and in the system of political and commercial alliances imposed or encouraged by Assyria thrived among a coalition of city-states and nations that, under the same impulses, also achieved distinction and self-definition.

Mainland Phoenicia in “Cooperation with Assyria”

The seventh century was an organized and energetic time throughout the Levant. Judah was associated closely with Tyre. The Philistine cities had diverse foreign relations. The coastal Phoenician towns were dependencies of Tyre, Sidon, or Byblos or of each other. Transjordan, via Judean or Tyrian intermediaries, had commercial and cultural relations with Tyre or one of the Philistine conglomerates. Egypt during the reign of Psammetichus I (664–610 B.C.E.) was in and out of Palestine but an accomplice of Assyria and a constant presence. For the latter part of the seventh century, in his last decades, and during the reign of Necho (610–594 B.C.E.), Egypt became the dominant foreign power in the region. The century ended in the discombobulation of Babylonian interference and disregard.

Sidon was situated on a promontory. On its south side, there was a bay that formed a natural protected harbor. North of the promontory, partly protected by a reef and a small island, there were two ports: the more westerly and seaward incorporated the reef into its system of breakwaters; the more landward was enclosed by the north–south pier of the western port and by the east–west jetty at its northern tip. One of these, or the whole complex was called “The Port of Esarhaddon,” which he built, or rebuilt, after he destroyed Sidon “like the Flood,” tore down its walls, murdered ʿAbdmilkot, its king whom he had captured at sea (undoubtedly with ships from the Assyrian port at Arvad), and ransacked the city in 677 B.C.E.

Sidon and its territory, excepting Sarepta to the south, which was ceded to Tyre, but including 16 named towns to the north of the city,22 became an Assyrian province. The city still functioned, despite the rhetoric of its total destruction, but it was entirely owned and operated by the Assyrians, with an Assyrian governor and without a king or royal family. ʿAbdmilkot’s wives, children, and palace personnel were deported to Ashur. Sidon remained the premier trade center in the Levant but under new management. It trafficked in expensive goods and artistic expertise: Esarhaddon’s loot (he apparently was not interested in staples) included gold, silver, precious stones, linen garments, and garments with multicolored trim, elephant hides, ivory, ebony, boxwood, alabaster jars filled with the finest oil, rich goods of every kind.23 Sidon survived this Assyrian regime, restored its monarchy when the empire failed, and soon overtook Tyre by the favor of the Babylonians24 and Persians.

There are a few Phoenician inscriptions from seventh-century Sidon, from places where its people settled, or from countries that had come under its influence. Inscriptions from Sidon include an Ammonite seal that, besides the name of its owner, mentions the fact that it was offered in fulfilment of a vow to Astarte (lʿšt) in Sidon:25 the offering formula is Phoenician, but the script and language are Ammonite, and the ex-voto was probably left in her temple by some trader from Transjordan who regularly did business with the Phoenicians. A tombstone from Sidon inscribed with the name ʾAbihûʾ, the son of Murroʾ (ʾbhʾ bn mrʾ), suggests by its script and by the name of the man’s father that he—his own name would be good Hebrew and is not found in Phoenician—was from Cyprus, perhaps specifically from Kition.

Similarly, an ostracon found in a Sidonian tomb has a name that is found in Cyprus, although it is also good Hebrew as well as common Phoenician, and it identifies him as an Ionian merchant (mnḥm sḥr ywn).26 A deed of sale from Nineveh is stamped with the seal of “ʿAbdisilli, the Sidonian”: he may have been a deportee when Sidon was taken over by the Assyrians or, more likely (because it was probably “business as usual” when Assyria assumed the management of Sidon’s affairs), a Sidonian merchant who had taken up residence in the Assyrian capital.27

From Kythrea in north-central Cyprus, in a totally Cypriot context, there is a clay sarcophagus inscribed in Phoenician with a curse, like the curses on later Sidonian coffins, against anyone who might disturb the eternal rest of this settler from the distant coasts.28 From Cilicia there is a Phoenician seal of a Hittite jailor inscribed with his name and profession (“Belonging to Muwatillis, the jailor” [lmwtlš hrpd]),29 and a late seventh-century boundary stone inscribed in Phoenician with the complicated history of the transfer of a particular parcel of land and its chattels.30 These inscriptions reflect both the eclipse of Sidon in the seventh century and its enduring ties to places, especially in Cilicia and Cyprus, where its citizens had boldly gone in earlier times.

Byblos is mentioned in Esarhaddon’s treaty with Baʿal of Tyre, together with the Lebanon and cities in the mountains, as the northernmost part of Assyria territory on the seacoast. Baʿal is given access to its towns, villages, and ports of trade but must pay the usual taxes to Assyria. Byblos, despite this, remained an independent kingdom, and the privileges accorded to Tyre do not imply any territorial, commercial, or political control of its land. It was part of the western coalition, listed with Philistine Ekron, and two kings bearing the traditional Byblian throne names ʾUrumilk and Milkʾasap ruled from the time of Sennacherib to about the mid-seventh century.31

Additionally, men and women whose Phoenician names might suggest that they came from Byblos had good jobs in the empire: a man named ʾAḥubast, mentioned occasionally as a witness in legal documents from 696–663 B.C.E. held the office of “Head Doorman”;32 the woman named ʾAmatʿaštart was superintendent (šakintu) of the palace at Nimrud, and her daughter Ṣubetu, whose name means “Gazelle” or “Pretty” in Phoenician, married another Phoenician, a Byblian, whose name was Milkiram ben ʿAbdazûz, perhaps the Milkiram who was the eponym of the year 656/655 B.C.E.33

There was another woman from Byblos who officiated at the rites of Adonis celebrated by Byblian expatriates in Ur. Her name is ʾAmotbaʿal bat Patʾisis, “Servant-of-Baʿal daughter of Gift-of-Isis,” and she was in fact the servant of Adonis. She carried a small ivory box, or miniature coffin, in which, as its inscription affirms, Adonis lay during the three days of his festival. The box was found along with other ivory toilette articles (combs, a mirror, a kohl pot and stick, a pyxis, and a jar in the form of a crouching sphinx, all of which would have been suitable for a woman of her rank) in a room in the Temple of the Moon God Nana and his consort Ningal,34 appropriately enough since the Festival of Adonis was linked to the phases of the new and waning moon. Another woman who was a priestess of Astarte is memorialized by a funerary urn that contains her bones (the bones of the dead were the pledge of their resurrection) gathered for her by her companion, ʾIttobaʿal.35

These named people are joined by the unnamed masons and craftsmen who went overseas and were buried at Caere in Italy, where their descendants more than a century later built a sanctuary for Astarte;36 and by the merchants and traders who stayed in Byblos and whose inscribed and decorated seals reveal their names and aspirations.37 One of these is Paṭʾisi, “Gift of Isis,” who sees himself as a mythical griffin confronting a uraeus, and another is Milkiram who surrounds his name with Egyptian symbols of life and regeneration.38 Byblos was fairly inconspicuous in the seventh-century bustle, but it was nevertheless a respected and very productive member of the international community.

Tyrian and Sidonian presence on the Syrian coast north of Byblos and its territory had been vital in the ninth and eighth centuries but dwindled in the seventh when Tyre went west, Sidon folded, and local Phoenician regimes, with Greek and Cypriot connivance, catered to the Assyrians. Al Mina in the eighth century was a Tyrian and Chalcidian station frequented by Cypriots, but in the seventh century, in keeping with the changes reflected in the new town plan, its dealing were mainly with Samos and Rhodes,39 and it was the port of the Assyrian province of Kunulua to which it belonged.

Arvad, the island kingdom and traditional Sidonian confederate, provided a port and a navy to the Assyrians, and in the reigns of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal is listed, in tandem with Samsimuruna, in the western coalition. A new king, Yakinlu, who came to the throne late in the reign of Esarhaddon, was uncooperative. He confiscated the taxes and tolls due to the Assyrian port authority, prevented ships from docking there, killed the captain and looted the goods of any that did, and was generally unreceptive to Assyrian envoys. He was brought into line by Ashurbanipal, who imposed tribute on Arvad in addition to its naval commitment. When Yakinlu died, Ashurbanipal appointed one of his sons, ʿAzibaʿl, as Yakinlu’s successor and kept the other nine in Nineveh as hostages.40

Arvad was in the province of Simirra, the capital of which, Sumur, at Tell Kazel, retained its distinctive Syrian and Phoenician mix, continued to do business with Cyprus, and perhaps developed closer ties with Byblos immediately to the south. These places, then, were involved in a peculiar dynamic. Arvad was part of the western alliance because it had the navy that Assyria needed. The other two were not directly part of this coalition but belonged with Arvad in a collateral network that was immediately subject to Assyria and gave it access to the Greek Mediterranean world.

The towns in Tyrian territory along the coast north of Mount Carmel maintained their distinctive provincial Phoenician character throughout the seventh century. South of Carmel, the towns and ports belonged to Tyre or Sidon, and south of these was the territory of the Philistines where Tyre and Byblos shared commercial and cultural hegemony.

The most northerly town in Tyrian territory was Sarepta, which had belonged to Sidon but was ceded to Tyre by Esarhaddon. There are ceramic imports from Cyprus in the earlier seventh century—miniature perfume bottles that combine Phoenician fashion (black lines on polished Red Slip) and form (mushroom-lip or neck-ridge juglets) with Cypriot technique (multiple brush- and compass-drawn concentric circles)—and from Rhodes in the latter part of the century.41 The most distinctive Tyrian item is an inscribed ivory plaque found in a symposium (mrzḥ) club house (bt ḥbr) and dedicated to Tannit-ʿAstarte, a melding of Goddesses—Tannit of the Tyrians who now occupied the site and Astarte of the earlier Sidonian community—and a dual divinity of the sort especially popular among Cypriot Phoenicians.42 There was an occupational gap at Sarepta at the end of the seventh century,43 when Tyre began to feel the weight of the Babylonian Empire, and a cultural break is visible when life begins again in the sixth.

The Tyrian sites in western Galilee continued to prosper under Assyrian tutelage. ʾAchzib, 25 kilometers south of Tyre is known mainly from its three cemeteries. These seem to have been occupied by people of different origins, ethnicity, beliefs, and occupations, among them naval personnel and workers in the shipyards. There was a mortuary chapel associated with the northern cemetery, where child sacrifice was memorialized.44 In the eastern cemetery, there were shaft tombs with benches on three walls, inhumation was the norm, pottery deposits included water jugs and storage jars, most of the small finds were women’s jewelry, and the tombs may have been prepared for potters and weavers as well as musicians and escorts from the busy harbor.

In the southern cemetery, there were built tombs and shaft tombs and, until the late seventh century when the practice stopped, cremation was as common as inhumation.45 There are seven tombstones from this graveyard, roughly finished and undecorated, and inscribed in an unprofessional scrawl with the name of the dead men:46 most of them without parentage, one a blacksmith (hnsk), the rest stevedores or otherwise employed in the port. Among the terra-cottas, there were grotesque masks and amulets that ships from the town brought to Carthage.47 Beautiful figurines of a seated pregnant woman are most characteristic of ʾAchzib, however, and in the sixth century traveled with these people to Cyprus and Carthage and the towns in Syria and Palestine frequented by their ships.48

ʿAkko, 15 kilometers south of ʾAchzib, came under Sidonian control for a time during the reigns of Luli and his successors but was returned to Tyrian management by Esarhaddon. One notable seventh-century relic from the site is a seal (see fig. 4.1) showing a man, preceded by an ibex, greeting a God dressed in Egyptian fashion who sits enthroned in front of a smoking incense stand, while behind him an attendant lifts a scepter, and a monkey raises its forepaws in adoration.49 To this scene, which is drawn in the negative so as to be impressed positively, a positive text was added as a commentary, changing the magical seal into an amulet. Above the scene the owner inscribed his name, now lost, introduced by “This belongs to . . .”; and written vertically between the God and the incense stand is the name ʾElnaʿ (“Before El, Tremble!” ʾl nʿ), which occurs as a geographical name and may have been the owner’s hometown.50

Fig. 4.1. Seal from ʿAkko, picturing a man with an ibex (IAA 73-216). Reproduced by permission of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Tel Kabri, between ʾAchzib and ʿAkko, was a Tyrian military outpost. In the seventh century, it was fortified by a casemate wall, and its pottery, which included east Greek wares, comprised transport and storage jars and dinner dishes suitable for the garrison and, probably, for its detachment of Greek or Cypro-Phoenician mercenaries.51

There was similar pottery at Tell Keisan, as well as Assyrian pottery and a complete assemblage of coastal Phoenician wares like the wares at ʿAkko and ʾAchzib and, later in the century, pottery from Cyprus, Ionia, and Rhodes. But the place is noted especially for its basket-handled amphorae from Cyprus.52 Tell Keisan, ancient ʿAchshaph or Kaspuna, was the Assyrian headquarters in this region between Tyre and Carmel and a distribution center for Phoenician goods, including textiles made locally and overseas. One of these products is the small unguent jar that made its way to Tell es-Saʿidiyeh, halfway between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea in Transjordan, which is emblazoned with a doggerel Phoenician advertisement incised under its handle: kul yušman / ʾiš laḥḥa biyya, “All will be scented / who smear themselves with me.”53 Some of these places were destroyed in the Babylonian invasions at the end of the century, but all of them had thrived through their association with Tyre and with Assyrian incentives and encouragement.

The coastal territory between Mount Carmel and Joppa had been parceled out to Sidon and Byblos, but they abandoned places such as Tel Mevorakh and Tel Michal sometime between the tenth and the sixth centuries, and Sidon lost Dor to Tyre in the early seventh century. Dor was the capital of the Assyrian province named after it and a strategic port for trade between Cyprus and the coastal plains.54

The most interesting find from the seventh-century city is a scapula with a fragmentary boat scene and a Cypriot Syllabic inscription.55 On the left, a ship pulls away from the dock: three rowers wearing Egyptian-style caps look out to sea and the captain, standing in the stern, looks back to shore, his left hand to his forehead in a gesture of supplication; the stern is decorated with a duck’s head facing forward, and a railing on which a tarpaulin could be hung stretches from there to the bow. On the shore, a woman who wears a veil and a long embroidered robe stands in a doorway and looks out to sea at the departing ship, with a libation bowl in her raised right hand and her left arm extended in entreaty. Behind her, to the right of this scene and facing away from it, a priest wearing an Egyptian wig raises his left hand in veneration of an Assyrian-style Tree-of-Life that stands in a portable shrine, under an awning draped over a rope-and-pole device. On the reverse, an inscription identifies the man, perhaps a captain like the one portrayed, who dedicated the scapula, perhaps in a temple pavilion like the one depicted in the scene. Of special interest are the personal grief and trepidation that preceded a voyage, the public rituals performed when setting out on an overseas voyage, and the eclectic styles (Egyptian, Assyrian, Cypriot, and Phoenician), typical of the Tyrian mentality and most likely representative of the mixed population and culture of the port city at this time.

Six and one-half kilometers north of Dor and 8 kilometers south of Mount Carmel was the port of ʿAtlit. It belonged to Sidon in the Persian period, and the harbor may have been used by Sidonians in the late eighth or early seventh century, but it seems likely that the port was built, and the town with it, when this whole stretch of coastline was ceded to Tyre. ʿAtlit is a promontory jutting half a kilometer northward into the Sea. South of the promontory is the natural harbor of ʿAtlit Bay, and northeast of it is the artificial harbor.56 This consisted of perpendicularly aligned moles, on the north side extending from the promontory and on the east reaching out from the shore, built of large and tightly fitted ashlar blocks. Quays similarly built joined them at right angles along the promontory and along the shore, and towers at intervals and at the end of the moles served as warehouses and stores.57

The earliest burials are cremations, but the later, when ʿAtlit belonged to Sidon, were inhumations in rock-cut shaft tombs.58 The earliest graves were of adults and of children whose bodies had been burned and buried in the sand. The pottery associated with them was local, coarse, and domestic (bowls, jugs, cooking pots, lamps and the like) or elegant Red Slip and Black-on-Red wares, or White Painted pottery from Cyprus decorated with zigzags and encircling bands. The seals and amulets from the time of Tyrian occupation, mostly from the sixth century, often depict Melqart in his Greek guise as Heracles,59 and small finds have some of their better parallels in Sardinia.60 Two large, bustling ports situated so close to each other as were Dor and ʿAtlit are signs of Tyre’s prosperity in the seventh century. But their proximity may also suggest that the ports were specialized, with Dor, for instance, importing from Cyprus, ʿAtlit exporting to the western Mediterranean, and both of them counting on the various inland markets of Judah, Transjordan, and Philistia.

The Mainland Affiliates of the Phoenicians: The Western Coalition of the Assyrian Empire

The mainland countries in the western coalition were integral to the political, cultural, and commercial network centered on Tyre. They were more or less Phoenician in the seventh century, and their organization and interests reflect the dynamic of the Tyrian enterprise and are carried along in the vector of the Assyrian Empire. What is not known directly about Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos can be surmised and reconstructed on the analogy of their inland neighbors.

Judah

Judah was a faithful, treaty-bound vassal of Assyria in the seventh century, ruled by kings of the Davidic Dynasty in uninterrupted succession. In 701 B.C.E., Hezekiah, through interference in Philistine affairs, lost 46 towns and their territories to Ashdod, Ekron, and Gaza61 and was left “like a bird in a cage” in Jerusalem. This city, which he had made the religious center of the nation, became the economic and cultural hub of a trim city-state in the half-century reign of his son and successor, Manasseh.62 At the end of the century, when Assyria was losing its grip, his grandson Josiah reorganized the kingdom on a retrograde tribal model and squandered the goodwill of nations through exclusive religious reform and by misguided meddling in world affairs.63 In 586 B.C.E., Jerusalem was captured and sacked by the Babylonians, and a century of prosperity and splendid achievement crumbled in its hands.

An indicator of the power and centralized organization of this hereditary kingdom is the large number and general uniformity of its personal seals.64 There are many seals of government officials: there are seals of named kings, and of “The King”; seals of his family—“Daughter (bt) of the King” and “Son (bn) of the King”; seals of the palace manager, the one “who is in charge of the household” (ʾšr ʿl hbyt) and of retainers simply called “servant” (ʿbd) of the king (see, for example, fig. 4.2); there are seals of officers (šr), of the mayor of Jerusalem (šr hʿr), of the prison warden (šʿr hmsgr), and of the man in charge of public works (ʾšr ʿl hms); seals of scribes (hspr) and priests (hkhn), who may or may not have been independent of the palace. Some seals include a regnal year and the name of a man or a town and probably had to with records of tithes or taxes. Some seals belonging to women have only their name; others also identify them as the wife or the daughter of some named man.

Fig. 4.2. Judean titled seal, picturing a rooster (IAA 32.2525). Reproduced by permission of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Photo by: Miki Koren.

There are hundreds of men’s seals, at least ten times as many as there are in neighboring countries, and most of them have just the man’s name and patronymic, separated by a double line, but without any representation or design. When they are iconic and locally inspired, they usually represent plants such as pomegranates and floral patterns, animals (a horse, a dog, a roaring lion, an ibex running, a grazing doe), a fish, or a bird. Others have linear or geometric designs or astronomical features—a winged sun, a crescent moon, sometimes in association with an altar, or a star. Human figures are rare and most often generic, although there is a seal with girls dancing around a palm tree, another with a chain of dancing girls, one with the portrait of a winged and naked Goddess, and one with a winged God facing another winged creature.

The iconography of other seals is inspired by Egyptian motifs, directly via Judah’s traditional Egyptian connections, or indirectly through familiarity with the Phoenician repertory: scarabs, an ankh sign, a uraeus, Horus seated on a lotus, a lotus blossom, or the eye of Horus. All of these seals were used on papyrus documents (of the numerous bullae, many have marks of the string that bound the papyrus on their reverse), and they belonged—as orders, receipts, reports, or directives—to artisans, merchants, traders, and administrators. Their large number suggests that their owners were not working in a competitive market but were members of a monopoly that operated through a hierarchically arranged local, regional, and national network. Their aniconism, which was sponsored by the court and the religious institutions interested in promoting the exclusive worship of the once dynastic and now political, national, and transcendent God, suggests that the plain seals with a name and patronymic may have been the signets of public servants, while those with pictures or designs belonged to independent entrepreneurs and secular business people who had more personal, traditional, or international tastes.

The seals are an indicator of widespread literacy in seventh-century Judah. This followed an educational policy, the focus of which was political and religious, and which is also manifested in occasional texts (letters, lists, and the like) and in an abundant and sophisticated literature. The occasional texts are inscriptions from Jerusalem, the intellectual capital of Judah, and from settlements on the periphery of the kingdom, where soldiers, merchants, and farmers resided; the literature is in the many biblical texts that were composed, in Jerusalem, in these exciting and vibrant times. The smaller sites provide a glimpse into Judean society and economy and into the ordinary links in the chain of international relations. Jerusalem is the prime analogate for the spiritual revival that accompanied the universal political, social, and economic upswing in the seventh century, mainly motivated by Assyria, but which is less palpable in the countries of the Tyrian alliance the archives and literatures of which were never published and have not survived.

From a small and short-lived site near Yabneh Yam, 15 kilometers south of Joppa and less than half a kilometer from the coast, there is an ostracon with a letter from a Judean farmhand to the commandant of his community protesting the injustice that has been done to him.65 The letter is written in a good practiced hand and the case, based on laws codified in the Bible,66 is presented in a logical, literary, and persuasive factum. The plaintiff was working in the grain harvest, and on a particular day, the eve of the Sabbath, was accused of not completing the tasks assigned to him—reaping, stooking, and storing—specifically of not storing the grain in the barn.67 The letter is in Hebrew, the foreman, who was in charge of public works (šr hms), had a Judean name, and the commandant (šr) was a Judean government official who was expected to know and observe the law of Judah.

However, Yabneh Yam is in Philistine territory (there is a Philistine inscription from nearby ʿAzor), and the pottery assemblage, which is indigenous coastal, contains enough east Greek wares (Ionian cups, Rhodian wine jugs, Samian cooking pots and transport amphorae) to suggest that the site billeted Greek mercenaries or Greco-Phoenicians from Kition.68 There was similar pottery in all the Philistine and Phoenician coastal towns and settlements, in both Syria and Palestine, and there were Greek garrisons at Tel Kabri and Tell Keisan, but there was no Greek pottery and there were no Greek troops in Judah.69 This site near Yabneh Yam, therefore, illustrates how Judah could cooperate with the Philistines; how its local economy, which in this case, and generally, was under the control of the central government, was based in agriculture; and how Judah’s involvement in the Tyrian trade network could simply consist of supplying migrant labor and food to its neighbors.

The southern part of Judah flourished in the seventh century, partly because this region made up for the territory that Judah had lost to Philistia in the west, and partly, or perhaps mainly, because of booming trade with Edom and Arabia. The outpost at Ḥorvat ʿUza, 30 kilometers east of Beersheba, has yielded ostraca that illustrate how a small trading center in the Negeb worked. There is a Hebrew ostracon, written in an untrained hand, that has the names and the patronymics of three men from three different towns in the Negeb who worked for ʾAḥiqam, son of Menaḥḥem: they could have been soldiers and he their captain, or he might have been involved in overland trade with Edom, and they would have been his business associates.70

There is also an ostracon written in Edomite with instructions from the cult center at Ḥorvat Qitmit, 10 kilometers to the southwest:71 “Says Lamelek: Say to Bilbil, ‘Are you well? I invoke blessings on you by Qaws. And now: Provide the meal which is in the keeping of ʾAḥîʾimmî and offer up ʿAzaʾel on the altar, today, lest the meal become rancid.’” The format of the instructions resembles that of contemporary Hebrew letters from nearby Arad, with the expected substitution of the Edomite God Qaws for Yahweh of Judah in the salutation. The instructions are also comparable to the prescriptions for the ritual of the Scapegoat ʿAzaʾzel, except that the Edomite custom includes an offering of meal and the sacrifice of a goat (“The Goat-of-El”), whereas the biblical rite requires two goats, one of which was to be offered in sacrifice in Jerusalem, while the other is to be kept alive and sent out into the wilderness—where Ḥorvat ʿUza was located—to ʿAzaʾzel (Lev 16:7–10).

A third ostracon, quite fragmentary, has the remains of a prophetic text, written in literary Hebrew, apparently in poetic form, by a skilled scribe.72 The prophecy, which may have originated in Jerusalem, calls for conversion and, of course, because the genre requires it, threatens judgment for noncompliance. Ḥorvat ʿUza, clearly, was a community where Edomites and Judeans convened and worked cooperatively, most likely in local and long-distance trade, and probably under the central authority in Jerusalem.

Tell ʿIra, halfway between Ḥorvat ʿUza and Beersheba, has Edomite pottery, large transport jars made in the vicinity of Jerusalem and many with potters’ marks, as well as standard and unusual clay figurines made locally, and some Hebrew inscriptions.73 One of these, like the first from Ḥorvat ʿUza, is a list of three men, with names or nicknames, but without patronymics, who are described as “the bodyguard of Berekiah,” presumably armed men who traveled with him and protected him from brigands, the usual bane of merchants and traders.74 Another is a fragmentary letter containing a report (“Your servant . . . has written to report . . .”), another a receipt, and others are personal or place-names written on jars to indicate their origin or their destination.75

These places in the Negeb were not on the main roads but presumably were part of the overland trade network, regulated by Jerusalem, that connected Beersheba to the coast and to Edom and Arabia. Their administrators, not surprisingly, liked to keep lists and had subordinates who filed reports. One of their scribes was trained in a local country school, but their people were literate, religious, and susceptible to persuasion by a sophisticated, and instructive, missive from the city. In an integrated and centralized system such as Judah’s, these rural settlements were the foundation of the new society and economy.

A perception of how Jerusalem functioned at the heart of this system is available in the literature it fostered. Some of it was prophecy, such as the noncanonical letter to Ḥorvat ʿUza, and some of it was history and law. Its most interesting aspect, its most illuminating feature in an increasingly international society, was its borrowings from the literatures of the world. Seventh-century Jerusalem, at least in this sense, was the paradigm of the intellectual revolution fostered by Assyria and made possible by the Phoenician construction of a common world.76

Babylonian and Assyrian literature influenced the expression of Judah’s basic beliefs. The story of creation in the first chapter of Genesis draws on the ancient and canonical Babylonian version, in which Marduk was the protagonist in overcoming chaos, and it is moved by more recent or contemporary astronomical theories that demystified the planets and promoted the worship of a supreme God.77 The same myth, the Enūma elish, supplies the materials for the description of the exodus as a journey that took the people from Egypt, brought them through the sea on dry ground, and culminated in the construction of a tabernacle and temple for their God. The story of creation in the second chapter of Genesis begins like the Enūma elish (in both, the beginning is signaled by the phrase “on the day”), but it continues with the themes of humanity and marriage unraveled in Atrahasis, and of self-transcendence developed in Gilgamesh: the setting for the story is the Garden of Eden, which is modeled on the gardens of Paradise built by Assyrian and Judean kings,78 and is situated surreally in Jerusalem and between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The life-spans of the antediluvians were calculated with the help of Babylonian mathematics,79 and the flood story follows in every detail the version in Gilgamesh.

The depth of Assyrian influence on Judeans’ thinking, beliefs, and practices is most striking in the borrowing of the Assyrian treaty format (the instrument of stable and enduring relations among nations) to express their covenant relationship with their God.80 It was an unprecedented, unparalleled, and astonishing move (to contemporary critics it was their “covenant with death”), leading to centralization and the consequent political, economic, and social reform that allowed the country to slip into the western alliance and the Tyrian network. It reveals the impact of the empire, but it also indicates very clearly that the people of Judah and Jerusalem thought of their treaty with Assyria as a real blessing, in no sense a constraint, but a divinely inspired liberation.81

The cities of Phoenicia were most evidently influential in the arts and crafts and commerce, but they also contributed to the literary renaissance in Judah. This may have been indirectly through the people of North Israel with whom the Phoenicians, quondam Canaanites, were affiliated or directly by regular contact with Phoenicians in Jerusalem or in the coastal regions where Tyrians, especially, had settled. An obvious instance is the biblical story of Joseph (the eponym of the northern tribes), which is modeled on and actually refers to the legends of Adonis, the God of Byblos, whose story was told and whose rites were practiced in Samaria.

Less obvious but just as startling is an allusion in the preface to the flood story in Genesis to a Greek tradition on the causes of the Trojan War.82 In this preface and in the Hesiodic tradition to which it alludes, the motive for the catastrophe, the flood or the war, was that the Gods had taken beautiful women as their wives and had produced a heroic race of demigods who threatened God’s, or Zeus’s, divine prerogative. The preface is just an allusion to this alternative tradition, which is not developed (a device that this particular writer regularly uses) but that would have been familiar to readers of the story. This alternative interpretation might have been learned from the world travelers who reached coastal Phoenicia and Philistia, or it could have been brought to Jerusalem by Tyrians who went regularly to central Greece, but the literati of Judah and Jerusalem were obviously receptive and delighted.

A third instance is similar. It is the incorporation of a Phoenician world view, which also has resonances in Hesiod and the Greek cosmologists, into the early chapters of Genesisby a sixth-century Judean writer filling out the seventh-century story of the origin of the world. This view was compiled by Philo of Byblos83 around 100 C.E. from the ancient legends and lore of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos and was presented from four different perspectives. The first is cosmological and, like the beginning of Genesis, explains the creation of the world, animals, and plants in the same sequence and using the same or equivalent terms, with some differences in interpretation. In the Phoenician version, for instance, there were “Observers of the Heavens” who worshiped the sun, the moon, the stars, and the great constellations, but in the biblical version these astronomical elements are denuded of their divinity and incorporated into the workings of the cosmic clock.

The second perspective is cosmogonical and goes over the same material to describe the inhabited world: the wind and darkness of the first telling, for instance, acquire names, the first man is born, and he discovers nourishment from trees—all this in the Genesis sequence but in a factual, non-narrative account. The third is ethnographic and recounts, with allusion to Tyre and Sidon, the origins of civilization, and this also has parallels in Genesis asides on the origin of clothing, strife, agriculture, pastoralism, urbanism, metalworking, music, wine, worship, and the like.

The last perspective is theological and traces the origin and succession of the Gods, beginning with the Gods of Byblos, and even this shows up in Genesis with random references to the epithets of the olden Gods. Judeans, as these examples suggest, went eagerly into the seventh century, rewriting their history to show how they belonged to the modern world and how the world belonged to them, driving the timid among them to warn them not to abandon their traditional ways.

Judah exemplifies the impact of seventh-century changes on small countries caught up in the organization and enthusiasm of a successful imperial system. These included everything from large-scale reorganization to details of a written code and a legal system accessible to all, from foreign trade to local commerce, from farming to schooling. It differed from the other countries in the network by keeping records of these changes, some critical and some approving, and by writing histories that traced its cultural development. There was a great deal more to the seventh century than politics and economics, and Judah is a window to what this was and what it meant.

Transjordan

The Transjordanian states, Moab, Edom, and Ammon, were tributaries of Assyria in the seventh century. They were, each in its own way, aligned with Judah and Philistia in the Tyrian network and were important intermediaries in the Arabian transit trade with Nineveh. Assyrian influence, especially the dent of Assyrian aggression, was more acute in northerly Ammon,84 and Judean enterprise and commercial organization were predominant in the more southerly Moab and Edom. The involvement of these states in the Tyrian network is emblematic of the swirl and excitement among native peoples and established nations created by the enthusiasm that pervaded the new world discovered by the Phoenicians.

Edom

Edom occupied the land from the southern tip of the Dead Sea to the Gulf of ʿAqaba, and from the Wadi Araba, the continuation of the Jordan Valley, to the desert fringe about 100 kilometers to the east. In the seventh century, as an Assyrian protectorate, Edom expanded (there were, for instance, many new agricultural communities) and flourished.85 The Wadi Feinan copper mines, in the northwestern part of the country, achieved their maximum output, and huge slag heaps indicate that thousands of tons of metal were produced for export.86 There were new towns, and the more important were established along the major north–south trade route, the King’s Highway, leading to the Red Sea and Arabia: Bozrah (Tell el-Buseirah), capital of Edom, Tawilan, Petra (Umm el-Biyara), and ʿAqaba (Tell el-Kheleifeh). The Wadi Feinan is due east of the Beersheba valley in Judah, where Edomite merchants and traders took up residence, and many other Edomite towns, settlements, and outposts were scattered along these southern Judean roads leading to Philistia.87 Edom’s business, apart from agricultural products and copper, was managing the toll roads from South Arabia, through the Negeb of southern Judah, to the coastal cities of Philistia, possibly to Gaza, perhaps (as in the eighth century) to Ashdod and Ekron.88

Edomite pottery has been found at numerous sites in the Negeb, along the routes followed by individual traders who were working for themselves, in syndicates, or in the service of the royal court. The everyday wares are little different from the local wares of these southern regions, but the decorated wares, which imitate Assyrian pottery and metalwork and Phoenician painted and burnished wares, are typically Edomite and become increasingly popular as the seventh century progresses.89 ʿAqaba, the gateway for Arabian trade—in gold, precious stones, camels, spices, and fragrances—had wares of both kinds as well as Judean, Midianite, Greek, Arabian and Egyptian pottery. Beersheba, at the other end of the trade routes, had mostly Judean wares but with a mixture of coastal, Edomite, and Egyptian pottery types.90

An ostracon from Arad, in the territory of Judah but within the same trade network, contains a list of merchants’ names, including a Judean, an Edomite, and two Phoenicians called Eshmnʾadonay, a syncretistic name and a favorite at Kition in Cyprus.91 Two of the sites, ʿEn Haseva, near the western border of Edom, and Ḥorvat Qitmit, just inside the eastern border of Judah, featured wayside shrines where travelers could offer incense and libations and dedicate cylindrical stands to which (with the assistance of resident potters) animal, human, or divine figurines were custom fitted. Both places are Edomite, with Edomite dedications and forms of worship, but the buildings and the ceramic offerings display Phoenician and perhaps specifically Cypriot Phoenician influence.92

Edomite merchants figure in a number of personal seals and in an inscription concerning a private club or marzeaḥ. Two of the seals, one unearthed in Babylon, the other found at Petra, belonged to Qausgabri, the king of Edom during the reign of Esarhaddon (680–669 B.C.E.) and in the first year of Ashurbanipal (668 B.C.E.). Both have three registers, with the king’s name and title displayed in the upper and lower, while the central register is filled with a crescent and full moon and linear designs on the Babylon seal, and with a winged and kilted sphinx striding to the right on the Petra seal.93 From Bozrah, the capital of Edom, there is a seal of “Mulkbaʿal, servant of the king.” The name and title are written in three registers, and above these in the top register are what appear to be three standing stone shrines or baetyls.94 A seal impression with the legend “Belonging to Qausʿanali, servant of the king” was found at ʿAqaba (Tell el-Kheleifeh), and there are many others like it on the handles of jars, jugs, and craters.95 This Qausʿanali had done well because, without his title, he was mentioned in a Hebrew letter from Arad96 as the recipient of food rations, such as were distributed regularly to the Phoenician merchants from Kition, the Kittiyyim, who traveled along these trade routes through Judah and Edom to the Red Sea and Arabia.

From Jerusalem there is a seal of an Edomite businesswoman, inscribed on one side with her name, “Munaḥḥamit, wife of Padamilk” and on the other with an elaborate ritual scene: two men flanking a crescent moon into which a radiant star descends raise both their hands to a winged anthropomorphic sun disk depicted as bearded, wearing a round hat and a short skirt, striding to the left, with his right arm raised in salutation and his left holding a scepter (see fig. 4.3).97

Fig. 4.3. Edomite seal (BM 136202). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

From ʿAqaba, again, there is a seal of Yotam, whose design consists of a ram walking left toward a bird; and from Aroer in the Judean Negeb, a seal of Qausaʾ that features a couchant griffin and an Egyptian ankh symbol; of unknown provenance is the seal of “Qausʾimmi, [son of] Laʿadʾil,” on which the names are written above and below a ritual scene, and the seal of “Qausʾadonay” which presents a God, bearded, wearing a crown and a long plain robe, and enthroned on a bull, who is greeted by two worshipers who wear belted and pleated robes.98 All of the seals are individualized by their iconography and personalized by names, or names and titles, or names and patronymics, or in the case of the woman from Jerusalem, her name and the name of her patron. She may have been involved in a syndicate or a family business, the other individuals in private enterprise, the servants of the king in public trade and commerce, with the king himself probably in a purely executive role.

The marzeaḥ inscription, dated to about the mid-seventh century B.C.E. or a little later, is in a cursive hand on a sealed papyrus roll.99 The text is elegantly written, in two lines, with divider dots between words:

1 kh . ʾmrw . ʾlhn . lgrʾ . lk . hmrzḥ . whrḥyn . wh

2 byt . wyšʿʾ . rḥq . mhm . wmlkʾ . hvlš

Thus says God to Geraʾ: “Yours is the marzeaḥ, and the millstones, and the house, and Yišaʿaʾ is excluded from them. And Malkoʾ is the depositary.”

Inquiry had been made to the patron God of the marzeaḥ, or symposium, or confraternity, as to which of the two contestants, Geraʾ or Yišaʿaʾ, should be its leader. God chose Geraʾ, giving him control of the marzeaḥ, possession of the house where their meetings took place, and of the millstones which were at the heart of the joint enterprise, and dismissed his rival. God’s response, delivered orally through a prophet, was a legally binding decision on the litigants and on the members of the guild and was entrusted in writing to a depositary—literally, to “The Third,” someone who was not involved in the dispute. The papyrus was sealed with his seal, and the bulla reads, in three registers separated by double horizontal lines. “—— || Belonging to Malkoʾ || the Kitian.” The seal is Transjordanian: Cypriot seals, for instance, generally are free field, are not divided into registers, and do not have double horizontal lines. The top register is missing in a break in the bulla, but it contained Malkoʾ’s device, something simple, such as celestial symbols, to suit the general layout of the seal. The second and third registers were for his name and place of origin: there are four letters on each line, and so the last letter of his name (an ʾalep)was written in the third register with the name of his hometown, “the Kitian.”

The papyrus is of unknown provenance, and it is not entirely certain that it is Edomite rather than Moabite, but what is particularly interesting is (1) that the disputants have Phoenician names,100 and (2) that the depositary, who also has a Phoenician name, is identified as coming from Kition in Cyprus, and (3) that the legal proceedings are recorded, not in Phoenician, but in a Transjordanian language and script. A marzeaḥ was a club for merchants, traders, or entrepreneurs in some specialization who met under the auspices of a patron God to drink and play and remember the departed of their corporation. In this particular instance, perhaps in general, the symposiarch’s authority was established by a decree of the patron God and extended to ownership or at least control of the club’s assets. The members of this particular club apparently were millers and probably included, besides Phoenicians from Kition, representatives of the other nationalities and ethnic groups who traveled along these roads from Arabia and ʿAqaba to Jerusalem or the Philistine coast.

In the early sixth century, when Judah was broken by the Babylonians, the Edomites rushed in to pick up the pieces, grabbing territory, commandeering trade routes, forging ties with Tyre. But in the seventh century, they were just avid competitors with the Judeans, Phoenicians (specifically Tyrians and their associates from Kition in Cyprus), Philistines, Moabites, and Arabs who were stationed there or traveled the trade routes. The Phoenicians had been active in the region for ages (they were at Kuntillet ʿAjrud in the very early eighth century, and an artist at Beersheba much later in that century or in the early seventh copied their coroplastic art),101 but the Edomites were upstarts and, in the opinion of later Judean writers, bumpkins and boors. They were, nevertheless, country cousins to the Judeans, shrewd and ambitious, and an essential factor in the worldwide web of trade relations.

Moab

Moab is the country east of the Dead Sea and north of Edom. Along with Edom, and included right after Tyre and Judah, it was part of the Assyrian western confederacy, but neither country appears on the Judean map of the world dominated by Phoenician commerce. There are some Phoenician imports, notably of cosmetics palettes for women, but in the seventh century Moab is known mainly from the personal seals of some of its more successful entrepreneurs.102

There are approximately 54 of these seals that can be dated to the seventh century. Four belonged to scribes (hspr), one to the court historian (hmzkr), and one to “Manasseh, son of the king,” the heir apparent to the throne of Judah. His Moabite seal features a star and a crescent moon, but the same legend occurs on his Judean seal, where these symbols are replaced by a winged sun disk shaped like a scarab.103 Three of the earlier seals are aniconic, one inserts a row of birds, an Ammonite device, into the usual astral repertoire, and another is unique in depicting a galloping horse. The rest of the seals fall into three groups.

The typically Moabite group consists of about 24 seals adorned with a star and crescent moon: these together may represent the composite divinity ʿAthtar-Kemosh known from the Mesha Stele, because ʿAthtar is the morning star and Kemosh, because he was worshiped only at open-air sanctuaries or high places, seems to have been a Celestial God. On some of these seals, the crescent rests on a horizontal line representing the horizon; on others, the star and crescent are balanced by a winged sun disk or aligned with an ankh sign or very schematic, sceptre-like Tree-of-Life. Only a few of the owners have names composed with the divine name Kemosh (see, e.g., fig. 4.4), and the rest are hypocoristic nominal or verbal names.

Fig. 4.4. Impression of Moabite seal with inscription, star, and crescent (BLMJ 1848). Reproduced courtesy of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem.

A second group incorporates some Assyrian motifs. Two of these seals portray a pair of worshipers facing a star that twinkles before their eyes while a crescent moon rises above their heads; another like them features stick-figure men worshiping a central crescent enclosing a twinkling star; and another has the central star but lacks the crescent. On three others, men in long robes face a central altar, above which hovers a winged sun disk or a crescent moon or a star set within a crescent moon. There is also a seal on which worshipers address a blazing sun (a sun with rays) and a crescent moon, while a winged sun disk with a blazing sun above it hovers over them. On one seal the central object of worship is an Assyrian-style Tree-of-Life, above which hover a winged sun disk and the crescent moon. Another pictures a single worshiper flanked by stylized trees; and another, the script of which is Moabite but the layout of which is Ammonite (the name is written vertically behind the figure and not in a horizontal register) features a single worshiper in Assyrian dress and sporting an Assyrian beard and hairdo, who holds an ankh staff in his right hand and raises his right hand in adoration. None of their names are composed with the divine element Kemosh, but one is Phoenician in origin (lbʿlʾ), one is Arabic (ʿbdwhbn), and the rest are Moabite kinship (ʾb, “Father,” or ʾḥ, “Brother”) or hypocoristic nominal names.

The third group of seals, adorned with fantastic men, beasts, or divine beings, reflects a more cosmopolitan taste. Five represent griffins and fill the open field with a stylized ankh sign or a Tree or Plant-of-Life. One portrays a four-winged man wearing an Egyptian kilt and crown and holding a Plant-of-Life in either hand. Another shows winged sphinxes facing a plant, and below them and the name is a winged sun disk. Another features an anthropomorphic winged sun disk with the disk as a man raising his arms in greeting or adoration. In the top register of another seal, there is a four-winged female with an Egyptian double crown who holds a branch in either hand, while a winged sun disk holds sway in the bottom register. Two of the names are composed with the divine element Kemosh and are clearly Moabite, as are other kinship or hypocoristic nominal names, but one of the seals depicting a griffin belonged to a man with an Ammonite name (ʾmrʾl), and the seal with the four-winged man belonged to someone with an Edomite or Philistine name (bʿlntn).

These Moabite seals are a narrow but bright entry into the political, social, religious, and economic life of the country in the seventh century B.C.E. There was some public or government intervention, either administrative or commercial, witnessed by the seals of scribes and members of the court. In a special case, Manasseh of Judah, son of Hezekiah, king of Judah, in the line of David, whose Moabite lineage the Bible admits or flaunts, apparently held dual citizenship, or a Moabite laissez passer, when he was crown prince: the privilege presumably was not executive but commercial and illustrates the deep and enduring, if sometimes strained, relations between Judah and Moab.

The star-and-crescent seals, like the earlier aniconic seals, are representative of seventh-century universalism, which promoted trans-tribal Gods toward transcendent, symbolic, or abstract status. Subgroups in this class of seals belonged to members of the same syndicate or guild or were made in the same workshop, but all most likely reflect the theology of a newly flourishing union of tribes. The quasi-Assyrian seals (the formal dress, the pose, the gesture, the prominence of the sun disk) are an indication of the influence of the empire on the people who were involved in the international schemes of trade and tribute. The cosmopolitan group of seals is a trace of Phoenician and worldly realism, straddling the line between conventional and secular aspiration. Moabite society, or at least its commercial echelons, was individual and personal and apt to fit into the worldwide enterprise engineered by the Phoenicians of Tyre and its mainland affiliates.

Ammon

The Ammonites lived north of Moab, south of Gilead, east of the Jordan, in towns and settlements radiating from the city of ʿAmman,104 which was situated at the junction of the North Arabian route through the Wadi Sirhan and the South Arabian route that proceeded northward along the King’s Highway from the Gulf of ʿAqaba. The country is mentioned in Assyrian tribute lists and from these, from Ammonite seals and inscriptions, and from an assortment of biblical texts, it is possible to compose a complete king list from the mid-eighth century to the end of the seventh century B.C.E.105 Apart from this peek into Ammon’s political history—its cultural, economic, and religious history in the seventh century—as the history of Moab, is reconstructed from a few artifacts and inscriptions.

There are more than 200 Ammonite personal seals, mostly from the seventh (and only a few from the sixth) century.106 There are seals of kings, officials, and professionals and seals of women who were their daughters or wives. Their names suggest their ethnicity, and the totality of their names reveals their virtual or actual pantheon. Their iconography is Ammonite or colored by Syrian, Assyrian, and Phoenician themes and motifs. The seals can be grouped by the names and possible filiations, or by particular devices and designs. In the absence of evidence on Ammon’s role in the political and commercial network of the western alliance, the seals preview some of the particular relations and individual connections of these men and women that locate them, however tentatively, on the map of the seventh century B.C.E.

Women’s seals identify their owners as the “daughter” (bt) or “servant” (ʾmt)—meaning a woman with an official status, either marital or professional, in relation to a named man. The seal of “ʾAbiḥay, daughter of Yinaḥḥim” is organized in three registers separated by double-line dividers, the most common glyptic design. It features her name in the upper register, a winged sun disk in the central register, and her father’s name in the lowest register.107 Her father, Yinaḥḥim, had his own seal, with his name spread over the upper and lower registers and a charging bull emblazoned in the very prominent, middle register. Her brothers Menaḥḥem, Elishaʿ, and ʾAmarʾel also had their personal seals, and it is clear that the whole family, excepting the mother, who did not have a seal, was professional and may have worked in the same business.108

There are seals of two women, ʾElshagub and Ḥatʿuzzat, who are daughters of ʾElishamaʿ.109 Each seal has a different design: ʾElshagub’s is in three registers, with her name and patronymic in the upper and lower, and the middle register occupied by two seated monkeys flanking a plant; Ḥatʿuzzat’s has the second-most popular design, oval with a central figure, in this case a bird, and with the name and patronymic written around the edge (see fig. 4.5). Their names are also interesting: ʾElshagub, “The God ʾEl is Exalted,” is a typical Ammonite name composed with the divine name ʾEl, the national God of Ammon,110 whose sobriquet was “The King” (*milkom); the name Ḥatʿuzzat, “Sister of al-ʿUzzah,” is composed of the Phoenician prefix “sister,” written as in Phoenician without initial ʾalep (ḥt instead of ʾḥt),and the Arabic theophoric element,111 al-ʿUzzah (ʿUzzat in Ammonite) being the Great Goddess of North Arabia, and so it is representative of the fairly cosmopolitan and outward-looking spirit of seventh-century Ammon, which was caught up in the international mood of the traffic traveling its roads.

Fig. 4.5. Impression of Ammonite seal with bird and inscription (private collection). Reproduced courtesy of the owner.

Several women among the almost 20 with personal seals who do not have kinship (“father,” “sister”) names, have North or South Arabic names (ltmyrš, ʿlʾ, ʿlyh,ʿnmwt, ḥmdn). However, most of the names of the husbands (of women called “servant”) and fathers (of women called “daughter”) are good, old-fashioned Ammonite. Thus, it seems that Ammon was especially intricate with the Arabs, who were alternately renegades and the allies and boutique suppliers of the Assyrians.112

Professionals, merchants, and administrators with seals include scribes (hspr), a goldsmith (hṣrp), a doctor (hrpʾ), a standard-bearer (hnss) (his device is a four-winged scarab, suggestive of royal authority, flanked by standards),113 and Mattanʾil, who was “Manager of the Royal Estates” (mtnʾl šr nḥl) and whose seal belongs to the Running-Charging-Bull class.114 There is a seal of Puduil who was king of the Ammonites in the time of Sennacherib (701 B.C.E.) and Esarhaddon (675 B.C.E.), that is carved in Phoenician style—a design footnoted in a lower register by a name: the upper register pictures a striding Egyptian-style sphinx and takes up most of the seal; as often in Phoenician but uniquely in Ammonite, the possessive “belonging to . . .” (l-) before his name is omitted, as is his rank “king” (hmlk),115 and he seems to have enjoyed the fuss and sophistication conferred by his civilian status. There is also a seal of his foreign minister, “Biyadʾil, servant of Puduʾil” (bydʾl ʿbd pdʾl), whose iconography aligns it with two distinct classes of Ammonite seals: on the front or stamp side, there is a Running-Bull framed by a single oval line, and on the top there is a monkey sitting on a papyrus flower (see fig. 4.6), eating fruit, a playful turn on the Phoenician portrayal of Harpocrates seated on a lotus blossom with his finger to his lips.116

Fig. 4.6. Impression of Ammonite seal (two-sided, one side shown) with monkey and inscription (Paris, BN, CM, De Clercq Collection 2512).

The seal of another Ammonite king, “Barakʾil, the King” (lbrkʾl hmlk ||), who came to the throne after Puduʾil, is aniconic but it includes, as do some other seals, two vertical lines to mark the end of the text.117 The seal of his chamberlain (nʿr) is also aniconic, but his name (btš) is Arabic, and the design of the seal is unusual in having a large dot in the lines separating the two registers.118 There is also a seal of ʿAbdaʾ, who was the chamberlain (nʿr) of ʾIlram, a private individual of some rank or means.119

ʿAmminadab, who was king about the mid-seventh century during the reign of Ashurbanipal, had two ministers with seals: ʾAdonînûr (ʾdnnr), whose seal is aniconic; and ʾAdonîpilleṭ, whose seal shows a bird-headed and lion-footed winged figure dressed in Assyrian style standing beneath a crescent moon and a star.120 Baʿalyišaʿ, who was king of Ammon toward the end of the seventh century, had a seal like the seal of Puduʾil—its device is a sphinx—but the seal itself is totally Ammonite, in three registers with the design in the middle, and with a sphinx that lacks the grace and litheness of the Phoenician original.121 His minister (ʿbd) was Milkomʾûr, and his seal also is entirely in the Ammonite glyptic tradition: his name and title are in the top and bottom register, and in the middle register there is a four-winged scarab flanked by standards,122 like the seal of the standard-bearer, a symbol of royal authority.

Among the seals of scribes, there is one belonging to a man with an Arabic name (ḥṭy)who was the personal scribe of ʾAdonʾab (ʾdnʾb):123 his Ammonite handwriting is atrocious, and he may have been responsible mainly for the company’s Arabic correspondence. There are also 15 or more seals inscribed with abecedaries instead of proper names,124 which may have belonged to scribes or teachers or seal-makers.125 The abecedaries contain the first 4, 5, 8, 10, or 11 letters of the alphabet and might be indicative of the patterns of rhyme or rhythm used in learning the 22 letters. Two of the abecedaries are preceded by the genitive preposition l-, “belonging to,” which usually precedes the name of the seal’s owner. More than half are aniconic, with the letters in one register, or in two registers separated by a double line, and their owners would have been identified by the choice of letters and their handwriting. The 6 or so that have some design have a bird facing a papyrus plant or a worshiper facing the plant, or facing the plant with a bird above it. Their uniformity suggests that they were the work of apprentices in a writers’ guild and may have served as their personal seals until they made a name for themselves.

The existence of these sorts of guilds or corporations or family businesses, or the stratification of society that promoted several members of the same family into public or professional service is suggested by the various possible groupings of seals by genealogy or iconography. ʾIlram, for instance, whose chamberlain (nʿr) had his own seal, may be the ʾIlram whose son (bn) Hiṣṣilʾil also had a personal seal.126 There is also a seal of ʾIlram, one of three sons of ʾEliʿezer, who may be the same man.127 There are seals of three sons of ʾElishaʿ, of two of his grandsons and one of his great-grandsons.128 And there is a seal of ʾElishaʿ, the son of Yinaḥḥim, possibly the same man,129 whose sister ʾAbiḥay and brothers ʾAmarʾil and Menaḥem also owned seals. Finally there are seals of two sons of Menaḥḥem.130 There are at least four generations, if these people are all related, and it is evident that the whole family was successful and may be supposed that each was educated and trained; it is even possible that they all worked for the same company or family business.

Similarly, Biyadʾil, who was foreign minister in the reign of Puduʾil, had two sons with seals who may have followed him into public service.131 There are similar instances of transgenerational notoriety—a seal-bearing father who is succeeded by one or two sons with seals—in families with more modest profiles.

The iconography of the seals,132 on the other hand, can suggest groupings of seal owners, not all of whom were members of the same family. The seals that portray Harpocrates, the child Horus, as a monkey seated on a lotus or papyrus blossom belonged to Biyadʾil, minister of the king; to one of his sons; to ʾElishaʿ, the son of Yinaḥḥim; to a son of ʾAmarʾil; to one of the sons of ʾEliʿezer; and to three other, unaffiliated persons.133 The running-charging-bull seal series comprises two variants: three registers, with the bull portrayed in the center and the name of the owner in the upper and lower registers; and two registers, with the bull either at the top or at the bottom. Each is a little different from the others, neither series seems to be by the same gem-cutter or from the same workshop, and only two belonged to individuals with titles or whose families are known. Both of these are in the three-register series: one belonging to Mattanʾil, who was the manager of the king’s estates; the other to Shuʿal, the son of ʾElishaʿ.134 But the common image does suggest some shared ideology or employment.

The other iconographic series include genuine Ammonite Images (a central standing bird surrounded by the owner’s name and patronymic, like the seal belonging to the woman Ḥatʿuzzat) and some that seem to toy with borrowed icons (a central ram’s head with flanking birds, a variant with a bull’s head in the middle); human figures, some with Assyrian features, done in a quasi-Phoenician style: a worshiper with arms outstretched and hands raised; a naked girl as a sort of signature on the seal of a woman, or a clothed girl just for the fun of it; a striding man with a staff in his left hand and his right arm by his side; a bearded and winged bull man; and a man in an Egyptian kilt stabbing a standing lion.135 The most striking feature of all these seals is their individuality, the differences in style, the nuances in portraying the same motif, so that even members of the same family or corporation defined themselves by truth-to-tell personal seals.

These series, founded on filiation or iconography, are local Ammonite creations that draw on Syrian, Assyrian, and Phoenician artistic traditions, or in the case of aniconic seals, on the worldwide tendency at this time, fostered by the Assyrian Empire, toward an exclusive, transcendental, and abstract conception of God. The divine name occurring most frequently on seals is ʾEl—the epithet Milkom, which biblical texts identify as the name of the God of Ammon, is very rare—but the other theophoric elements reflect an awareness of a vibrant international pantheon comprising Ammonite tribal kinship divinities and the Gods of Syria, Assyria, Arabia, and Phoenicia.

The same kind of openness to foreign influence, tempered by an insistence on adaptation and personal appropriation, is evident in Ammonite art and architecture and in a rare literary composition. A group of double-faced caryatids, for instance, that were part of a balustrade imitate the North Syrian ivories representing a Woman-at-the-Window but remove the woman from the window in order to incorporate her into the architecture.136 There are statues of men and women137 that display local style (right arm hanging by the side, left folded across the breast and holding a bouquet) as well as imitations of Egyptian, Assyrian, or Syrian features (headdress, hair style and clothing). Each presents the face of some individual whose piety it memorializes, and one is actually identified by an inscription on the pedestal as the grandson of Šanipu, the king of Ammon in the time of Tiglath-pileser III.138

Ammonite literary aspirations and this penchant toward individuality and even personality are revealed in an inscription on a small bronze bottle from the end of the seventh century:139

Composition of ʿAmminadab, king of the ʿAmmonites, son of Hissilʾil, king of the ʿAmmonites, son of ʿAmminadab, king of the ʿAmmonites: “Vineyard, and wine press, and conduit, and vat, may they bring pleasure and happiness, for many days and for years to come.”

The sentiments are pretty well universal, but the ditty has its peculiar cadence, its repetitions, its assonance and alliteration, and was probably composed for recital at a party (or, marzeaḥ) for the king and his cronies in international trade.

Ammon was originally a small, ethnically uniform, and stable kingdom: it is identified in Assyrian texts as “the House of Ammon,” and in its own texts its people are known as “the Children of Ammon.” This was still the case in the seventh century, but by this time it belonged to the international community created and operated by Assyria and managed by Tyre. There are a few Phoenician imports, trinkets and luxuries among them,140 and there is evidence for partnership with the Philistines and for cultural interchange with Syria and Assyria, but mostly it is a matter of personal seals witnessing to Ammonite engagement in world trade. There may have been syndicates and corporations, and it may be supposed that kings were significant players, but there is a strong argument for private enterprise, individuals working in their own businesses, or families, living in compounds or multiroom houses,141 with generations of experience. North and South Arabia were among their suppliers, and their customers included all who needed exotic tribute to send to Assyria, but Ammon’s trademark and strength was the independence and gumption of its people.

Philistia

The main Philistine cities were Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Gaza on the coast and Ekron, about 20 kilometers inland from Ashdod, Gath having disappeared from history after its capture by Damascus in the ninth century. These and their satellite towns, many of which had political and commercial relations with Judah, had assimilated to the Phoenician way of life and prospered in the seventh century. All are included in the Assyrian lists of tributary states during the reigns of Esarhaddon (680–669 B.C.E.) and Ashurbanipal (668–627 B.C.E.), where Gaza is mentioned along with Ashkelon, Ekron with Byblos, and Ashdod with Ammon.

The Phoenicianization of Philistia is most obvious in its adoption of the onomasticon and language of the various Phoenician cities.142 The Kingdom of Gaza was the gateway to Egypt and Arabia. Gaza city was an Assyrian custom house, jealously guarded by them from Egyptian interference.143 An outpost at Tell er-Ruqeish, on the coast, 20 kilometers south of the city was fortified, and its storehouses with Phoenician, Cypriot, Greek, and Egyptian pottery provide evidence of brisk trade.144 Another outpost at Tell Jemmeh, just a few kilometers east of Ruqeish and southeast of Gaza, was a station for camel caravans145 traveling through the Sinai to Egypt or through the Negeb of Judah to Edom and the Red Sea. There are Philistine inscriptions from this place written in a beautiful flowing hand but in a hybrid Hebrew-Phoenician script.146 Most of the names are Phoenician (the rest being presumably Philistine), and patronymics of men are usually marked, as if they were Greek gentilics, by a suffixed letter šin (ʾdnš, “son of ʾAdon”; ppš, “son of the Paphian”), or in one instance (as in the dialect of Byblos, where “son” is written b- instead of bn) by a prefixed letter b- (bmlk, “son of Malk”). Patronymics of women, or possibly their matronymics, are marked by the feminine suffix -yh (qsryh, “daughter of Qsr, or “son of the woman Qsr”).

There are also Philistine inscriptions from Tel Seraʿ, about 20 kilometers farther east of Tell Jemmeh, that are written in a similar but not identical, hybrid script and in which the names are Phoenician and South Arabian.147 The Philistines of the Kingdom of Gaza, in short, borrowed Phoenician as their lingua franca and wrote it in a script that they learned first from the Phoenicians, with whom they did business, and later modified by studying under the Judeans, with whom they had age-old diplomatic ties.

Ashkelon was the chief port of Philistia and the terminal of land routes from Gaza, Ekron, Timnah, Gezer, and Ashdod. Although traditionally aligned with Egypt, it was forced to submit to Assyria and became a reluctant staging area in Esarhaddon’s campaigns against its patron.148 It was not incorporated into the Assyrian provincial system but as a vassal remained independent in the empire, where its loyalty was always in doubt. Prior to setting up this camp, Esarhaddon inquired of the Sun God whether Ashkelon, relying on troops from Egypt (and two other states whose names are lost), would interfere with his preparations.149 Ashkelon, however, was not geared for war and was more concerned about its place in the Mediterranean trade network than about its position in the empire.150

Ashkelon, built on the coast, with walls and towers was an international port. In the heart of town (only very partially excavated) was a marketplace with a winery, warehouses, shops, administrative buildings, and a customs house.151 Most of the pottery is coastal Philistine, but there is also imported Phoenician Red Slip, with its local imitations, and Phoenician storage jars and fine ceramics, as well as central and southern Judean pottery, Ionian drinking cups, East Greek Wild Goat wine jugs, and Cypriot, Corinthian, Chian, and Samian wares. Ashkelon’s Egyptian connections, or perhaps even the existence of an Egyptian enclave in the town are evident from weights and from a variety of ritual and religious items: a bronze offering table, a statuette of Osiris, amulets and Bes figurines, situlae with representations of Min, and an array of bronze statuettes of Egyptian Gods. In later times, Ashkelon was famous for its wine,152 and this may have been one of its principal exports in the seventh century.

Ashkelon also used Phoenician as its official language and wrote in a hybrid Phoenician-Judean-Philistine script. There is a seal of ʿAbdʾilʾib, the son of Shibʿat, who was the servant of Mitinti (mtt on the seal, Mitinti in the Assyrian annals), the son of Sidqaʾ.153 Mitinti, mayor of Ashkelon (he is not named king on the seal) paid tribute to Esarhaddon in 677 B.C.E. and to Ashurbanipal in 667 B.C.E. The final [t] in his name, as in the name Shibat, distinguishes it from standard Phoenician and, as in North Arabic, is a final morpheme of Philistine masculine names. His father’s name, in root and structure, is good Phoenician, while the name of the owner of the seal, ʿAbdʾilʾib, “Servant-of-the-God-of-the-Fathers,” is truly archaic, harking back to the Sea Peoples’ earliest contact with Canaan—its theophoric element is not found anywhere else in Phoenician but is known from Ugaritic pantheon lists.

There is another seal in Philistine script belonging to ʾAḥaʾ, and a seal belonging to a Judean woman called “Abigail, wife of ʿAšyahū” (ʾbgyl ʾšt ʿšyhw), and this diversity is completely consistent with the international status of the city.154 An ostracon recording the sale of a cereal crop155 illustrates the almost creole quality of the local language, in which the script is hybrid, the orthography is Hebrew, the morphology is dialectal Phoenician, and the lexicon and onomasticon are common to both languages (the syntax is obscured by the fragmentary condition of the ostracon).

Ashdod, like Ashkelon, reveals a mixture of Philistine, Phoenician, and Hebrew elements in the seventh century. There is a great deal of Phoenician Red Slip pottery, mostly transport jars, which is an argument for trade between Ashdod and Tyre and its Palestinian possessions north and south of Mount Carmel. Excavations on the site uncovered a potters’ quarter (a street, courtyards, and houses used as workshops) and some brief inscriptions written in Judean Hebrew. One reads, “the potter” (pḥr) and would have contained his name, which is now lost; others designate weights and measures; and another is “Royal Measure” (lmlk) and is inscribed on a jar handle. Like Ashkelon, the city was coveted by Egypt (its position in the western alliance and in the Tyrian trade nexus was a good reason), and it may have been captured by Psammetichus I in the third quarter of the seventh century.156

Sites on or near the coast but north of the Sorek Valley have connections or affinities with the Philistine cities without belonging to the same system of city-states. Tel Qasile, near Joppa, left no seventh-century architectural remains, but its unusual pottery assemblage may reflect its trade network.157 There are bowls of various types that resemble comparable items in Philistine (Timnah), Phoenician (ʾAchzib, Tell Keisan), and southern Judean (Beersheba) sites; cooking pots like those at Hazor in Northern Israel and at Ashdod; storage jars with parallels at Ashdod and Tell Keisan; and jugs that can be compared to others from Philistia, central Judah, and the Tyrian towns at Tell Keisan and Yokneʿam. Tell Qasile, therefore, was not isolated from Philistia and Judah but differs from the Philistine cities in its decided outreach to the places in the Plain of ʿAkko and the Jezreel Valley that were under Tyrian jurisdiction.

By contrast, ʿAzor, which lay just 10 kilometers southeast of Tell Qasile, had predominantly Cypriot connections from the Late Bronze Age through the ninth century. The same may hold true for the seventh century (a scaraboid adorned with a prancing horse would be consistent with Cypriot tastes), and the only serious connection with the Philistine cities south of the Sorek is an inscription on a transport jar identifying the producer of its contents as Shulmay (šlmy), a good Phoenician name but written in a fine Philistine hand,158 although obviously this could indicate dealings with a Philistine merchant south of the border without implying Philistine involvement at the site. The Sorek Valley, then, is the border between the Philistine cities where Phoenician and Judean cultural and commercial influences melded, and the sites south of Mount Carmel where Phoenician and Cypriot influences predominated.

The most important Philistine city of the interior was Ekron, about 20 kilometers due east of Ashdod.159 The city was graced with a large temple, designed in part according to Assyrian palace models160 (a large courtyard, a reception hall with a throne room, a long sanctuary with two rows of pillars, a raised stone dais opposite the entrance), the storerooms of which were filled with gold, silver, bronze, and ivory objects (including a golden uraeus from an Egyptian crown), and all the necessary ceramic utensils.161 The city flourished in the seventh century, starting during the Assyrian regime but accelerating in the second half of the century under Egyptian tutelage,162 when the lower town outside the walls filled with migrant workers. The sources of this prosperity were a strong textile industry (attested by hundreds of loom weights) and a remarkably successful oil and perfume industry (attested by more than 100 oil presses and by numerous commercial incense burners).163 Another measure of Ekron’s prosperity can be seen in the numerous hoards of silver (ingots, broken pieces, and discarded jewelry) found in the temple complex and in some wealthy homes in the heart of the city.164

The silver in these hoards was probably used as money and, along with its industries, the incense-importing business, some luxury items, and the records of merchants at Nineveh, it is a clue to Ekron’s involvement in trade and commerce. The olive presses, it has been estimated, could produce about 1,000 tons, or 48,000 large transport jars, of oil per year;165 and a large amount of the finished product must have found its way into the trade network either for local consumption or for export to the western Mediterranean. The textile industry, similarly, was too vigorous to have been producing goods destined for sale in Ekron alone. There is also evidence for direct trade with Tyre (the silver jewelry in the hoards represents international tastes but was Phoenician in its inspiration, and engraved tridacna shells found at Ekron were a Phoenician specialty) and for merchants from Ekron doing business in Assyria.166 Like trade with North and South Arabia, for which the only tangible evidence is a group of incense stands, most of the evidence for Ekron’s involvement in the Phoenician trade network is indirect and partial.

Ekron, along with its sister city Timnah,167 illustrates the characteristic Philistine melding of Judean and Phoenician cultural influences. There is an inscription, for instance, incised on a seventh-century storage jar that reads “for Baʿal and for Padi” (lbʿl | wlpdy |), with the names set off by vertical dividers. Both are good Phoenician, and therefore Philistine, personal names, but Baʿal is also a God and the name of the contemporary king of Tyre. If the reference were to the kings of Ekron and Tyre, the inscription’s storage-jar context would suggest a commercial relationship between them, while the omission of their royal titles would brand it as extraordinarily informal and personal. But if the reference is to God and the king, the use of the word-dividers and the repetition of the preposition “for” give it a ring, make it a saying or a motto or a rallying cry—exactly like the invocation of the king and the Goddess on the Pygmalion pendant from Carthage—and simultaneously satisfy the Assyrian ideal of revering “God and King.”168 Baʿal, however, was the God of Byblos—the major cities had their individual Baʿal or “Lord,” but the Baʿal of historical record was the God of the ancient city where his story was remembered and retold.

These cultural and specifically religious connections with Byblos are also attested in the inscription that was composed for the dedication of the dynastic temple in Ekron.169 Its format, with the text written between horizontal lines, its morphology (third-singular personal suffixes in -h), its lexicon, and its explicit concern for the land (the king invokes blessings on himself and on the land [ʾereṣ] of Ekron) have good and unique parallels in Byblian inscriptions of the tenth to fifth centuries B.C.E. The cultural mix at Ekron is also evident in the contents of the inscription. The king (šr, “prince,” “mayor”) is ʾAkayus, Ikausu in Assyrian, Achish in the Hebrew Bible, Achaios or Anchises in Greek,170 the son of Padi, king of Ekron. The temple was dedicated to a Goddess whose name (ptgyh) evokes Mycenean memories but does not have a Phoenician equivalent, although there are other inscriptions, incised on storage jars in the temple, that feature Asherah, the Goddess worshiped in contemporary Jerusalem (ʾašerâ), invoked in a Phoenician spelling (ʾšrt) of her name.171

The overall impression is that Ekron was an early convert to the Phoenician, perhaps specifically Byblian way of life in which it was alphabetized and acculturated, that it entered easily into the Tyrian trade network late in the eighth century, and that it flourished in the seventh century in a creative symbiosis with Judah, at first under Assyrian auspices, and in the end under the aegis of Egypt. At the end of the century, it was this Egyptian connection that was its undoing, when ʾAdon, the king of Ekron with an orthodox Byblian Phoenician name, appealed in vain to the pharaoh to honor the pact between them and save him from Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.172

Philistia, the territory and city-states south of the Sorek Valley and north of the Wadi el-Arish, was an independent region stimulated and bedeviled by the tug of war between Assyria and Egypt. It was the outlet for overland trade with Egypt and Arabia and a gateway for people and products from Cyprus and the Aegean. Its connections with Phoenicia were both traditional and recently updated (borrowings of scripts and dialects; participation in the new monetary policy; import of interesting, exotic, and expensive doodads), and its position as intermediary between Judah and Phoenicia in the global trade network is evident in its catering to the demands and tastes of its former antagonist. The Judean perspective on this old and new Philistia is revealed in the story of Samson, which was spun out of the legends of Heracles (the same type of divine origin, a liking for strong women, similar trials and tribulations, final immolation) and in which the gruff Judean becomes the admirable, irrepressible, malleable, and immortal Greek (Judges 13–16).173 Its own culture was radically Palestinian, and its ability to assimilate to these dominant ethnicities marks it as typical of the new world order.

Tyre in the Western Mediterranean

Tyre turned much more resolutely to the western Mediterranean in the seventh century. The colony at Carthage in North Africa was becoming the hub of a new Phoenician world. There was not much room for development in the east. Judah and Transjordan were stable and assertive and became independent and demanding in the network of nations. Assyrian patronage started to wear thin, and its constant tussle with Egypt and interference in Tyre’s relations with this old and constant partner was becoming less and less profitable to the island metropolis. Going west was not just a matter of “business as usual.” The battering of Sidon and the marginalizing of Byblos had benefited Tyre, but the rivalry of these cities was essential to Phoenician identity. It was a matter of development and survival.

Cyprus

Cyprus began the seventh century under Assyrian hegemony. This diminished Sidon’s role, fragmented the Cypriot amphictyony once centered at Kition, and promoted Tyre as agent of the empire, but it did not give Assyria direct military, commercial, or cultural control. Cyprus left the seventh century a congeries of independent city-states in regional configurations and alliances that left it open to Attic and Egyptian influences. The Phoenicians were a little bit everywhere on the island, but their interests, as usual, were leading them away to ever-more-specific destinations farther West. And now the Cypriots went with them.

The ten Cypriot kingdoms that paid tribute to Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal in the first half of the seventh century (in 673 and 664 B.C.E.) were governed by Greek Cypriot rulers, except Carthage in the southwest, whose king had a Phoenician name.174 Other places that are of some importance in the archaeological record are not listed and either were included in the territory of another kingdom, as Amathus was in the Kingdom of Carthage, or Lapethos and Ayia Irini in the northern kingdom of Chytroi; or were Assyrian protectorates, like Kition, which in the eighth century had become the Assyrian capital of Cyprus. The kingdoms are listed by region, and their order suggests the boundaries of each region: the eastern region comprised the kingdoms of Idalion, Chytroi, and Salamis, and this order describes a triangle from the southeast to the north and then to the east; the western region formed another triangle with the Kingdom of Paphos in the south, Soloi in the north, and Kourion on the southern coast; the central region consisted of Tamassos, Carthage, Ledra, and Nora, and the order of their listing staggers the inland kingdoms of Tamassos and Ledra against the coastal kingdoms of Carthage and Nora. These regions were topographical and may have corresponded to economic and administrative realities, but they seem to reflect Assyrian familiarity with a map of the island rather than any concrete or cultural involvement in the affairs of the kingdoms or the lives of the people.

The war between Chalcis and Eretria put an end to Euboean overseas interests, especially to Euboean pottery exports to Cyprus, and most of the imported pottery in seventh-century Cyprus was East Greek and Corinthian. Places such as Amathus and Salamis where Tyre had an investment imported the most, while Kition, which had been a Sidonian settlement until it was taken over in the Assyrian reorganization of the island, imported very little.175 Phoenician pottery characteristic of the seventh century (including wide-rimmed mushroom-lipped and trefoil-lipped jugs) is found at Limassol, Kition, and Idalion and in larger quantities at Amathus and Salamis.176 Some of the more popular wares such as the trefoil-lipped jugs and a small handle-less bowl that were produced on the island from metal prototypes show up in Italy in the seventh century, where they were copied either in ceramic or in silver.177

Local Cypriot pottery included figurative wares in the Free Field style (the figures are not set into geometric frames but are painted on the open surface of the vessel) that emerged toward the end of the eighth century, partly under Attic influence, and that reveals some of the interests, occupations, and aspirations of the artists and their patrons.178 There are few maritime scenes but many military and rustic scenes: chariots, horses and riders, archers and armed warriors, birds and animals, and people with flowers or holding or leading an animal. Cyprus, according to the pottery record, was mainly native Cypriot in the seventh century, but there was still an established Greek population, and Phoenicians (Byblians in the north, Tyrians along the southern coast, and a remnant of the Sidonians at Kition and Idalion) were a distinct minority.

The terra-cotta industry catered to the Cypriot market,179 where it was used mostly in ex-votos but also in toys, mementos, and tomb gifts. Phoenician influence could affect details, such as the rendering of the nose or ears, but also extended to the introduction of new themes into the Cypriot repertory.180 At Kourion, statuettes of bulls and of male votaries in long robes were popular,181 but the preferred offerings were statuettes of women and men: women with their arms raised and men on horseback. Phoenician influence is perceptible in the partial or complete nakedness of some of the women, in the larger size of many terra-cottas, and in the addition of saddle cloths (such as were used by Assyrian cavalry) to the horse’s accoutrements.182 At Amathus, where most of the terra-cottas are later, Phoenician tastes in the seventh century are evident in the choice of subjects and in the modification of Cypriot originals.183 There are scenes of women who stand at a table and make bread, as at eighth-century ʾAchzib, and statuettes of women holding or playing tambourines, as at Shiqmona and Tyre. There are also the usual representations of naked women proffering their breasts, as well as a version of the woman with arms raised, whose robe, in Phoenician fashion, falls open to reveal her pudenda and painted breasts.

At Kition, where the earlier terra-cottas were exclusively Cypriot, there is a similar interest in portraying the sexuality and nurturing instincts of women, as well as everyday domestic scenes, and the popular Tyrian theme of the seated and pensive pregnant woman.184 In general, Phoenician influence on the production and export of terra-cottas did not antedate the seventh century and, though marked, was modest.185 It was a woman’s work (domestic scenes, a feminine perspective, and toys for the children were most popular among the Phoenicians),186 and its limited impact probably reflects women’s status in a mercantile society.

The bronze and silver drinking bowls that have been found at Idalion, Tamassos, Salamis, Amathus, and Kourion were made by Phoenician or Cypriot craftsmen, most likely for Cypriot clients and according to their specifications.187 The decoration of the bowls features Egyptianizing themes typical of Tyrian artistic traditions but mixes them with current Assyrian motifs and embellishes them with Phoenician narrative friezes and some stunning Cypriot designs. The central medallion portrays a striding pharaoh with his right hand raised to club a squatting suppliant prisoner, or replaces this with a four-winged Assyrian genius stabbing a lion, or with an Assyrian rosette or, on a bowl from Tamassos that undoubtedly was engraved for a Cypriot client, with a beautiful prancing horse.

The inner register can continue the contest thematic of the medallion or present naturalistic or symbolic pastoral scenes: horses grazing, animals and trees, or a file of couchant sphinxes or griffins flanking a stylized tree. The outer register usually is more imaginative: an afternoon in the country for the king of a walled city, or the siege of a city; a king riding in a chariot followed by his retinue; a feast with music and good food or a marzeaḥ with much drinking and lewd behavior; or a series of religious and mythological vignettes in Egyptian or Egyptian and Assyrian style. The bowls, designed to feast the eyes when lifted to the lips, illustrate the depth of Phoenician interaction with indigenous craftsmanship and artistic traditions, and the impact that the Assyrian Empire and contemporary events could have on the archaizing canons of their schools.

The effect of Phoenician intervention in the island’s economy is evident from the seventh- and sixth-century proliferation of personal stamp seals.188 The earliest of the seals are Phoenician, from western Cyprus, but the production of Cypriot seals that they encouraged was established by the second half of the seventh century. The Phoenician seals and most of the local seals are anepigraphic, and this is peculiar to Cyprus. Their design, because of this lack of personal name and patronymic, is free form and without line-dividers or registers, except for a residual and nonfunctional exergue on a few seals. The devices of the Phoenician series contain familiar motifs,189 but, except for the earliest, their layout, form, and workmanship betray generations of assimilation to Cypriot standards and tastes. The earlier tend to preserve the refined Egyptianizing features of their subjects (for instance, seals from Kition and Kourion representing Isis nursing Horus).190 However, the later are satisfied with rough sketches and careless composition (for example, seals with a striding man holding a scepter are cartoons in comparison with the earlier models from Kition and Idalion).191

There are regional and local differences. Ayia Irini, for instance, which is usually aligned with Amathus and Kourion is also distinguished from them by the preservation of its Byblian heritage and its artistic ties to North Syria. Together with their very large number (there are more than 300 from Ayia Irini alone), these seals from inland and coastal sites are indirect evidence for a brisk and diversified Phoenician market in seventh-century Cyprus.

Direct evidence for Phoenician activity in Cyprus at this time is supplied by the very few inscriptions and some random archaeological finds. From the temple precinct at Kition, there are two bronze statuettes of striding men, similar to the striding men shown on seals, wearing an Egyptian crown and kilt: one with both arms by his side; the other with his right hand raised in benediction.192 There is also some Phoenician Red Slip pottery from Kition, and three pieces in particular (a fragment and two mushroom-lipped juglets)193 are inscribed in Eteo-Cypriot Syllabic script with the names of their owners. On the outskirts of town is a tomb in whose antechamber there was a burial of cremated remains and in whose chamber a woman and child were buried with imported Red Slip and White Painted wares, as well as with some local Cypriot wares and eight local imitations of Phoenician Red Slip bowls.194

From Pyla, about 10 kilometers northeast of Kition, there is a quasi-pyramidal limestone cippus inscribed in Phoenician, “what ʾEshmunhilles the sculptor made for his Lord, for Reshep his tutelary spirit.”195 There is a hole on the top of the stele into which the socle of a statuette or a bust, the likeness of himself or of his God, could have been slipped.

Idalion, one of the cities mentioned by the Assyrian kings, was under Cypriot rule in the seventh century, but there are two inscriptions that indicate at least some Phoenician presence in the latter part of the century. A large geometric pedestal bowl, Cypriot in inspiration, was decorated in black paint with the name of its Phoenician owner: the name is “Pygmon” (pgmn), formed from the Greek root (pgm-) of the name “Pygmalion” by adding the Phoenician agentive -ôn instead of the Phoenician adjective -aliôn.196 A pair of bronze horse blinkers from the city is inscribed “Baʿana’s Horse” (pḥl bʿnʾ): each portrays a papyrus brake and a griffin with its raised left foot resting on a lotus blossom;197 the personal name Baʿanaʾ, borne by a later king of Sidon, originally was derived from the name of a warrior class called “The Sons of ʿAnat,” the ever-adolescent Warrior Goddess who continued to be worshiped at Byblos and in the Byblian colony of Lapethos in Cyprus.

There is Phoenician pottery in a Cypriot tomb at Kornos near Idalion, and there are Cypriot ostraca and graffiti and a Phoenician inscription on a transport amphora from Golgoi, about 12 kilometers east of Idalion.198 There is a mortuary inscription of Sidonian type from Chytroi,199 one of the Cypriot kingdoms tributary to Assyria, about 25 kilometers north of Idalion and 10 kilometers from the northern coast of Cyprus. On the south coast, in the Vasilikos Valley, a tomb at Maroni showed Red Slip and Black-on-Red pottery and featured heirloom Phoenician (“Samaria Ware”) table settings.200 The tomb of a young Cypriot warrior, buried with his wife and their child, at nearby Mari contained just one imported Phoenician jug and a variety of imitations of Phoenician wares.201 From Amathus, a Phoenician center, there is only one Phoenician inscription and this on a locally made Cypriot amphora.202

From Ayia Irini on the west coast, which probably belonged to the Byblian Kingdom of Lapethos, there is a small Cypriot jug inscribed after firing with the name of the merchant, the identification of its contents, a dye or ink, and probably the amount: “140 gallnuts” (ʿpṣm).203 The impression created by these scattered artifacts and inscriptions is that the Phoenicians had come and gone, that they were a modest presence among Cypriots and Greeks, that their greatest impact on Cyprus had been in the preceding centuries, and that what counted in the seventh century was the survival of their ideals, ambition, performance, and productivity in the lifestyle and emulation of their Cypriot hosts.

Phoenicians from Cyprus radiated through the western Mediterranean. There was some traffic between Cyprus and the Greek emporium at Naucratis in the Egyptian Delta204 and, as the steatite scarabs attest, from there to Italy. There are Cypriot terra-cotta votive figurines on Rhodes, Chios, Delos, and at the Heraion on Samos.205 On Rhodes, at Ialysos, Camiros, and Exochi, there were faithful copies of Cypro-Phoenician Black-on-Red perfume and unguent jars and wine jugs and of Red Slip mushroom-lipped jugs made by Phoenicians or Greeks for local use and export to Italy, Spain, and the western Mediterranean.206 There was also a Rhodian school of ivory carving that produced Orientalizing works and faience workshops that could copy Egyptianizing pieces imported by Tyrians from Cyprus or Al Mina.207

The treasury of the Heraion on Samos became the repository of votive offerings from around the world, including ivories such as these and Cypriot pottery and limestone statuettes.208 Some of it was brought by Phoenicians from Cyprus, some perhaps the reward of Samian piracy, much of it the gift to the sanctuary of pilgrims who had collected bric-a-brac, art, and exotica—notably from Assyria and Babylonia—that were sold on the Phoenician market.209 Other Greek sanctuaries began to treasure Near Eastern artifacts210 and became the customers of these Phoenicians from Cyprus and of their confreres from Tyre and its mainland possessions. With the collectables, they brought literature and culture211 (words, treaty forms, astronomy, luxury) and participation in the economic surge overtaking the Mediterranean world. A few places lagged and were left out of the race.212

The Phoenician effect on Cyprus was centuries old in the seventh century and can only be sorted out of its native Greek and Cypriot adaptations. The Phoenicians themselves had adjusted to Cyprus. There seems to have been little recent immigration from the mainland cities and towns. The islanders were self-sufficient, and imports were rare, mainlanders visited but did not stay, and the island was settling down into its Cypriot and Greek self. The Phoenicians on Cyprus, perhaps assimilated Cypriots too, joined the westward race.

Carthage

Carthage was founded by settlers from Cyprus toward the end of the eighth century B.C.E.213 It was a colony, like Carthage in Cyprus, deliberately constituted in the name of Tyre and intended as the center of a new Phoenician venture in the western Mediterranean. It was an open city, settled by residents of the island, by people from the mainland city and its Palestinian possessions, and by the individual merchants, craftsmen, laborers, and adventurers who traveled to Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, or Spain. It began as a compound on the Byrsa hill, with houses and workshops in the fields below, and harbor facilities and warehouses in the natural port just to the south of them. By the end of the seventh century, it had become a planned and multipurpose town, with the residential streets, which now crept over the adjoining Juno hill, following the contour of the hills and the downtown streets laid out on an orthogonal grid.

The oldest parts of the settlement can be recognized in a few scattered remains of walls, workshops, and tombs.214 In one sector of the hill settlement there was early pottery (a lamp and a proto-Corinthian rounded jug [aryballos]) associated with a foundation strong enough to support a multistoried house.215 The hilltop compound was walled. Houses at the foot of the hill had stone foundations, brick walls, and beaten-earth floors. In the workshop area near the shore, where the floors were also of beaten earth, there were traces of an iron foundry (blast pipes, slag, deeply burned earth), a murex or purple dye industry; and pottery ovens with pieces of heavy amphorae, storage jars, cooking pots, lamps, jugs, and plates.216 The earliest infant burials are in the Tannit precinct just west of the port: the cremated remains were gathered in urns, red burnished with black linear decoration, laid on bedrock, covered with little stone cairns, and sometimes accompanied by a figurine or a vase. This phase of the cemetery was sealed by a layer of yellow clay and was succeeded by a totally different burial configuration: plain urns buried in the clay and covered by tombstones. The earliest adult burials were interments on the slopes of the Byrsa hill,217 and the earliest built tombs are like tombs at Amathus in Cyprus.218 New settlers kept arriving throughout the seventh century (there was good farmland in the interior, west of the maritime city), and the city hit its stride in the sixth century.

Among the earlier pottery, there is an abundance of Red Slip and a sample of Euboean, Corinthian, and Pithecusan wares, but pottery imports of the early seventh century were gradually replaced by locally made wares.219 There are many transport amphorae from the Phoenician mainland and from Spain in the first half of the century, suggesting that Carthage at first depended on these places for its supplies of food, wine, and oil.220 The pottery found in a cache, sometimes said to be a foundation deposit of the new colony, consisted of amphorae, juglets, and perfume bottles with Cypro-Geometric, proto-Corinthian, Italian, and Greek antecedents and could have been imported from Amathus in Cyprus, where a similar crasis of ceramic traditions had occurred.221 Earlier seventh-century pottery from houses in the center of the city was mainly from central Italy and included fine wares from Etruria, Latium, Campania, and Pithecusa and handmade Italo-Phoenician transport amphorae from Pithecusa and Cerveteri.222 The colony was the clearinghouse for ships sailing back to the eastern mainland and at first counted on them as a source of supply. However, things began to change around the mid-seventh century and, when Carthage had established good relations with neighboring North African countries,223 it soon became self-sufficient and the core of a western Mediterranean Phoenicia that would revel in the wonderments of its Eastern origins.

The built tombs were influenced by Cyprian standards.224 The earliest was the tomb in which Yadaʿmilk, the leader of the Cypriot contingent, was buried with his wife. The Pygmalion medallion was emblematic of his illustrious career, and their tomb is a mark of their prestige in the early Carthaginian community.225 It was large, built of hewn and finished blocks, the walls plastered inside as if waiting for painted designs, the ceiling paneled. His body was laid on a pallet to the left of the entrance, and he wore a bronze bracelet and a gold ring. His wife was placed on the ground to his left, with a large silver bowl at her head and a wine jug and a lamp in a niche within reach, and a Phoenician urn, broken deliberately, lay between them. The pottery they shared included a Phoenician amphora and urn, a proto-Corinthian drinking bowl, a trefoil-lipped wine jug, and cooking pots. His jewelry contained, besides his gold pendant, an ivory scarab inlaid with gold and set in a silver ring. Her ornaments featured a gold necklace, a gold jewelry box, and a gold amulet case. Yadaʿmilk describes himself as a soldier who was commissioned by Pygmalion, but he seems to have been the commandant of the new colony.

The colonials kept arriving on the ships that supplied them and, consequently, came from Tyre, its Palestinian possessions, from Cyprus, and from the communities that had already been established in the West. Their diversity is represented in their arts and crafts. Their graves have yielded female masks like those from ʾAchzib; shallow pedestal bowls like bowls at towns near Tyre and Sidon; perfume bottles, called “Sidonian,” the parallels of which are from Sidon and Sarepta; as well as terra-cottas of a lone figure in a boat crossing to the afterlife, or of groups of figures in an open-air sanctuary similar to the homely designs from Cyprus.226

The seventh-century gold and silver jewelry (medallions, pendants, rings, earrings) is plain, with west Mediterranean parallels; or has the Egyptianizing motifs favored by Tyrian artists; or features the Sign of Tannit, which was adopted as the colonial symbol.227 But two small ivory figurines from graves in the oldest cemeteries228 depict a woman with pudgy features and a receding chin, wearing an Egyptian wig that reveals her large Hathor or cow-like ears, fully clothed but cupping perfectly delineated breasts, and with a stylish collar necklace like others found in contemporary Carthaginian graves. The style (her physical features, the mixture of motifs, the melding of Syrian modesty and Phoenician brass) is North Syrian or Anatolian, but the figurines were obviously made locally by an émigré artist, assuredly from Sidon, and trained in this Syrian tradition.

The foundation myth of Carthage229 was transmitted in Greek sources and gave the bold and exciting facts romantic truth and epic reality. Elissa was the sister of Pygmalion, king of Tyre, and the daughter of Mittin or, as a variant has it, of Baʿal. In either case, she was a princess, the daughter of a king—of Mittin, who is mentioned as king in the Assyrian annals for the year 734 B.C.E.; or of Baʿal, who was king around the turn of the century and into the reign of Esarhaddon. Her brother Pygmalion is invoked in the victory shout recorded on Yadaʿamilk’s medallion as the founder of Carthage and was a hero to his men, but he was a wicked king according to the legend and a lustful scoundrel who murdered his sister’s husband, Zakarbaʿal. Elissa escaped to Cyprus—Elissa (Alashiya)was the name of Enkomi, and then Salamis and, among the Greeks, of the whole island—and from there, she and her maiden friends sailed to Carthage. It is the same story that is told and retold, about the men who planned the colony, about the women who captured its romance, and about the silent earth that cried out for recognition.

Sardinia

Phoenicians in seventh-century Sardinia had irregular relations with the eastern mainland and concentrated on consolidating and developing the network of western settlements. They were established on the island, and the native Nuraghi population, whose way of life had changed from the moment of their settlement, continued to benefit from their industry and outreach. They came to Sardinia for its resources, and they stayed to maintain this vital link between Europe and North African Carthage.

Until about the mid-seventh century, there was a uniform Eastern–Western Mediterranean ceramic tradition.230 From that time, very few forms traveled from East to West, and the Western settlements in Sardinia and elsewhere produced their own domestic, ritual, and commercial wares. Red Slip lost its international status, the nearly ubiquitous mushroom-lipped jug developed into a peculiarly Western form,231 and there was ceramic variety from place to place.232 In Sardinia, even between places in the same region, uniformity was not to be expected, because each town went with the tastes of its settlers from the East and its contacts in the West.

In the ninth and eighth centuries, relations with Etruria were evident mainly in Nuraghic settlements from central to northern Sardinia.233 In the seventh century, southern Sardinia became involved in trade and cultural exchanges with Etruria, and this is evident first in the interior, where it is witnessed primarily by expensive imported items, and later in the Phoenician inland sites and coastal areas, where it is visible in plainer goods, such as amphorae, jugs, and drinking bowls meant for symposia.234 The imports themselves (the silver, bronze, bone, and ceramic materials) were Orientalizing, the work of assimilated Phoenicians living in Etruria or of Etruscans trained in the Phoenician boutiques.235

The Sardinian exports to Etruria included native Nuraghic bronze weapons and tools, household goods such as bronze cauldrons and lamps and decorated ceramic pitchers.236 Modeled on small bronze, ivory, or ceramic originals but influenced by Greek representational ideas were large or even life-size ceramic statues by acculturated Phoenician craftsmen or their Sardinian apprentices.237 By the seventh century, the Phoenicians had settled in to the Sardinian rhythm, and their Nuraghi hosts were accustomed to their social and economic demands. Their exports, such as Sardinian amphorae in Latium, and imports were handled by Phoenician traders,238 and this continuing Italian nexus is consistent with pioneering ninth-century Nuraghic contacts and with the eighth-century origins of Phoenician settlements in Sardinia.

Tharros was a mixed community of Sardinian elite and Phoenician (specifically, Sidonian) professionals.239 In the seventh century, it was spread out along the Tharros peninsula in the Gulf of Oristano, where the residences, stores and workshops, public buildings, and graveyards were located; at Othoca on the opposing coast, which gave residents access to the adjacent farmlands; and at Monti Prama on the mainland just north of the peninsula at the edge of the vast Sinis plain, a sanctuary town where the Phoenicians met and did business with the native aristocracy.240 Although there are few architectural remains on the peninsula (a large fifth-century ashlar building built on the site of an earlier structure), its topography, especially its transformation of the surrounding area (the Sardinians abandoned their separate fortified nuraghe to live in open villages with streets, public squares, and drainage systems), suggests that Tharros in the seventh century was becoming an expansive and vibrant urban center.241

Some small finds from Tharros offer clues on the mentality, origins, and connections of the Phoenician settlers. There is an ivory cosmetic spoon in the shape of a naked swimming girl holding a deep receptacle in her outstretched hands.242 The item is commonplace, and the girl usually is presented as a lithe and dainty Egyptian maiden, but in this example she is squat, chubby, and Syrian or Anatolian in appearance—that is, hardly “Phoenician” at all, but rather, Sidonian. Similarly, a pendant in the shape of a naked girl holding her breasts and a ceramic bust of a woman feature the full-bodied Oriental type of Sidonian art.243 Three bronzes—a lamp holder, an incense stand, a tripod cauldron-base—were imports from Cyprus, and the last was an heirloom, cast most likely in the eleventh century;244 these three reveal another facet of this Sidonian heritage.

Finally, there is an incense-offering or libation ensemble245 that gives a local twist to the triple-baetyl monuments of Tyrian origin. The base and the three uprights were carved in one piece of limestone. The center upright has a steep-sloped roof structure jutting above the others and below this roof an inverted crescent draped over a full moon. The lateral uprights look like crenellated towers, and their top surface is scooped out to receive the incense or libation. The Tharros ensemble, all in all, transforms the symbolism of the traditional funerary monument into the current realities of urban life. The central, roofed structure represents the temple, and the lateral towers represent the wall of the city, which as implied by their ritual function is the city of God. The representation is unique, but it seems to summarize the memories and aspirations of the founding generation from Sidon and its possessions as it joined in the planning of a new Western Phoenicia.

Much of what is known about ancient Tharros is gathered from the contents of its tombs. Cremation, with one exception, was reserved for babies who died at or soon after birth.246 It was accompanied by the offering of a lamb or kid, and the burial urns contained the ashes of both the animal and the child as well as of the wood (olive, lentisk shrub, or small oak), and in a few of the urns there was also a seashell.

The inhumations are notable for the vast amounts of expensive jewelry and trinkets they contained.247 The gold was from Spain, the silver from Spain or the Iglesiente region of southern Sardinia, the smiths were from the East, the techniques were traditional, and the work was local.248 The jewelry consisted mainly of finger rings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and pendants. The trinkets, or amulets, some of them imported, featured Egyptian Gods such as Bes, Horus, and Harpocrates and a whole array of Phoenician specialities: there is the God Baʿal, the naked adolescent girl, the bust of a woman; there are body parts, including an eye, a hand and arm, a heart, feet and legs, and phalli; there are also plants (pineapples, lotus and papyrus flowers) and many animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, and cats) and symbols (acorns, altars, obelisks, axes, and writing tablets). Tharros, however, specialized in gold jewelry, which it exported throughout the Punic world, especially to Carthage, where most but not all of its styles are represented.249

Sulcis, with its satellite towns in the Iglesiente region of southern Sardinia, was distinct in its origins, constitution, and management from the Phoenician center at Tharros. It was a Tyrian settlement with close ties to Pithecusa,250 founded as an outpost and supply depot for Carthage. It had not been a Nuraghic settlement before the Phoenicians arrived and, although there may have been intermarriage with the natives, Sulcis remained aloof from its surroundings, as was usual in Tyrian towns, and relations with the Sardinians were relegated to its outlying stations, notably at Monte Sirai.251 It maintained its original ties to Cyprus and mainland Phoenicia into the seventh century, but its most consistent and productive links were with Carthage and with Greek sites in Italy.

There are architectural remains at Sulcis, but the pottery is more revealing of the makeup of the population. Houses were built on both sides of the streets, constructed of brick with stone foundations and consisted of small square rooms, floors of tufa or beaten earth, and a courtyard with a well or cistern.252 The pottery, much of it from the cremation burials, was Euboean and Corinthian,253 Pithecusan, Etruscan, Phoenician, and Carthaginian. Some of the Phoenician wares, a bowl, for instance, and a set of cups, are imitations of Greek originals.254

A few of the wares from both early and late in the seventh century are adaptations of Sardinian forms.255 Others are reproductions of Eastern mainland models. About 40 percent of this standard Phoenician pottery consists of transport amphorae, storage jars, and domestic containers.256 The rest includes household wares257 (carinated and tripod bowls, deep rounded cups, plates with narrow rims, and one-wick lamps) as well as the signature mushroom-lipped jugs, the earlier of which were imported from the East and probably traveled with the settlers. The later, up to about the mid-seventh century, were locally made.258 There are also shallow drinking bowls (the form was adapted from the Greek skyphos, but the ceramic finish and the painted decoration are Phoenician), which were popular everywhere in the Punic Mediterranean, but the best parallels of which are found at Toscanos in southern Spain, Motya in Sicily, and at Carthage.259 There were local variations: Red Slip at Sulcis is dark and framed by black lines, but at Tharros it is light and edged with colored bands. But in general, Sulcis, Carthage, and Spain followed the same ceramic trends and even exchanged their wares.260

The graveyard on the north side of town is interesting, not only for the typology of the urns in which the cremated remains were buried and for the large number of Egyptian amulets and knickknacks included in the burials, but especially for its tombstones.261 Among the early steles is one, the iconography of which is adapted from the representation of kings, court officials, and merchant bankers on eighth- and early seventh-century seals from Tyre and other countries in the Tyrian trade network:262 a man wearing a long robe belted at the waist strides to the right, with a floral staff (or a lance) in his left hand and his right hand raised in blessing. The difference is in the details and the context that remove him from simply human stature to being the divinized mortal who was Melqart, and this in a distinctively Sardinian, perhaps specifically Sulcian, mode.

He is set into an aedicule; columns support the architrave in which a crescent is draped over a full moon. He stands on a pedestal, and so in effect is an effigy of the God in his temple. But his facial features are not Egyptianizing or refined as in the Eastern exemplars, and he wears a Syrian cap—a sort of mitre with a broad pendant band rolled upward at the nape of his neck. The stele is unique at Sulcis, and the divine status of its figure (also represented on a seal from Cyprus)263 is suggested as well by the fact that the next-earliest steles (none of them antedating the sixth century by much) are aniconic or abstract, while steles with representations of women or men, done under Greek influence, follow only in the latter part of that century. As in the ceramic repertory, stele styles varied from place to place. Thus, Sulcis steles differed from steles at Tharros or from Carthage, with which otherwise Sulcis was closely related, and even from the steles at its own establishment at Monte Sirai.

There are three seventh-century inscriptions from Sulcis. The latest, from about the middle of the century, is the legend “belonging to Gerʾeshmun, son of Ḥimilk” on a stamp seal.264 The seal has a winged sun disk above a ritual scene featuring the child Harpocrates facing an animal-headed goddess and seated on a lotus-flower pedestal flanked and held by Horus, who wears the double crown of Egypt, and by Isis, who is adorned with a horned-disk headdress—with both of them identified by hieroglyphic signs. The name is Phoenician or Punic, the surname is more typically western Mediterranean, and the iconography is in the Egyptianizing Tyrian tradition.

The earlier inscription, from the beginning of the century, was hammered into a piece of gold plating,265 which was designed to cover the finial of a scepter, like the scepter carried by Melqart on the Sulcis stele, or on seals by eastern notables who assumed the grand striding-smiting pose. The man’s name (ʾAbî), the antiquity of the finial, and its dedication to Baʿal make it likely that it was made and dedicated in the East and arrived in Sardinia with its owner.

There is a third inscribed object from Sulcis that is of similar interest.266 It is a silver cup, made in the seventh century for a symposium, from a southern Etruscan workshop. It was kept as an heirloom, restored, and inscribed in the third century B.C.E. Its inscription reads:

To the Lord, to Baʿal ʾAddir. May he bless [ybrk]. Skyphos [skt] weighing 59 shekels, which the artisans restored in the time of the aldermen [rabbîm]Magon and ʿAzormilk, in the year of the magistrates [špṭm] in Sulcis [slky], ʾAddirbaʿal and Milkyaton, and in the time of the chief priest Bodʿaštart, son of ʾAriš, son of Ḥimilkot.

The prayer for “blessing” without specifying a particular object, the omission of the donor’s or craftsman’s name, and the inclusion of a full slate of eponymous officeholders, indicate that the cup was designed from the beginning, and not just from its third-century refurbishment, as public property. It is a Phoenician adaptation of a Greek original (it has handles and a foot, as Greeks insisted). If the dedication is original or authentic, it may have been made in a Byblian workshop—Baʿal ʾAddîr is the manifestation of this God peculiar to Byblos—or as a foundation gift from the Byblian community in Etruria to the people of Sulcis.

The close connection between Sulcis (along with its outposts in the Iglesiente region of southwestern Sardinia) and Carthage led to direct control by the Punic capital and eventually to less-than-benign neglect. Monte Sirai, where there were residences (with beaten-earth and tufa pavements, as at Sulcis itself) and some public buildings in the seventh century, had a Phoenician and Sardinian population of around 300.267 The pottery (about 40 pieces from 3 of the rooms) relates the earliest phase to Tyre and Tell Keisan, and the later seventh-century and early sixth-century phase to Sulcis, to Bithia in the Iglesiente, and to Cuccureddus di Villasimius on the Gulf of Cagliari.268

The seventh-century burials at Monte Sirai, as throughout Sardinia at this time, were cremations, with the urns simply buried in the ground or placed in a stone-lined grave.269 Of unknown provenance, but probably from the Iglesiente region, is a terra-cotta statuette of a naked woman lying on her back and in labor pains, her vagina open to give birth, her mouth twisted, gasping for breath.270 It is a strange mixture of artistic sensitivity and technical naïveté but a good example of the vigorous indigenous traditions that mellowed the Phoenician élan and that resisted and outlasted their dominant presence.

Sardinia was a principal player in the Phoenician policy of westward expansion. Each site, Tharros and Sulcis most clearly, was different, marked by the distinctiveness of the town or district in eastern Phoenicia that had contributed most to its establishment.271 Each belonged to a specific network: Sulcis, for instance, to the Iglesiente and to the Toscanos-Carthage nexus; and Tharros, with its Nuraghic base in central Sardinia, to a circuit that included Atlantic Spain, the Gulf of Cagliari, and Motya in Sicily. In the seventh century, the Phoenicians were so well established that their presence was no longer conspicuous. From the start, Carthage was the focus of all these Sardinian foundations, and by the sixth century, the tide turned and Carthage began to dominate the politics, religion, and material culture of the island.272

Spain

Phoenicians in Spain in the seventh century were still distinguished by their habitat and their native context, those on the Atlantic coast less being influenced by Greeks and more engaged in the aboriginal communities, those on the Mediterranean being regularly in contact first with Samians and then with Phocaeans,273 while remaining as aloof as possible from the native communities. It was a century everywhere of population growth and hunkering down,274 not just working, doing business, making money, but making a good life in new surroundings and providing necessities and delicacies for fellow colonials and the folks back home.

On the Atlantic side, in Tartessos as it is called, the native Spaniards were smart and sophisticated, while on the Mediterranean coast and the adjacent inland regions they were more rustic, but all were invigorated by the Phoenician presence and contributed accordingly to the prosperity of the settlers.275 The Greeks brought their culture—notably their alphabetic script—and the Phoenicians brought a whole new way of life:276 changes in agriculture (donkeys) and eating habits (figs and fish), in pottery making (the wheel), mining (better furnaces, cupellation), clothing (fibulae, belt buckles), housing and town planning, religion (incense, burial customs), and social organization (banquets, founding of an aristocracy). Spain was the new frontier and constant throb of the Western Phoenician world.277

In the valley of the Guadalquivir, from the region of Seville as far as Castulo in the northwest, there were many more places where Phoenicians settled down and numerous native sites that, as the Phoenician pottery from the residential areas and the graveyards clearly indicates, profited from their contact with the colonials.278 There was acculturation on both sides: the traders and artisans were no longer foreigners; the Spaniards did business with them, as the Phoenician amphorae suggest, and became accustomed to their ways, as Phoenician tripod mortars, unguent bottles and plates, locally made Red Slip and Black-on-Red bowls, and handmade imitations of their wares279 attest. At Cruz del Negro, just east of Seville, there was a cemetery with Phoenician Red Slip wares, ivory grave gifts, and cremation urns unceremoniously buried in the ground alongside inhumations and the tumuli of the local aristocrats.280

At Carmona, just to the south, there were buildings constructed either in the pillar-and-rubble style or with stone foundations and adobe walls. One of them, from the late seventh century, had a floor of beaten earth painted bright red and contained three amphorae with painted decorations that were inspired by scenes on the ivories from this Phoenician enclave.281 At Montemolín, farther west, there was a similar housing complex, built in the Phoenician stone-and-adobe style. One of these buildings also had a stamped red floor, with pottery of various forms and one amphora decorated in the same way, but the presence of animal bones—beef, pig, sheep, and goat—suggests that it was an abattoir or even a ritual slaughterhouse, from which fresh or salted meat was shipped to the neighboring towns.282 The Phoenicians, as these details illustrate, may have come at first to exploit the vast resources of the region, but they assimilated and settled in and were essential to the development of the local economy.

Iron and bronze razors, bronze lamp standards (alternatively identified as incense stands), and bronze statuettes are further evidence of the presence of Phoenician workshops in the region of Seville. The standards, featuring three coronets of down-curling petals of papyrus blossoms, have their prototypes in ivory, faience, and clay examples found on Cyprus and in Northern Israel and were made in various Spanish workshops: they have been found near Seville and at Castulo, in a rich Phoenician tomb at La Joya near Huelva and in the district of Málaga.283 The razors, in the same way, come from El Carambolo, Setefilla, Cruz del Negro, and Acebuchal in the periphery of Seville, and from La Joya near Huelva and Las Cumbres in the vicinity of Cádiz, but they are a typically seventh-century Phoenician product and are very common throughout southern Spain.284 The bronze figures285 are large statuettes or life-size statues made in Spain (three found their way to the Heraion in Samos) by Phoenician artists and their Spanish apprentices. Two or three in a Syro-Phoenician style are from Seville, one a version of the striding man who holds a scepter in his left hand and raises his right in greeting, the other an adaptation of this pose, in which the left hand held a shield and the right was raised to hold a javelin.286 These poses are typical, but the facial features are individual and seem to represent a living subject, perhaps a well-known figure, or the patron who commissioned this particular statue.

The earliest Greek pottery in Spain is a lone Middle Geometric II (800–760 B.C.E.) crater from Huelva,287 brought by one of the pioneering Sidonian settlers, and it antedates by 50 to 100 years the regular influx of Attic (SOS) oil jars from Pithecusa imported—these too probably by Phoenicians rather than Greeks—to the Mediterranean coast of southern Spain. At Huelva there is little Greek pottery before the end of the seventh century. In the eighth and early seventh century, indigenous Tartessian pottery predominated, but it dropped from 80 to 60 percent and by the end of the century to 25 percent of the total, as it was gradually displaced by the wares used in the expanding Phoenician community.288 Their pottery was distinctive, lacking some forms popular at other sites, producing different styles of common ceramic types, such as bowls and jugs, and not following the normal development of pottery forms—notably the gradual but insistent widening of the rims of plates.289 This combined with other diagnostic features may be an indication of a change in diet among the Phoenicians in Spain that was resisted at Huelva.290 The Greek pottery was ordinary but nicer than the Phoenician and, in the days before it could be had from Samian and Phocaean peddlers, came back to Huelva with Phoenician merchants on their return voyages from Italy or Sardinia.291

The Phoenicians who came to Huelva for its metals (gold, silver, iron, tin, and copper) met a vigorous and advanced native population with developed traditions and ready to learn.292 What is known about the Phoenicians at Huelva is gathered mostly, although not exclusively, from reflections of them among these indigenous Tartessians. In the ninth and eighth centuries, these people erected burial steles on which were engraved figures of warriors and their weapons, along with pictures of mirrors, combs, fibulae, and the musical instruments they had received from the Phoenicians in trade.293

In the seventh century, the cemetery at La Joya,294 just northeast of the town, has aristocratic burials, both cremations and inhumations, accompanied by traditional gifts such as horses, chariots, bridles, braziers, swords, and shields but also by Phoenician ivories, gold jewelry, alabaster, amber, decorated ostrich eggs, incense burners, and mirrors. One man was buried with his sword and with an iron knife of Cypriot manufacture and at his feet an urn with the cremated remains of his Phoenician wife. In an adjacent but separate section of the cemetery, amid the ashes of on-the-spot cremations or of some ritual involving incense, bodies were buried in a contracted or quasi-fetal position. There were few grave goods. One of the dead was a woman with bad teeth, whose robe was fastened with a Phoenician fibula; all were adults and very likely household slaves, either captured by the Tartessians or bought from Phoenicians who had picked them up along the way.

Before the Phoenicians arrived, the people of Huelva and its environs and the silver miners in the valley of the lower Guadalquivir295 made pottery by hand and lived in round or oval houses made of perishable materials. But by the seventh century, they were using the wheel and had begun to build rectangular houses in the Phoenician stone-and-adobe style, with paved floors and sometimes with benches against the walls.296 In addition to these oblique reflections, there is also direct evidence for Phoenician presence, as in two seventh-century bronze statuettes of the striding hero297 that still maintain some of the original Egyptian characteristics of the form (an Atef crown or the crown of Upper Egypt) but display Syrian facial features. These Phoenicians, who probably were of Sidonian extraction but certainly were not from the places that sent settlers to the Mediterranean coast of Spain, were glad to live among the indigenous people (although some of them kept their distance), and they flourished and assimilated, as they did at Huelva, in direct proportion to the cultural and material resources of their hosts.

Cádiz was very prosperous in the seventh century, trading in wine, oil, grain, precious metals, salt, skins, and slaves.298 There are no architectural remains from this period, but there is some pottery and plenty of jewelry, similar in quality and design to the jewelry found at Carthage and at Tharros in Sardinia.299 Each of these three towns had its own gold workshops and produced a great deal the same sort of jewelry, but each also had its specialities and fashions, with Cádiz fixed between the relative austerity of the Carthaginian shops and the ostentation of Tharros.300 There are earlier pieces (the signet ring inscribed lnʿmʾl and a statuette of Ptah, whose face is overlaid in gold) that may be imports, but most of the jewelry was created in the seventh and sixth centuries, with gold from the Sierra Morena and Estremadura supplied by Tartessian miners and middlemen. There were earrings of many distinctive types, finger rings, medallions, and pendants, most or all of them made for the local market (silver and silver jewelry, by contrast, was shipped to Eastern markets)301 and for a wealthy male and female clientele.

The population at Doña Blanca increased in the seventh century and was progressively more Phoenician, with stone-and-adobe or pillar-and-rubble houses and wheel-made pottery.302 The town specialized in silver mined in the interior but refined and worked on the spot and then exported to Sardinia, Carthage, and the markets in mainland Phoenicia. The pottery included domestic items, such as Red Slip cups, Grey Ware shallow bowls, and two-wick lamps; and commercial articles including amphorae and large-capacity pots with double handles that were decorated with bands of red marked off by narrow black lines or with concentric circles in red or black.303 Unlike Huelva, where the rim width of plates is not chronologically significant, Cádiz followed the standard west-Phoenician pattern of increasingly wider rims.304

Amphorae like those at Doña Blanca were also found in indigenous communities in the interior, and their contents probably represented partial payment for the silver and other goods and services that they supplied to the Phoenician merchants on the coast. The names of some of these people are preserved on an amphora and on ostraca (fragments of Red Slip or Grey Ware bowls or plates) that may have accompanied the shipments: the amphora was inscribed with the gentilic designation “from ʿAkko” (ʿky), referring to the merchant who sold the goods and not to the product;305 an ostracon from about the middle of the seventh century consists of the first four letters of the alphabet (ʾbgd), the first twowritten with a ligature, like a monogram;306 a fragment of a Red Slip bowl is inscribed in early seventh-century script with a name that is only partially preserved; and a fragment of a Red Slip plate, similarly, has only the beginning of the name in a slightly later script.307 The fact that these were ostraca rather than usable dishes identified by the name of their owners or potters is clear from another seventh-century fragment inscribed with a personal name and a number, “belonging to ʾEshmun, 100” (lʾšmn + symbol for 100), “one hundred shekels.”308 This fellow could have been a supplier or silver smith, for instance, and the shekels would have his share of a shipment of raw silver or payment for silver jewelry that was being exported to the mainland or to one of the colonies.

Some of the silver at Doña Blanca and some of the salt and fish at Cádiz came from Phoenician establishments in Portugal. All of these were situated on rivers (the Tagus, Sado, and Arade), and all but one were indigenous settlements with small Phoenician enclaves.309 The exception is Abul, about 40 kilometers from Lisbon, on the Sado halfway between Setúbal and Alcácer do Sal.310 Like all the sites, it began to be frequented by Phoenicians sometime in the first half of the seventh century, but unlike them, it was built by Phoenicians for their own use, at a distance from the two nearest native towns. It was in the center of a region famous for its salt marshes, and because it seems to have consisted mainly of storerooms and warehouses, it may have been intended for the production and marketing of this commodity.

The other sites are marked as familiar with the Phoenicians by pieces of their pottery or, as at Rocha Branca at the mouth of the Arade, by the presence of the bones of donkeys, an animal introduced into Spain by them, or as at Alcácer do Sal, by a Phoenician seal.311 The seal is a takeoff on the traditional scene of caprids flanking the Tree-of-Life and shows monkeys on either side of a date palm with their hands raised in veneration of the fruit. The affiliation of these sites is unknown, although the isolation of Abul would be typical of a Tyrian settlement, but their number and duplication suggest that they were the outposts of more than one of the established centers on the Atlantic coast of Spain.

Málaga and its work station at Cerro del Villar at the mouth of the Rio Guadalhorce were the most westerly of the settlements on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Málaga was a Punic colony, founded by Carthage in the second half of the seventh century, in fertile farmland, and at some distance from the Phoenician foundations at Toscanos and Morro de Mezquitilla.312 It maintained good relations with the local native farming communities, and is distinguished from them by its pottery313 (some household wares but mostly transport and storage amphorae) and by a few specialty items. One is a cylinder seal, an heirloom like similar seals found at Carthage, depicting the Goddess Asherah, naked, holding flowers in each hand, with her lion at her feet, attended by two worshipers—one human, the other wearing an animal mask.314 Another is a carved ivory plaque made as a furniture ornament in a Carthaginian workshop, showing worshipers standing in the entrance to a temple, facing each other and together holding a central staff-of-life with a lotus blossom finial, while above the lintel a winged sun disk is attended by flanking uraei.315 Málaga, from the Punic word for “Royal City” (*mlk-t), was founded to take advantage of the abundance of agricultural products in the region.

The work station at Cerro del Villar316 is 7 kilometers west of Málaga, on an island at the mouth of the river Guadalhorce. It owned farms on the west bank of the river that supplied some of its needs,317 and it either raised by itself or bought from the local farmers the wheat and barley, cattle, sheep, and goats that were produced in the surrounding rich alluvial plain. The houses were built in the pillar-and-rubble or stone-and-adobe style on paved (cobblestone or stamped earth) streets and consisted of between four and six rooms around a central courtyard.

There is pottery for local domestic use and evidence of fishing (hooks and weights) and dyeing (murex shells), but the main business was the pottery barn that turned out large transport and storage jars for the produce it supplied to Carthage, especially, and to Toscanos. It was a busy site (there is pottery from Cerveteri, Athens, Corinth, and Samos, as well as Carthage) but for a short time, and it was abandoned early in the sixth century when the river silted, and the island (today a hillock in the plain) was flooded.

Toscanos,318 on the river Vélez, was a walled and densely populated town in the seventh century. Its involvement in the export business is attested by the new warehouse that was built at this time and by the very high percentage of transport amphorae in the pottery assemblage.319 The town was well planned, with the houses facing onto streets, the residential areas separated from the factories and storerooms, and specialized operations such as the forge located at the edge of town. There were horses and donkeys, oxen and beef cattle, sheep and goats, a few dogs, as well as pigs and chickens—everything needed for food, transport, haulage, and protection in an area with access to iron but especially renowned for its farmland.320

There is Greek pottery, some of which may have arrived in Phoenician ships sailing from Italy or Sicily.321 There are also, as there were at Carthage, locally made Phoenician imitations of Greekdrinking bowls.322 And it is just as likely that Greeks—individuals such as Kolaios from Samos at first, and later Phocaeans from Massalia—were trading with Phoenicians at Toscanos and with the indigenous people in southern Spain by the mid-seventh century, who were becoming, at least in their symposia, fashionably Hellenized.323

Toscanos was started by individuals or groups from mainland Phoenicia, as indicated by some of the stonework done by a master mason from the East, but developed in the seventh century with an influx of laborers and professionals from the Western colonies, in particular from Carthage.324 It was a mixed community, a base probably for some Greek merchants, who came to do business but not to settle,325 had a wide range of investments including the station at Abul in Portugal, and became a mainstay of Carthaginian expansion.

The Phoenicians at Morro de Mezquitilla and affiliated sites east of Toscanos had become accustomed to the rhythms of life and death in southern Spain. There was some new construction at Mezquitilla, following a new town plan and using better adapted building techniques.326 There were richly endowed cremation burials at Trayamar, across the river Algarrobo to the west, and at Almuñécar, farther to the east.327 In both cemeteries, there were shaft tombs cut into the rock leading to burial niches or chambers, with Egyptian or Egyptianizing alabaster urns for the ashes, Red Slip ceramic grave goods, sometimes amulets or decorated ostrich eggs, and silver or gold imported jewelry.328

At Abdera there were pottery works, and the boats that sank just off the coast farther east at Mazarron were carrying pottery that may have come from its ovens.329 The boats were small, could navigate the rivers on which all the Phoenician settlements on this coast of Spain were situated, and stayed fairly close to shore as they traveled from one place to another.330 The faunal remains indicate that the crew had been eating goat, rabbit, and chicken that they picked up along the way. The pottery included domestic wares, some with Red Slip, as well as urns, and transport and storage jars for commercial use. It was boats like these that kept all the sites in the domain of Morro de Mezquitilla in touch.

In the seventh century, Phoenicians from this southern region, perhaps in cooperation with confreres from Carthage, began exploring the east coast of Spain. They are especially prominent in the vicinity of Alicante, but there are traces of them in the region of Valencia, and as far north as the mouth of the Ebro. By mid-century, these places were overtaken in importance by Ibiza, a Carthaginian foundation, and by the end of the century, this Phoenician and Punic northward movement along the east coast of Spain was arrested by the founding of Massalia and Emporion by the Greeks.

In the Alicante region, there are numerous small sites in the valley of the Rio Segura and its tributaries that had commercial and cultural relations with the Phoenicians.331 The earliest is La Fonteta, with offshoots at Cabezo del Estano and Castillo de Guardamar, at the mouth of the river, and at Los Saladares and Peña Negra just slightly inland.332 It occupied between six and eight hectares and seems to have been settled early in the century. There are houses with stone foundations and adobe walls, and evidence for metallurgical installations—furnaces, iron and copper slag, molds, vent pipes, and ashes. At the end of the century, a defensive wall and a moat were built.

The pottery comprised Phoenician amphorae and tableware, including a great variety of plates (Red Slip, Grey Ware, monochrome, and bichrome) and mushroom-lipped wine jugs, and indigenous wares. There is also a Red Slip lamp, dating to about 675 B.C.E., which is inscribed on the base with the name of its owner, Melqartyosep (mlqrtysp).333 At the end of the century, there were imported Greek wares, such as Ionian cups, Rhodian cups; Corinthian, Chian, and Samian amphorae; and East Greek aryballoi.

At Peña Negra, which seems to have been a crafts center, there were Red Slip amphorae with Phoenician potters’ marks, and household wares, as well as silver and gold necklace beads, and bronze fibulae, pendants, and jugs. Near these places, in the Bajo de la Campana, and presumably destined for them, there was a seventh-century shipwreck of a vessel that was transporting lead and tin ingots, as well as African elephant tusks inscribed with Phoenician letters.334 La Fonteta, it seems, was originally or soon became a joint enterprise of Phoenicians and Carthaginians—the defensive system would suit the Carthaginian mentality at the end of the century. Their presence at a large number of sites in the region made a clear and lasting impression335 and immediately attracted neighboring Phocaeans to join in their venture.

Phoenician presence farther north was less intense. In the region of Valencia, the evidence consists of seventh- and sixth-century amphorae found along the coast and in the interior.336 Just south of the river Ebro, there was a site consisting of a few isolated houses and other buildings with Phoenician pottery and some Greek but no local wares: it looks like a farming village that supplied field crops and meat to the Phoenician merchants who visited the area.337 Phoenician amphorae were found at several other sites on the lower Ebro, and between the Ebro and Greek Emporion.338 The most interesting of these is on a point that juts into the river. It consists of four irregularly shaped, quadrangular rooms and one semicircular room abutting them. In this room, there were about 100 Phoenician transport amphorae, one of them of an Ibiza type, as well as bronze and iron objects. The site was occupied by indigenous people who supplied grain to the Phoenicians in their own containers, which had been stored in this semicircular room or granary, in exchange for bronze and iron implements. It was operational for about 25 years and was destroyed by fire at the end of the seventh century.339 This entire area, from Valencia to the Ebro, it seems, was a source of food supplies for the people working in the Alicante region and living on Ibiza.

Ibiza, according to Diodorus (5.16), was founded 160 years after the foundation of Carthage. This seems about right, because it puts the settlement of Ibiza around 665 B.C.E., following the classical calculations, or around 565 B.C.E., following the archaeological schedule and, although most of the remains support the sixth-century date, it is clear that Carthaginians were living on and making productive use of the island in the seventh century.

There is a site known as Sa Caleta near the town and harbor at the southeast tip of the island where there was a settlement in the second half of the seventh century. It covers about four hectares (ca. ten acres) and consists of an agglomeration of rectangular buildings separated by laneways, with some Red Slip pottery, the best parallels of which are at Cerro del Villar near Málaga, and with bits of lead and silver from the Argentera mines in the eastern part of the island.340 This complex included residences (the domestic pottery consists of Red Slip plates and bowls, lamps, polychrome funerary urns, storage jars, and various forms of Grey Ware), workshops, and storage areas, but these became redundant and the site was abandoned when the town of Ibiza was established. Sa Caleta occupied a promontory exposed to the winds, and this was essential to the pine-tar industry that began there and the successful management of which encouraged Carthage to establish a permanent colony nearby on the island.

The town of Ibiza had an excellent harbor, partly enclosed by an island, as good town planning prescribed. There are few traces of the town, but there is some evidence for an early sanctuary on the harbor island.341 More general settlement, though sparse, is marked by the relatively large percentage of bronze arrowheads that can be dated typologically to this time.342 The oldest terra-cotta and ivory figurines illustrate a variety of styles and imply that the first settlers came from many different places.343 They came from Cyprus, for instance, and Sicily, either directly or via Carthage, and the later colonists, as the mixed archaeological message indicates,344 were also of diverse origins.

An inscription from the town supplies a little perspective to these scattered finds.345 It is on a small, rectangular bone plaque and records the dedication of a gate, to which it was affixed by a hole in each of its corners, by ʾEshmunʾabî (ʾšmnʾb), who traces his ancestry to the seventh generation. The inscription is dated paleographically to around the middle of the seventh century. The dedication is to ʾEshmunmelqart, the syncretic God of Sidon and Tyre whose cult is known only from Kition in Cyprus.

The man’s name and the names of his forbears are an assortment from the Sidonian onomasticon, and the seven generations, amounting to about 180 years, fix the origin of the family in late ninth-century Kition. The inscription shows that there were émigrés in the town of Ibiza in the mid-seventh century and that at least one of them came from Kition, where his was one of the founding families, after it fell under Tyrian control, and that the various segments of the new society brought their civic or ancestral Gods with them.

The island sometimes is thought to have been a port of call on a longer and much more promising voyage, but its proximity to the coast of Spain (Alicante is just a day’s sail and is visible on a clear day) make this redundant. But if the island was a destination, then its attraction for the settlers and colonists surely was the forests for which it was renowned: Ibiza’s Phoenician name is “Balsam-Island” (*ʾy bsm), and the Greeks, according to Diodorus (5.16), gave it the epithet “Abounding-in-Pine-Trees” (Pituoussai). And so it was settled and then colonized by skilled workers from various places in the eastern and western Mediterranean, under the auspices of Carthage, who prepared the timbers and pine caulking used in building boats such as those that sank at Mazarron (made of pine and partially caulked inside and out with pine tar) or who made balm and pharmaceuticals from the pine and balsam resin.

The Phoenicians who came to Spain in the eighth century had become part of the cultural landscape in the seventh. They adopted Iberian ways; the Tartessians, Spanish, and later the Portuguese followed Oriental fashions. The newcomers in the seventh century were associated with the vital, even if at first modest expansion of Carthage, and their energies were directed to the acquisition of garden, agricultural, and forest products as much as to the usual exploitation of Iberian mineral resources. The swing from the far western to the eastern coast of Spain coincided with this new emphasis on the Punic capital and the diminishing importance, in the perception of the colonials, of their places of origin in mainland Phoenicia. The Atlantic region of southern Spain, where the Sidonians had been the predominant foreign presence, was routinely Tartessian. The Phoenicians of the Mediterranean region sent probes into Portugal, the Carthaginians went down the Atlantic coast of Africa, and together they made the development of the east coast of Spain their joint venture.

Conclusion

In the seventh century, Tyre presided over a vast network of economically alert, culturally attuned, and politically energized national states. The design was Tyrian (the infusion of lust for the good life, ambition, and hard work), and the engineering was Assyrian—cooperation, forced if not voluntary, as an ideal, and the possibility of progressing beyond the confines of tradition to a kind of self-transcendence in the empire. Pretty well everybody was part of the system or was crushed by it or just fell by the wayside.

In the eastern Mediterranean homeland, there was a confederation of Assyrian tributary states that was the basis of an intricate economic network. Tyre controlled the seaboard region from the Byblian frontier to Joppa, had access to the port towns, and built a new harbor south of Carmel at ʿAtlit. South of Joppa to the Egyptian border was Philistine territory, dominated by the port at Ashkelon and the industrial center at Ekron. Beyond Philistia was Judah, a now completely centralized economy, and to the east of this vibrant and creative nation were the Transjordanian states, each with its peculiar affiliations: Ammon with the city-states of Syria, Moab with North Arabia, and Edom with South Arabia and Egypt. Across the sea in Cyprus, the native kingdoms had been shaped by their relations with the Phoenicians, maintained cultural and economic ties with them, and encouraged them in their longstanding Hellenic bent. These native Cypriots and their Cypriot-Phoenician confreres went on to the coast of Syria, to Rhodes, and to places such as Samos, which would send explorers with them to the far western Mediterranean.

In the West, Carthage was establishing itself as the pivot of another Phoenician network. The town was growing, populated by immigrants from the homeland and from places previously settled in the colonial West, nurtured by established settlements in Italy, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia, and Spain and, toward the end of the century, supported by its own colonies in Spain, at Ibiza and Málaga, and in northwestern Sicily. In all these places, the novelty of the Phoenicians dissolved in the seventh century, the settlers assimilated, and the indigenous peoples learned to express their native differentiation in the habits and skills and aspirations they had once borrowed from these foreigners. Carthage was a Tyrian colony; but as a town, the inhabitants assumed an ethnic identity and became the “Phoenicians” familiar to the Greeks and then the Romans.

1. D. B. Redford, “Taharqa in Western Asia and Libya,” ErIsr 24 (Malamat Volume; 1993) 188*–91*.

2. ANET 292.

3. S. Parpola and K. Watanabe, Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths (SAA 2; Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1988) #5, pp. 24–27; N. Naʾaman, “Esarhaddon’s Treaty with Baʿal and Assyrian Provinces along the Phoenician Coast,” RSF 22 (1994) 3–8.

4. G. Bunnens, “Aspects religieux de l’expansion phénicienne,” RelPh, 119–25; H. J. Katzenstein, “Some Reflections on the Phoenician Deities Mentioned in the Treaty between Esarhaddon King of Assyria and Baʿal King of Tyre,” Atti 2, 1.373–77.

5. K. van der Toorn, “Worshipping Stones: On the Deification of Cult Symbols,” JNSL 23 (1997) 1–14; E. D. Stockton, “Phoenician Cult Stones,” Australian Journal of Biblical Archaeology 2/3 (1974–75) 1–27; K. van der Toorn, “Anat-Yahu, Some Other Deities, and the Jews of Elephantine,” Numen 39 (1992) 80–101. The foundation legend of Bethel in Israel was incorporated into the Jacob cycle (Genesis 28–35). According to the treaty, the curse of Bethel and ʿAnat-Bethel is to be devoured by a lion (Parpola and Watanabe, Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths, 27), and this is corroborated by biblical legend and prophecy (1 Kings 13, Hos 13:7).

6. P. Naster, “Ambrosiai Petrai dans les textes et sur les monnaies de Tyr,” RelPh, 361–70. A fifth-century inscription from Idalion in Cyprus (CIS 95; RES 453) records the dedication of a parapet to ʿAnat by the king of Kition and Idalion. A fifth-century bronze lance from Idalion (RES 1210; RPC 110–11, pl. 10:2) is inscribed “For ʿAnat / for ʿAnat” (lʿnt / lʿnt). A Greek-Phoenician bilingual from Lapethos in northern Cyprus mimics that battle cry in its dedication of an altar to ʿAnat and to Ptolemy I Soter (CIS 95; KAI 42).

7. E. Lipiński, Dieux et Déesses de l’Univers Phénicien et Punique (Studia Phoenicia 14; Louvain: Peeters, 1995) 84–86; PoB, 41 #7; A. R. W. Green, The Storm-God in the Ancient Near East (Biblical and Judaic Studies from the University of California, San Diego 8; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003); H. Niehr, Baʿalšamem: Studien zu Herkunft, Geschichte und Rezeptionsgeschichte eines phönizischen Gottes (OLA 123; Louvain: Peeters 2003). The God is special to Byblos and is mentioned in inscriptions from Byblos (KAI 4), Karatepe (KAI 26), Ekron (KAI 266), Umm el-ʿAmed (CIS 7), Kition (RES 1519B), Cagliari (CIS 139), and Carthage (CIS 379, 3778).

8. See Arabic *ljj, a root unattested in Phoenician but known in Syriac and Hebrew in the word log or lugaʾ, “liquid measure,” and in the Arabic words “depths of the sea” (lujj and lujja), “fathomless” (lujji), and with other nuances (“clamor,” “relentlessness”) that might be associated with the deeps.

9. KAI 50; P. Bordreuil, “Attestations inédites de Melqart, Baʿal Hamon et Baʿal Saphon à Tyr,” RelPh, 77–86.

10. Parpola and Watanabe, Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths, 27.

11. ANET 291, 292.

12. Ibid.,295–96.

13. Ibid., 293.

14. Ibid., 296.

15. Such a syndicate, or association of business people, is mentioned in a mark on a Cypriot amphora found at Tell Rachidiyeh, on the coast facing Tyre. The inscription, which can be dated to the mid-seventh century, reads “House of the Association” (bt ḥbr), referring to the jar’s destination. See Liban: L’Autre Rive—Exposition présentée à l’Institut du monde arabe du 27 octobre au 2 Maì 1999 (Paris: Flammarion, 1998) 125.

S. F. Bondì, “Note sull’economia fenicia—I: Impresa privata e ruolo dello stato,” EVO 1 (1978) 139–49.

16. ANET 291, 294; J. Elayi, “Les cités phéniciennes et l’empire assyrien à l’époque d’Assurbanipal,” RA 77 (1983) 45–58.

17. M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 11; New York: Doubleday, 1988) 265; S. Dalley, “Yabâ, Atalyâ, and the Foreign Policy of Late Assyrian Kings,” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 12/2 (1998) 83–98, esp. p. 93; R. Achenbach, “Jabâ und Atalja—zwei jüdische Königstöchter am assyrischen Konigshof? Zu einer These von Stephanie Dalley,” BN 113 (2002) 29–38.

18. M. Liverani, “The Trade Network of Tyre according to Ezek. 27,” in Ah, Assyria . . . : Studies in Assyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor (ed. M. Cogan and I. Ephʿal; Scripta Hierosolymitana 33; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991) 65–79; M. A. Corral, Ezekiel’s Oracles against Tyre: Historical Realities and Motivations (Biblica et Orientalia 46; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2002). The map is in Ezek 27:12–25a. It resembles and draws on a seventh-century genealogical presentation of the map of the world in Gen 10:1–7, 20, 21a, 22–23, 31–32, which was filled out, in the rest of this chapter, by a sixth-century writer interested in ethnography.

R. D. Barnett, “Ezekiel and Tyre,” ErIsr 9 (Albright Volume; 1969) 6–13, pl. 4. The building of the ship is described in Ezek 27:3b–9a + 11bβ, its sinking in Ezek 27:25b–26, and lamentation for its loss in Ezek 27:28–32. The captain of the ship, the God who sailed in it, is described in Ezek 28:1–10. The writer who inserted the map of the Tyrian trade world edited these portrayals in order to turn the ceremonial bark into a heavily laden merchantman (Ezek 27:9b–10, 11aβ, 27, 33–36) and its captain into the fabulously rich and vainglorious king of Tyre (Ezek 28:11–26).

19. Ezek 27:3b–9a + 11bβ; 27:25b–26, 28–32; 28:1–10. The rest of Ezekiel 27–28 is by the editor, who inserted the map of the world and adjusted the original context to suit it.

20. HistTyre 295–347.

21. P. Bordreuil, “Charges et fonctions en Syrie–Palestine d’après quelques sceaux ouest-sémitiques du second et du premier millénaire,” CRAIBL (1986) 290–308, figs. 1–9, esp. pp. 298–305, figs. 3–8; idem, CSOSI 23–24 #7.

22. E. Lipiński, “Le royaume de Sidon au VIIe siècle av. J.-C.,” ErIsr 24 (Malamat Volume; 1993) 158*–63*.

23. ANET 291; W. Culican, “Almuñécar, Assur and Phoenician Penetration of the Western Mediterranean,” Levant 2 (1970) 28–36; repr. Opera Selecta: From Tyre to Tartessos (Gothenburg: Åströms, 1986) 673–84.

24. M. Elat, “Phoenician Overland Trade within the Mesopotamian Empires,” in Ah, Assyria . . . : Studies in Assyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor (ed. M. Cogan and I. Ephʿal; Scripta Hierosolymitana 33; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991) 21–35, esp. pp. 29–31.

25. WSS 328–29 #876.

26. J. Teixidor, “Deux inscriptions phéniciennes de Sidon,” Archéologie au Levant: Recueil à la mémoire de Roger Saidah (Lyon: Maison de l’Orient, 1982) 233–36.

27. J. N. Postgate, “More ‘Assyrian Deeds and Documents,’” Iraq 32 (1970) 125–64, pls. 18–32, #9, esp. pp. 142–43, pls. 23, 31c. The name is written in Akkadian (ab-di-si-l[u] lú ṣi-du-na-a-a) at the beginning of the deed. The theophoric element (si-[l]u) occurs as Sillis in Greek transliterations of Phoenician names of men from Sidon, Tyre, Kition, and Ashkelon: O. Masson, “Recherches sur les Phéniciens dans le monde hellénistique,” BCH 93 (1969) 679–700, esp. pp. 679–87. It is probably the name of the Goddess Sala, or salas, “Daughter,” known from Old Babylonian and Hurrian texts: W. G. Lambert, “Old Testament Mythology in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context,” in Congress Volume: Jerusalem 1986 (ed. J. A. Emerton; VTSup 40; Leiden: Brill, 1988) 124–43, esp. pp. 136–37. She is known from the Ugaritic-Akkadian proper name Ili-sala, and her name occurs in the bilingual from Tell Fekherye as Sala in the Assyrian version and as Swl in the unvocalized Aramaic version.

28. RPC 104–8, pl. 8:2.

29. WSS 265 #714; Lachish Letter 4:5–9 (J. C. L. Gibson, Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, I: Hebrew and Moabite Inscriptions [Oxford: Clarendon, 1971] 41–43) in a report to headquarters notes: “Concerning the jail [ʿl dbr byt hrpd], there is no one there. As to Samakyahu, Shemayahu took him and brought him to the city. And I your servant am not sending the witness there today but I will send him when morning comes around.” The root rpd is not found otherwise in Phoenician. In Biblical Hebrew it can mean “support,” and in Old South Arabic it has the meaning “support, revetment, retaining wall.”

30. P. G. Mosca and J. Russell, “A Phoenician Inscription from Čebel Ireš Daği in Rough Cilicia,” Epigraphica Anatolica 9 (1987) 1–28, pls. 1–4; A. Lemaire, “Une inscription phénicienne découverte récemment et le mariage de Ruth la Moabite,” ErIsr 20 (1989) 124*–29*; G. A. Long and D. Pardee, “Who Exiled Whom? Another Interpretation of the Phoenician Inscription from Čebel Ireš Daği,” AuOr 7 (1989) 207–14.

31. ANET 287, 291, 294.

32. E. Lipiński, “Les Phéniciens à Ninive au temps des Sargonides: Ahoubasti, portier en chef,” Atti 1, 1.125–34. The preservation of the initial ʾalep in his name is a feature of the Byblian dialect.

33. Idem, “Phéniciens en Assyrie: L’éponyme Milkiram et la surintendante Amat-Ashtart,” Atti 2, 1.151–54. The eponym lent his name to the year. Short accented [a] usually becomes [o] at this time in Phoenician, but this change seems not to have taken place in the dialect of Byblos in verbs used in proper names, for example, Milkʾasap and Milkiram: see W. R. Garr, Dialect Geography of Syria–Palestine, 1000–586 B.C.E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; repr. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004) 33–35.

34. M. G. Amadasi Guzzo, “Two Phoenician Inscriptions Carved in Ivory: Again the Ur Box and the Sarepta Plaque,” Or 59 (1990) 58–66; idem, “Varia Phoenicia,” RSF 20 (1992) 95–104, esp. pp. 95–97; G. Garbini, “L’ancella del signore,” RSF 18 (1990) 207–8; T. C. Mitchell, “The Phoenician Inscribed Ivory Box from Ur,” PEQ 123 (1991) 119–28; P. Xella, “L’identità di ʾdn nell’iscrizione sulla scatola di Ur,” RSF 20 (1992) 83–91.

35. É. Puech, “Un cratère phénicien inscrit: Rites et croyances,” Transeu 8 (1994) 47–73, pls. 6–11.

36. M. A. Rizzo, “Alcune importazioni fenicie da Cerveteri,” Atti 2, 3.1169–81.

37. Among the Byblian seals may be included WSS 264–65 #713, 270 #724, and 273 #735.

38. WSS 278 #747, 412 #1091.

39. J. Boardman, “The Excavated History of Al Mina,” in Ancient Greeks East and West (ed. G. R. Tsetskhladze; Leiden: Brill, 1999) 135–61, esp. pp. 159–60.

40. F. Briquel-Chatonnet, “Arwad et l’empire assyrien,” in Ana šadî Labnāni lū allik. Beiträge zu altorientalischen und mittelmeerischen Kulturen: Festschrift für Wolfgang Röllig (ed. B. Pongratz-Leisten, H. Kühne, and P. Xella; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997) 57–68, esp. pp. 64–65.

41. R. B. Koehl, Sarepta III: The Imported Bronze and Iron Age Wares from Area II, X (Beirut: Librairie Orientale, 1986) 148.

42. J. B. Pritchard, Recovering Sarepta, a Phoenician City: Excavations at Sarafand, Lebanon, 1969–1974, by the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 104–8, fig. 103; idem, “The Tanit Inscription from Sarepta,” PhWest, 83–92, pl. 9; M. G. Amadasi Guzzo, “Two Phoenician Inscriptions Carved in Ivory: Again the Ur Box and the Sarepta Plaque,” Or 59 (1990) 58–66; idem, “Tanit-ʿštrt e Milk-ʿštrt: ipotesi,” Or 60 (1991) 82–91; P. Bordreuil, “Tanit du Liban (Nouveaux documents religieux phéniciens, III),” in Phoenicia and the East Mediterranean in the First Millennium B.C. (ed. E. Lipiński; Studia Phoenicia 5; Louvain: Peeters, 1987) 79–85, esp. pp. 81–82.

43. W. P. Anderson, Sarepta I: The Late Bronze and Iron Age Strata of Area II, Y (Beirut: Lebanon University, 1988) 421.

44. M. W. Prausnitz and E. Mazar, “Achzib,” NEAEHL 1.32–36.

45. M. W. Prausnitz, “A Phoenician Krater from Akhziv,” OrAnt 5 (1966) 177–88; idem, “Die Nekropolen von Akhziv und die Entwicklung der Keramik vom 10. bis zum 7. Jahrhundert v. Chr. in Akhziv, Samaria und Ashdod,” PhWest, 31–44; P. Smith, L. Horwitz, and J. Zias, “Human Remains from the Iron Age Cemeteries at Akhziv, Part I: The Built Tomb from the Southern Cemetery,” RSF 18 (1990) 137–50, pls. 12–15; M. Dayagi-Mendels, The Akhziv Cemeteries: The Ben-Dor Excavations, 1941–1944 (Israel Antiquities Authority Reports 15; Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2002).

46. G. R. Driver, “Seals and Tombstones,” ADAJ 2 (1953) 62–65, pl. 8:6–8; R. Hestrin, Inscriptions Reveal: Documents from the Time of the Bible, the Mishna and the Talmud (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1972) 144–45 ##142–43; B. Delavault and A. Lemaire, “Les inscriptions phéniciennes de Palestine,” RSF 7 (1979) 1–39, pls. 1–15, #2–5, esp. pp. 3–4, pls. 1–3; F. M. Cross Jr., “Phoenician Tomb Stelae from Akhziv,” in M. Dayagi-Mendels, The Akhziv Cemeteries: The Ben-Dor Excavations, 1941–1944 (Israel Antiquities Authority Reports 15; Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2002) 169–73.

47. W. Culican, “Phoenician Demons,” JNES 35 (1976) 21–24, fig. 1; E. Stern, “Phoenician Masks and Pendants,” PEQ 108 (1976) 109–18, pls. 9–11.

48. W. Culican, “Dea Tyria Gravida,” Australian Journal of Biblical Archaeology 1 (1969) 35–50; repr. Opera Selecta: From Tyre to Tartessus (Gothenburg: Åströms, 1986) 265–80.

49. WSS 266–67 #716.

50. There is a place in the vicinity of ʿAkko and ʾAchzib called Neʿiʿel (Josh 19:27), with the elements ʾl and nʿ in the opposite order.

51. A. Kempinski and W. D. Niemeier, “Kabri, 1992,” IEJ 43 (1993) 181–84.

52. J. Briend and J.-B. Humbert, Tell Keisan (1971–1976): Une cité phénicienne en Galilée (Paris: Gabalda, 1980) 131–56; J.-B. Humbert, “Récents travaux à Tell Keisan (1979–1980),” RB 88 (1981) 373–98, pls. 8–10; J.-F. Salles, “À propos du niveau 4 de Tell Keisan,” Levant 17 (1985) 203–4; J. Gunneweg and I. Perlman, “The Origin of ‘Loop-Handle Jars’ from Tell Keisan,” RB 98 (1991) 591–99; J.-B. Humbert, “Keisan, Tell,” NEAEHL 3.862–67.

53. A. Lemaire, “Une inscription phénicienne de Tell es-Saʿidiyeh,” RSF 10 (1982) 11–12, pl. 6. A vertical line separates the main clause from the following subordinate relative clause—a syntactical signal otherwise known only in Moabite—and suggests a poetic cadence for the text.

54. E. Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, II: The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods, 732–332 BCE (New York: Doubleday, 2001) 50–101.

55. Idem, “A Phoenician-Cypriote Votive Scapula from Tel Dor: A Maritime Scene,” IEJ 44 (1994) 1–12.

56. G. Markoe, Phoenicians (London: British Museum, 2000) 69–70.

57. A. Raban, “The Heritage of Ancient Harbour Engineering in Cyprus and the Levant,” in Cyprus and the Sea (ed. V. Karageorghis and D. Michaelides; Nicosia: University of Cyprus, 1995) 139–88, esp. pp. 154–58; idem, “Near Eastern Harbors: Thirteenth–Seventh Centuries BCE,” MPT, 428–38; idem, “Conceptual Technology of Phoenician Harbours in the Levant,” Actas 4, 3.1095–1106.

58. C. N. Johns, “Excavations at Atlit (1930–1931): The Southeastern Cemetery,” QDAP 2 (1933) 41–104, pls. 14–37; idem, “Excavations at Pilgrims’ Castle, ʿAtlit (1933): Cremated Burials of Phoenician Origin,” QDAP 6 (1937) 121–52; C. N. Johns, A. Raban, and E. Linder, “ʿAtlit,” NEAEHL 1.112–20.

59. O. Keel, Corpus der Stempelsiegel-Amulette aus Palästina/Israel: Katalog, Band I (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997) 758–77, ##1–26.

60. G. Hölbl, Ägyptisches Kulturgut im phönikischen und punischen Sardinien (Leiden: Brill, 1986) 39–42.

61. Some of these towns, such as Beth Shemesh, were simply abandoned in the seventh century, while their Philistine neighbors, in this case Timnah (Tel Batash), flourished: see S. Bunimovitz and Z. Lederman, “The Final Destruction of Beth Shemesh and the Pax Assyriaca in the Judean Shephelah,” TA 30 (2003) 3–26.

62. A. F. Rainey, “Manasseh, King of Judah, in the Whirlpool of the Seventh Century B.C.E.,” in kinattūtu ša dārâti: Raphael Kutscher Memorial Volume (ed. A. F. Rainey; Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1993) 147–64; I. Finkelstein, “The Archaeology of the Days of Manasseh,” in Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J. King (ed. M. D. Coogan, J. C. Exum, and L. E. Stager; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994) 169–84.

63. N. Naʾaman, “The Kingdom of Judah under Josiah,” TA 18 (1991) 3–71.

64. N. Avigad and B. Sass, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1997) 49–263, ##1–711; R. Deutsch, Messages from the Past: Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Isaiah through the Destruction of the First Temple. Shlomo Moussaieff Collection and an Up to Date Corpus (Tel Aviv–Jaffa: Archaeological Center, 1999); R. Deutsch and A. Lemaire, Biblical Period Personal Seals in the Shlomo Moussaieff Collection (Tel Aviv–Jaffa: Archaeological Center, 2000); N. Avigad, M. Heltzer, and A. Lemaire, West Semitic Seals: Eighth–Sixth Centuries BCE (The Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum Collection B; Haifa: University of Haifa Press, 2000); R. Deutsch, Biblical Period Hebrew Bullae: The Josef Chaim Kaufman Collection (Tel Aviv–Jaffa: Archaeological Center, 2003); idem, “A Hoard of Fifty Hebrew Clay Bullae from the Time of Hezekiah,” in Shlomo: Studies in Epigraphy, Iconography, History and Archaeology in Honor of Shlomo Moussaieff (ed. R. Deutsch; Tel Aviv–Jaffa: Archaeological Center, 2003) 45–98.

65. J. Naveh, “A Hebrew Letter from the Seventh Century B.C.,” IEJ 10 (1960) 129–39, pl. 17; idem, “Some Notes on the Reading of the Meṣad Ḥashavyahu Letter,” IEJ 14 (1964) 158–59; S. B. Parker, Stories in Scripture and Inscriptions: Comparative Studies in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 13–35.

66. The earlier form of the law is in Exod 22:25–26, in the context of laws dealing with the disadvantaged, and was included in the seventh-century code. The version in Deut 24:10–15, which belongs to the sixth-century revision of the code, rephrases the law and puts it in the context of a just economy.

67. The emphasis throughout the factum is on storing (ʾsm) the grain, the last job of a harvester: “Your servant was a harvester, your servant had stored on the estate, and your servant harvested, and stooked, and stored as usual before the Sabbath. Just when your servant had stooked the harvest and stored as usual, along came Hoshaʿyahu son of Shubay and took the garment of your servant. Just as I had finished my harvesting that particular day, he took the garment of your servant. And all my brothers have testified on my behalf, those harvesting with me in the heat of the sun, my brothers have testified that I am innocent in the matter of the storing (mʾ[s]m).”

68. J. Naveh, “Writing and Scripts in Seventh-Century B.C.E. Philistia: The New Evidence from Tell Jemmeh,” IEJ 35 (1985) 8–21, pls. 1–3, esp. p. 18, fig. 4:2; A. Fantalkin, “Meẓad Ḥashavyahu: Its Material Culture and Historical Background,” TA 28 (2001) 3–167; R. Wenning, “Nachrichten über Griechen in Palästina in der Eisenzeit,” in Proceedings of the First International Congress on the Hellenic Diaspora from Antiquity to Modern Times, Volume I: From Antiquity to 1453 (ed. J. M. Fossey; Amsterdam: Gieben, 1991) 207–19; J. C. Waldbaum and J. Magness, “The Chronology of Early Greek Pottery: New Evidence from Seventh-Century B.C. Destruction Levels in Israel,” AJA 101 (1997) 23–40.

69. A.-M. Collombier, “Céramique grecque et échanges en Mediterrranée orientale: Chypre et la côte syro-phénicienne (fin VIIIe—fin IVe av. J.-C.),” in Phoenicia and the East Mediterranean in the First Millennium B.C. (ed. E. Lipiński; Studia Phoenicia 5; Louvain: Peeters, 1987) 239–48; G. Lehmann, “Trends in the Local Pottery Development of the Late Iron Age and Persian Period in Syria and Lebanon, ca. 700 to 300 B.C.,” BASOR 311 (1998) 7–37.

W. D. Niemeier, “Archaic Greeks in the Orient: Textual and Archaeological Evidence,” BASOR 322 (2001) 11–32.

See P. E. Dion, “Les ktym de Tel Arad: Grecs ou Phéniciens?” RB 99 (1992) 70–97. The letters qš on two bowls at Arad (Y. Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions [Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1981 115–17 ##102–3) are the name of the Edomite God Qaws written by a Phoenician from Kition, where the diphthong [aw] was pronounced [ô] and, like any vowel, was not written, and where samek (s) was pronounced šin (š), whence the writing qš and the pronunciation Qôš.The syncretism and eclecticism involved in this invocation of an Edomite God by Phoenicians were considered enrichments and were typical of the religious mentality in Kition. On the bowls, see F. M. Cross, “Two Offering Dishes with Phoenician Inscriptions from the Sanctuary of ʿArad,” BASOR 235 (1979) 75–77; N. Naʾaman, “The Abandonment of Cult Places in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah as Acts of Cult Reform,” UF 34 (2002) 585–602, esp. pp. 597–98.

70. I. Beit-Arieh, “The Ostracon of Aḥiqam from Ḥorvat ʿUza,” TA 13 (1986) 40–45, pl. 2. The first word, reconstructed as [ʿ]lm, is a label from the root ʿly, “to go up,” which sometimes has a military connotation, or from the root ʿll, “to act,” and so identifies the three men as his “escort” or “agents.”

71. Idem, and B. Cresson, “An Edomite Ostracon from Horvat ʿUza,” TA 12 (1985) 96–101; H. Misgav, “Two Notes on the Ostraca from Horvat ʿUza,” IEJ 40 (1990) 215–17. I. Beit-Arieh, “New Data on the Relationship between Judah and Edom toward the End of the Iron Age,” in Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology (ed. S. Gitin and W. G. Dever; AASOR 49; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989) 125–31.

72. Idem, “A Literary Ostracon from Horvat ʿUza,” TA 20 (1993) 55–65; F. M. Cross, “An Ostracon in Literary Hebrew from Ḥorvat ʿUza,” in The Archaeology of Jordan and Beyond: Essays in Honor of James A. Sauer (ed. L. E. Stager, J. A. Greene, M. D. Coogan; Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant 1; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000) 111–13; repr. idem, Leaves from an Epigrapher’s Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy (HSS 51; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003) 135–37.

73. I. Beit-Arieh, ed., Tel ʿIra: A Stronghold in the Biblical Negev (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, 1999).

74. Idem, “A First Temple Period Census Document,” PEQ 115 (1983) 105–8. One of the three had a normal sentence-name, “Yahweh-Requites,” but the others were called “Baldy” (gbḥ) and “Heavy” (mwqr).

75. Idem, ed., Tel ʿIra, 405–11.

76. B. Peckham, History and Prophecy: The Development of Late Judean Literary Traditions (New York: Doubleday, 1993).

77. B. Halpern, “Late Israelite Astronomies and the Early Greeks,” in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina (ed. W. G. Dever and S. Gitin; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003) 323–52.

78. L. E. Stager, “Jerusalem and the Garden of Eden,” ErIsr 26 (F. M. Cross Volume; 1999) 183*–94*; E. Cook, “Near Eastern Sources for the Palace of Alkinoos,” AJA 108 (2004) 43–77.

79. D. W. Young, “On the Application of Numbers from Babylonian Mathematics to Biblical Life Spans and Epochs,” ZAW 100 (1988) 331–61; idem, “The Influence of Babylonian Algebra on Longevity among the Antediluvians,” ZAW 102 (1990) 321–35.

80. S. Parpola, “Assyria’s Expansion in the 8th and 7th Centuries and Its Long-Term Repercussions in the West,” in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina (ed. W. G. Dever and S. Gitin; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003) 99–111.

81. Isa 28:15. The covenant with Yahweh is called a “treaty” (Deut 5:2–3) or an “oath” (Deut 29:11) or a “blessing” (2 Kgs 18:31), and their treaty with Assyria is described in the exact terms of their covenant with God (2 Kgs 18:31–32).

82. R. S. Hendel, “Of Demigods and the Deluge: Toward an Interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4,” JBL 106 (1987) 13–26.

83. H. W. Attridge and R. A. Oden Jr., Philo of Byblos, The Phoenician History: Introduction, Critical Text, Translation, Notes (CBQ Monograph 9; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association, 1981); J. Ebach, Weltentstehung und Kulturentwicklung bei Philo von Byblos: Ein Beitrag zur Überlieferung der biblischen Urgeschichte im Rahmen des altorientalischen und antiken Schöpfungsglaubens (Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament 108; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1979).

84. C.-M. Bennett, “Neo-Assyrian Influence in Transjordan,” in Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, I (ed. A. Hadidi; Amman: Department of Antiquities, 1982) 181–87.

85. E. A. Knauf, “The Cultral Impact of Secondary State Formation: The Cases of the Edomites and the Moabites,” in Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan (ed. P. Bienkowski; Sheffield Archaeological Monographs 7; Sheffield: Collis, 1992) 47–54.

86. E. A. Knauf and C. J. Lenzen, “Edomite Copper Industry,” in Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, III (ed. A. Hadidi; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) 83–88; P. Bienkowski, “The Origins and Development of Edom,” in Nuove fondazioni nel Vicino Oriente antico: Realtà e ideologia (ed. S. Mazzoni; Pisa: Giardini, 1994) 253–68.

87. J. R. Bartlett, “Edomites and Idumaeans,” PEQ 131 (1999) 102–14.

88. L. Singer-Avitz, “Beersheba: A Gateway Community in Southern Arabia Long-Distance Trade in the Eighth Century B.C.E.,” TA 26 (1999) 3–74, esp. p. 58.

In an Assyrian letter from about 715 B.C.E. that lists the ambassadors who brought tribute to Nimrud, a first group includes ambassadors from Egypt, Gaza, Judah, Moab, and Ammon who arrived on the twelfth of the month; and a second group that arrived later includes the emissaries from Edom, Ashdod, and Ekron: see H. W. F. Saggs, “The Nimrud Letters, 1952, Part II: Relations with the West,” Iraq 17 (1955) 126–60, Letter 16, pp. 134–35; M. Weippert, “The Relations of the States East of the Jordan with the Mesopotamian Powers during the First Millennium BC,” in Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, III (ed. A. Hadidi; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) 97–105, esp. p. 100; A. R. Millard, “Assyrian Involvement in Edom,” in Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan (ed. P. Bienkowski; Sheffield Archaeological Monographs 7; Sheffield: Collis, 1992) 35–39.

89. P. J. Parr, “Edom and the Hejaz,” in ibid., 41–46; S. Hart, “Area D at Buseirah and Edomite Chronology,” in Trade, Contact, and the Movement of Peoples in the Eastern Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of J. Basil Hennessy (ed. S. Bourke and J.-P. Descoeudres; Mediterranean Archaeology Supplement 3; Sydney: Meditarch, 1995) 241–64.

90. P. Bienkowski and E. van der Steen, “Tribes, Trade, and Towns: A New Framework for the Late Iron Age in Southern Jordan and the Negev,” BASOR 323 (2001) 21–47, esp. pp. 23–26.

91. Y. Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1981) 52 #26; G. I. Davies, Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Concordance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) #2:026.

92. I. Finkelstein, “Ḥorvat Qiṭmit and the Southern Trade in the Late Iron Age,” ZDPV 108 (1992) 156–70; P. Beck, “Transjordanian and Levantine Elements in the Iconography of Qitmit,” in Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990 (ed. A. Biran; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993) 231–36; idem, “Horvat Qitmit Revisited via ʿEn Hazeva,” TA 23 (1996) 102–14; I. Beit-Arieh, ed., Ḥorvat Qitmit: An Edomite Shrine in the Biblical Negev (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1995).

93. WSS 387–88 ##1048–49.

94. Ibid., 388 #1050.

95. Ibid., 389–90 #1051.

96. Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions, 26 #12: “Take one jar of oil and two measures of flour and give them to Qausʿanali right away.”

97. WSS 391–92 #1053.

98. Ibid., 392–94, ##1054–57.

99. P. Bordreuil and D. Pardee, “Le papyrus du marzeaḥ,” Sem 38 (1990) 49–68, pls. 7–10; F. M. Cross, “A Papyrus Recording a Divine Legal Decision and the Root rḥq in Biblical and Near Eastern Legal Usage,” Leaves from an Epigrapher’s Notebook, 63–69.

100. All three names occur in Phoenician, but the names ysʿʾ and mlkʾ also appear on seventh-century Moabite seals: see WSS 379–80 #1028; F. Yisrael, “Note di onomastica semitica 7/2: Rassegna critico-bibliografica ed epigrafica su alcune onomastiche palestinesi: La Transgiordania,” SEL 9 (1992) 95–114, esp. p. 108.

101. R. Kletter and Z. Herzog, “An Iron Age Hermaphrodite Centaur from Tel Beer Sheba, Israel,” BASOR 331 (2003) 27–38.

102. H. O. Thompson, “Iron Age Cosmetic Palettes,” ADAJ 16 (1971) 61–70, figs. 1–8; D. Barag, “Phoenician Stone Vessels from the Eighth–Seventh Centuries BCE,” ErIsr 18 (Avigad Volume; 1985) 72*–73* [English summary], 215–32 [Hebrew]; D. Homès-Fredericq, “A Cosmetic Palette from Lehun, Jordan,” in Trade, Contact and the Movement of Peoples in the Eastern Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of J. Basil Hennessy (ed. S. Bourke and J.-P. Descoeudres; Mediterranean Archaeology Supplement 3; Sydney: Meditarch, 1995) 265–70, pl. 17:2.

WSS 372–86 ##1006–47; R. Deutsch and A. Lemaire, Biblical Period Personal Seals in the Shlomo Moussaieff Collection (Tel Aviv–Jaffa: Archaeological Center, 2000) 193–208 ##186–201.

103. WSS 372–73 #1006; Deutsch and Lemaire, Biblical Period Personal Seals in the Shlomo Moussaieff Collection, 194 #187; WSS #16.

104. B. MacDonald, “Ammonite Territory and Sites,” in Ancient Ammon (ed. B. MacDonald and R. W. Younker; Leiden: Brill, 1999) 30–56.

105. U. Hübner, “Das ikonographische Repertoire der ammonitischen Siegel und seine Entwicklung,” in Studies in the Iconography of Northwest Semitic Inscribed Seals (ed. B. Sass and C. Uehlinger; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993) 131–57, 187–98.

106. WSS 320–71 ##857–1005; 409–24 ##1081–1119; BPPS 157–92 ##150–92; W. E. Aufrecht, “Ammonite Texts and Language,” in Ancient Ammon (ed. B. MacDonald and R. W. Younker; Leiden: Brill, 1999) 163–88; R. Deutsch and M. Heltzer, New Epigraphic Evidence from the Biblical Period (Tel Aviv–Jaffa: Archaeological Center, 1995) 69–71; A. Levin, “A Newly Discovered Ammonite Seal,” IEJ 46 (1996) 243–47; R. Deutsch and M. Heltzer, Windows to the Past (Tel Aviv–Jaffa: Archaeological Center, 1997) 56–58; R. Deutsch, “A Royal Ammonite Seal Impression,” in Michael: Historical, Epigraphical and Biblical Studies in Honor of Prof. Michael Heltzer (ed. Y. Avishur and R. Deutsch; Tel Aviv–Jaffa: Archaeological Center, 1999) 121–25; R. W. Younker, “An Ammonite Seal from Tall Jalul, Jordan: The Seal of ʾAynadab Son of Zedekʾil,” ErIsr 26 (F. M. Cross Volume; 1999) 221*–24*; M. Heltzer, “An Ammonite Seal with a Monkey,” in Assyriologica et Semitica: Festschrift für Joachim Oelsner anlässlich seines 65. Geburtages am 18. Februar 1997 (ed. J. Marzahn and H. Neumann; Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2000) 107–9.

107. WSS 325 #867.

108. Ibid., 347 #935, 334 #894 (Elishaʿ), 342 #919 (ʾAmarʾil), 350 #944 (Menaḥḥem). There is also a seal of Yinaḥḥim, son of Banaʾil (347–48 #936), who presumably is a different person, and of his brother ʾAmaraʾ, son of Banaʾil (342 #918).

109. WSS 326–27 #871; A. Levin, “A Newly Discovered Ammonite Seal,” IEJ 46 (1996) 243–47.

110. P. M. M. Daviau and P. E. Dion, “El, the God of the Ammonites? The Atef-Crowned Head from Tell Jawa, Jordan,” ZDPV 110 (1994) 158–67; W. E. Aufrecht, “The Religion of the Ammonites,” in Ancient Ammon (ed. B. MacDonald and R. W. Younker; Leiden: Brill, 1999) 152–62. The affix -m in the epithet mlkm is like the determinative on masculine-singular nouns in old South Arabic.

111. F. Israel, “Note ammonite—1: Gli arabismi nella documentazione onomastica ammonita,” SEL 6 (1989) 91–96; K. P. Jackson, “Ammonite Personal Names in the Context of the West Semitic Onomasticon,” in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Sixtieth Birthday (ed. C. L. Meyers and M. O’Connor; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983) 507–21.

112. I. Ephʿal, The Ancient Arabs: Nomads on the Borders of the Fertile Crescent, 9th–5th Centuries B.C. (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1984) 112–42; R. Byrne, “Early Assyrian Contacts with Arabs and the Impact on Levantine Vassal Tribute,” BASOR 331 (2003) 11–25.

113. WSS 324 #865.

114. Ibid., 352 #952.

115. Ibid., 357 #965.

116. Ibid., 321 #857.

117. Deutsch, “A Royal Ammonite Seal Impression.”

118. WSS 324 #863.

119. Ibid., 324 #864.

120. WSS 321 #858 (ʾAdonipilleṭ), 322 #859 (ʾAdonînûr).

121. R. Deutsch, “Seal of Baʿalis Surfaces: Ammonite King Plotted Murder of Judahite Governor,” BAR 25 (1999) 46–49, 66. Although the king’s name on the seal is written bʿlyšʿ, he is usually identified with the sixth-century king of Ammon, Baʿalîs (written bʿlys), mentioned in Jer 40:14. This does not explain the loss of the final ʿayin of bʿlyšʿ (meaning “Baʿal-has-saved”), and it misses the meaning and derivation of bʿyls, “Baʿal-Exists,” from bʿl + ys < yṯ: see G. A. Rendsburg, “The Ammonite Phoneme /Ṯ/,” BASOR 269 (1988) 73–77.

122. WSS 322 #860.

123. Ibid., 323–24 #862.

124. Ibid., 366–71 ##992–1005; BPPS 189 ##183–84.

125. A. R. Millard, “ʾbgd . . . : Magic Spell or Educational Exercise?” ErIsr 18 (Avigad Volume; 1985) 39*–42*.

126. WSS 324 #864 (= BPPS 157 #150) is the seal of the chamberlain, and BPPS 177 #170 is the seal of the son.

127. BPPS ##165, 174, 181.

128. WSS ##960, 975, 979. Ibid., ##951, 969, 986.

129. BPPS 165 #158.

130. WSS 334 #893, 337–38 #905.

131. Ibid., 340 #914, 346 #931.

132. Hübner, “Das ikonographische Repertoire der ammonitischen Siegel und seine Entwicklung,” 130–60.

133. WSS ##857, 894, 914, 933, 949, 951, 972; Heltzer, “An Ammonite Seal with a Monkey.”

134. WSS. Three registers: ##881, 928, 943, 952, 971, 979, 985, 991. Two registers: ##896, 908, 937, 942, 948.

135. Ammonite Images: ibid., ##887, 892, 906, 927, 963, 977; Levin, “A Newly Discovered Ammonite Seal.”

Borrowed icons: WSS ##886, 890, 895, 920, 931, 967, 988.

Human figures: ibid., ##902, 907, 911, 921, 934, 937, 950, 965, 968, 970, 976.

136. F. Zayadine, “Recent Excavations on the Citadel of Amman: A Preliminary Report,” ADAJ 18 (1973) 17–35, pls. 12–26, esp. pp. 33–35, pls. 21–23; K. Prag, “Decorative Architecture in Ammon, Moab and Judah,” Levant 19 (1987) 121–27; Abdel-Jalil ʿAmr, “Four Unique Double-Faced Female Heads from the Amman Citadel,” PEQ 120 (1988) 55–63.

137. M. M. Ibrahim, “Two Ammonite Statuettes from Khirbet el-Hajjar,” ADAJ 16 (1971) 91–97, pls. 1–3; A. Abou-Assaf, “Untersuchungen zur ammonitischen Rundbildkunst,” UF 12 (1980) 7–102, pls. 1–17; Abdel-Jalil ʿAmr, “Four Ammonite Sculptures from Jordan,” ZDPV 106 (1990) 114–18, pls. 7–8.

138. CAI 106–9; Hübner, 23–26.

139. H. O. Thompson and F. Zayadine, “The Tel Siran Inscription,” BASOR 212 (1973) 5–11; H.-P. Müller, “Kohelet und Aminadab,” in “Jedes Ding hat seine Zeit . . .”: Studien zur israelitischen und altorientalischen Weisheit. Diethelm Michel zum 65. Geburtstag (ed. A. A. Diesel et al.; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986) 149–65; I. Kottsieper, “Zur Inschrift auf der Flasche vom Tell Siran und ihrem historischen Hintergrund,” UF 34 (2002) 353–62.

140. D. S. Reese and C. Sease, “Some Previously Unpublished Engraved Tridacna Shells,” JNES 52 (1993) 109–28; idem, “Additional Unpublished Engraved Tridacna and Andara Shells,” JNES 63 (2004) 29–41; H. O. Thompson, “Iron Age Cosmetic Palettes,” ADAJ 16 (1971) 61–70, figs. 1–8.

141. P. M. M. Daviau, “Domestic Architecture in Iron Age Ammon: Building Materials, Construction Techniques, and Room Arrangement,” in Ancient Ammon (ed. B. MacDonald and R. W. Younker; Leiden: Brill, 1999) 113–36.

142. J. Naveh, “Writing and Scripts in Seventh-Century B.C.E. Philistia: The New Evidence from Tell Jemmeh,” IEJ 35 (1985) 8–21, pls. 2–3; A. Lemaire, “Phénicien et Philistien: Paléographie et dialectologie,” Actas 4, 1.243–49.

143. I. Finkelstein, “Ḥorvat Qiṭmit and the Southern Trade in the Late Iron Age,” ZDPV 108 (1992) 156–70; A. Spalinger, “Ashurbanipal and Egypt: A Source Study,” JAOS 94 (1974) 316–28.

144. E. Oren et al., “A Phoenician Emporium on the Border of Egypt,” Qadmoniot 19 (1986) 83–91 [Hebrew].

145. P. Wapnish, “Camel Caravans and Camel Pastoralists at Tell Jemmeh,” JANES 13 (1981) 101–21.

146. J. Naveh, “Writing and Scripts in Seventh-Century B.C.E. Philistia: The New Evidence from Tell Jemmeh,” IEJ 35 (1985) 8–21, pls. 2–3, esp. pp. 11–15, pls. 2b, 3; A. Kempinski, “Some Philistine Names from the Kingdom of Gaza,” IEJ 37 (1987) 20–24.

147. F. M. Cross, “Inscriptions from Tel Seraʿ,” in Leaves from an Epigrapher’s Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy (HSS 51; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003) 155–63.

148. L. E. Stager, “Ashkelon,” NEAEHL 1.103–12; D. M. Master, “Trade and Politics: Ashkelon’s Balancing Act in the Seventh Century B.C.E.,” BASOR 330 (2003) 47–64.

149. I. Starr, ed., Queries to the Sun God: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1990) 94–97.

150. M. Elat, “The Economic Relations of the Neo-Assyrian Empire with Egypt,” JAOS 98 (1978) 20–34.

151. L. E. Stager, “Ashkelon and the Archaeology of Destruction: Kislev 604 BCE,” ErIsr 25 (Aviram Volume; 1996) 61*–74*; idem, “The Fury of Babylon: Ashkelon and the Archaeology of Destruction,” BAR 22/1 (1996) 56–69, 76–77; D. M. Master, “Trade and Politics: Ashkelon’s Balancing Act in the Seventh Century B.C.E.,” BASOR 330 (2003) 47–64.

152. B. L. Johnson and L. E. Stager, “Ashkelon: Wine Emporium of the Holy Land,” in Recent Excavations in Israel: A View to the West (ed. S. Gitin; Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1995) 95–109.

153. J. Naveh, “Writing and Scripts in Seventh-Century B.C.E. Philistia: The New Evidence from Tell Jemmeh,” IEJ 35 (1985) 8–21, pls. 2–3, esp. pp. 9, 18, pl. 2a; O. Keel, Corpus der Stempelsiegel-Amulette aus Palästina/Israel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997) 688–89; WSS 399–400 #1066.

154. Keel, Corpus der Stempelsiegel-Amulette aus Palästina/Israel, 690–91 and 688–89.

155. F. M. Cross, “A Philistine Ostracon from Ashkelon,” BAR 22/1 (1996) 64–65; repr. in idem, Leaves from an Epigrapher’s Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy (HSS 51; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003) 164–65.

156. M. Dothan, “Ashdod,” NEAEHL 1.93–102; WSS 399 #1065 (lmlk is inscribed above the drawing of a soldier leading a naked captive). According to Herodotus (2.157) Psammetichus I besieged Ashdod for 29 years before capturing it, and the seal may reflect this implausible and tiresome situation.

157. A. Mazar, Excavations at Tell Qasile, Part One: The Philistine Sanctuary: Architecture and Cult Objects (Jerusalem: Hebrew University—Institute of Archaeology, 1983) 113–14; idem, Excavations at Tell Qasile, Part Two: The Philistine Sanctuary: Various Finds, the Pottery, Conclusions, Appendixes (Jerusalem: Hebrew University—Institute of Archaeology, 1985) 109–10.

158. J. Perrot, A. Ben-Tor, and M. Dothan, “ʿAzor,” NEAEHL 1.125–29; Naveh, “Writing and Scripts in Seventh-Century B.C.E. Philistia,” 18, fig. 4:2.

159. S. Gitin, “Tel Miqne–Ekron: A Type-Site for the Inner Coastal Plain in the Iron Age II Period,” in Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology (ed. S. Gitin and W. G. Dever; AASOR 49; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989) 15–58; idem, “The Neo-Assyrian Empire and Its Western Periphery: The Levant, with a Focus on Philistine Ekron,” in Assyria 1995 (ed. S. Parpola and R. M. Whiting; Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1997) 77–103.

160. S. Gitin, “Israelite and Philistine Cult and the Archaeological Record in Iron Age II: The ‘Smoking Gun’ Phenomenon,” in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina (ed. W. G. Dever and S. Gitin; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003) 279–95; S. W. Holloway, Assur Is King! Assur Is King! Religion in the Exercise of Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 10; Leiden: Brill, 2002) 203–11.

161. S. Gitin, “Philistia in Transition: The Tenth Century B.C.E. and Beyond,” MPT, 162–83.

162. Idem, “Tel Miqne–Ekron in the 7th Century B.C.E.: The Impact of Economic Innovation and Foreign Cultural Influences on a Neo-Assyrian Vassal City-State,” in Recent Excavations in Israel: A View to the West (ed. S. Gitin; Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1995) 61–79, pls. 1–4; idem, “Neo-Assyrian and Egyptian Hegemony over Ekron in the Seventh Century B.C.E.: A Response to Lawrence E. Stager,” ErIsr 27 (Hayim and Miriam Tadmor Volume; 2003) 55*–61*; N. Naʾaman, “Ekron under the Assyrian and Egyptian Empires,” BASOR 332 (2003) 81–91; L. E. Stager, “Ashkelon and the Archaeology of Destruction: Kislev 604 BCE,” ErIsr 25 (Aviram Volume; 1996) 61*–74*, pp. 70*–71*.

163. The stands, usually called “altars,” were for burning incense and other fragrances used in the production of perfume. They were found in the industrial (oil and textile) areas and in domestic contexts in the wealthy residential areas but not in the temple or in ritual or liturgical contexts: see S. Gitin, “Incense Altars from Ekron, Israel and Judah: Context and Typology,” ErIsr 20 (Yadin Volume; 1989) 52*–67*; idem, “New Incense Altars from Ekron: Context, Typology and Function,” ErIsr 23 (Biran Volume; 1992) 43*–49*.

164. A. Golani, “Three Silver Jewelry Hoards from Tel Miqne–Ekron,” Actas 4, 3.987–99; A. Golani and B. Sass, “Three Seventh-Century B.C.E. Hoards of Silver Jewelry from Tel Miqne-Ekron,” BASOR 311 (1998) 57–81; R. Kletter, “Iron Age Hoards of Precious Metals in Palestine: An ‘Underground Economy’?” Levant 35 (2003) 139–52; C. M. Thompson, “Sealed Silver in Iron Age Cisjordan and the ‘Invention’ of Coinage,” OJA 22 (2003) 67–107.

165. S. Gitin, “The Neo-Assyrian Empire and Its Western Periphery: The Levant, with a Focus on Philistine Ekron,” in Assyria 1995 (ed. S. Parpola and R. M. Whiting; Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1997) 77–103, esp. p. 87.

166. Silver: Golani and Sass, “Three Seventh-Century B.C.E. Hoards of Silver Jewelry from Tel Miqne–Ekron.”

Tridacna: B. Brandl, “Two Engraved Tridacna Shells from Tel Miqne–Ekron,” BASOR 323 (2001) 49–62. The shells are from the Indian Ocean, their workmanship is Phoenician, and their distribution—in Palestine (Ekron, Tell el-Farʿah South, Arad), Transjordan (ʿAmman, Buseirah), Babylonia (Susa, Warka, Babylon), Assyria (Ashur, Nimrud), and in the Heraion on Samos—is indicative of Phoenician commercial persistence.

Ekron doing business in Assyria: E. Lipiński, “Deux marchands de blé phéniciens à Ninive,” RSF 3 (1975) 1–6. The tablet is dated 660 B.C.E., in the eponym of Girsapon, whose Phoenician name would be normal for a man from Ekron. The men selling grain have names known at Ekron (Padi, also the name of a king of Ekron) or betraying the Byblian influence (Adoniḥay, “Adonis-is-Alive”) typical of Ekron. The grain is weighed according to the Judean standard, and this mixture of Judean and Phoenician elements is usual in Philistia, at Ekron in particular. The buyers and witnesses are Aramean.

167. A. Mazar and G. L. Kelm, “Batash, Tel (Timnah),” NEAEHL 1.152–57; A. Mazar, “The Northern Shephelah in the Iron Age: Some Issues in Biblical History and Archaeology,” in Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J. King (ed. M. D. Coogan, J. C. Exum, and L. E. Stager; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994) 247–67; G. L. Kelm and A. Mazar, Timnah: A Biblical City in the Sorek Valley (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995).

168. S. Gitin and M. Cogan, “A New Type of Dedicatory Inscription from Ekron,” IEJ 49 (1999) 193–202. The injunction is also reflected in Isa 8:19 and Hos 10:3.

169. T. Dothan and J. Naveh, “A Royal Dedicatory Inscription form Ekron,” IEJ 47 (1997) 1–16; R. G. Lehmann, “Studien zur Formgeschichte der ʿEqron-Inschrift des ʾkyš und den phönizischen Dedikationstexten aus Byblos,” UF 31 (1999) 255–306; V. Sasson, “The Inscription of Achish, Governor of Eqron, and Philistine Dialect, Cult and Culture,” UF 29 (1997) 627–39.

170. J. Naveh, “Achish: Ikausu in the Light of the Ekron Dedication,” BASOR 310 (1998) 35–37; R. Byrne, “Philistine Semitics and Dynastic History at Ekron,” UF 34 (2002) 1–23.

171. A. Demsky, “The Name of the Goddess of Ekron: A New Reading,” JANES 25 (1997) 1–5; C. Schäfer-Lichtenberger, “The Goddess of Ekron and the Religious-Cultural Background of the Philistines,” IEJ 50 (2000) 82–91; S. Gitin, “Seventh-Century B.C.E. Cultic Elements at Ekron,” in Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990 (ed. A. Biran and J. Aviram; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993) 248–58.

172. B. Porten and A. Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, 1: Letters (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1986) 6, #A1.1. The letter invokes a blessing on Pharaoh by the Gods of heaven and earth and by Baʿal Shamayim, the head (“Great God”) of the pantheon of Ekron, who were probably guarantors of the treaty that Ekron had made with Egypt.

173. See T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 374–466. By the sixth century, when this story of Samson was written, Heracles had been assimilated to Melqart, the God of Tyre—both were travelers, benefactors of their people, immortal heroes; but the writer of the story, who also knew the Phoenician legends of Melqart (1 Kings 18), turned Heracles into a legendary hero of Dan, the tribe of Israel (whose hereditary land the Philistines had usurped), with affinities to the Greeks of Cilicia and Cyprus.

174. A. T. Reyes, Archaic Cyprus: A Study of the Textual and Archaeological Evidence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) 49–68.

175. J. N. Coldstream, “The Greek Geometric and Plain Archaic Imports,” in Excavations at Kition, IV: The Non-Cypriote Pottery (ed. V. Kaarageorghis; Nicosia: Department of Antiquities, 1981) 17–22; idem, “The Greek Geometric and Archaic Imports,” in La Nécropole d’Amathonte, Tombes 113–367, II: Céramiques non-Chypriotes (ed. V. Karageorghis, O. Picard, and C. Tytgat; Nicosia: Department of Antiquities, 1987) 21–31; A.-M. Collombier, “Céramiques grecque et échanges en Méditerranée orientale: Chypre et la côte syro-phénicienne (fin VIIIe–fin IVe siècles av. J.-C.,” in Phoenicia and the East Mediterranean in the First Millennium B.C. (ed. V. Karageorghis; Studia Phoenicia 5; Louvain: Peeters, 1987) 239–48; L. Wriedt Sørensen, “Traveling Pottery Connections between Cyprus, the Levant, and the Greek World in the Iron Age,” in Res Maritimae: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean from Prehistory to Late Antiquity (ed. S. Swiny, R. L. Hohlfelder, and H. Wylde Swiny; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997) 285–99.

176. P. M. Bikai, The Phoenician Pottery of Cyprus (Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation, 1987) 56–58. Amathus produced the most representative assemblage of seventh-century Phoenician pottery: idem, “The Phoenician Pottery,” in La Nécropole d’Amathonte, Tombes 113–367, II: Céramiques non-Chypriotes (ed. V. Karageorghis, O. Picard, and C. Tytgat; Nicosia: Department of Antiquities, 1987) 1–19, pls. 1–7.

177. A. Rathje and L. Wriedt Sørensen, “Ceramic Interconnections in the Mediterranean,” Actas 4, 4.1875–83.

178. A. Demetriou, “The Impact of the Late Geometric Style of Attica on the Free Field Style of Cyprus,” in Periplus: Festschrift für Hans-Günter Buchholz (ed. P. Åström and D. Sürenhagen; Jonsered: Åströms, 2000) 43–50, pls. 6–15; V. Karageorghis and J. Des Gagniers, La Céramique chypriote de Style Figuré: Âge du Fer (1050–500 av. J.-C.)—Texte (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche / Istituto per gli Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici, 1974).

179. G. Markoe, Phoenicians (London: British Mueum, 2000) 158–60.

180. C. Beer, “Eastern Influences and Style? A Reconsideration of Some Terracottas of Cypriote Manufacture,” in Cypriote Terracottas (ed. F. Vandenabeele and R. Laffineur; Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussel / Liège: Université de Liège, 1991) 77–85, pls. 16–18. V. Karageorghis, The Coroplastic Art of Ancient Cyprus (6 vols.; Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation, 1993–96).

181. J. H. Young and S. H. Young, Terra-cotta Figurines from Kourion in Cyprus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955) 218–19.

182. V. Karageorghis, “Three Iron Age Wall-Brackets from Cyprus,” RSF 3 (1975) 161–67, pls. 35–37. The oldest of the brackets, possibly from Kourion but of unknown provenance, features a nude girl standing beneath two carefully carved bull heads. It contrasts with the second which, in better Cypriot taste, represents two fully clothed women facing each other under a bull’s head. The third bracket portrays a man armed with a sword who carries an axe in his right hand and a bow in his left.

Idem, The Coroplastic Art of Ancient Cyprus, vol. 3: The Cypro-Archaic Period: Large and Medium Size Sculpture (Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation, 1993) 6, 36, 86.

J. H. Crouwel and V. Tatton-Brown, “Ridden Horses in Iron Age Cyprus,” RDAC (1988) Part 2, 77–85, pls. 24–26; N. A. Winter, “The Terracottas,” in The Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion: Excavations in the Archaic Precinct (ed. D. Buitron-Oliver; Jonsered: Åströms, 1996) 89–144, pls. 17–33.

183. V. Karageorghis, “The Terracottas,” in La nécropole d’Amathonte, tombes 113–367, III: 1. The Terracottas; 2. Statuettes, Sarcophages et stèles décorées (ed. V. Karageorghis, O. Picard, and C. Tytgat; Nicosia: Department of Antiquities, 1987) 1–52, pls. 1–41.

184. F. Vandenabeele, “The Terracottas of the Cypro-Geometric Period,” in Cypriote Terracottas (ed. F. Vandenabeele and R. Laffineur; Brussels: Vrije Universiteit / Liège: Université de Liège, 1991) 57–68; idem, “Phoenician Influence on the Cypro-Archaic Terracotta Production and Cypriot Influence Abroad,” in Acts of the International Archaeological Symposium “Cyprus between the Orient and the Occident” (ed. V. Karageorghis; Nicosia: Department of Antiquities, 1986) 351–60, pls. 30–31.

185. Idem, “Has Phoenician Influence Modified Cypriot Terracotta Production?” ESC, 266–71; A. M. Bisi, “Le rayonnement des terres cuites chypriotes au Levant aux premiers siècles de l’âge du Fer,” ESC, 256–65; H. Kyrieleis, “New Cypriot Finds from the Heraion of Samos,” in Cyprus and the East Mediterranean in the Iron Age (ed. V. Tatton-Brown; London: British Museum, 1989) 52–67.

186. J. Karageorghis, “La vie quotidienne à Chypre d’après les terres cuites d’époque géometrique et archaïque,” in Cypriote Terracottas (ed. F. Vandenabeele and R. Laffineur; Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussel / Liège: Université de Liège, 1991) 149–69, pl. 42.

187. PBSB. The bowls belonging to Period III (710–675 B.C.E.) are Cy 1 and Cy 2 from Idalion, Cy 4 from Amathus, Cy 6–8, 12, 14 from Kourion, Cy 15 from Tamassos, and Cy 17 of unknown provenance. The bowls from Period IV (675–625 B.C.E.) are Cy 5 and 20 from Salamis, Cy 11 from Kourion, Cy 18 from Amathus, Cy 21 from Palaepaphos, and Cy 13, 16, 19, 22, of unknown provenance. Cy 8 from Kourion (pp. 177–79, 256–59) was made for Akestor, the king of Paphos, by Timocrates, as its Cypro-Syllabic inscription attests. Cy 6 from Kourion (pp. 175–76, 252–53) is inscribed “Kyprothales” in Cypro-Syllabic script, the name of the artisan or the client.

188. A. T. Reyes, The Stamp-Seals of Ancient Cyprus (Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2001).

189. Ibid., 85–124.

190. Ibid., 126 #293 (Kition) and #294 (Kourion).

191. Ibid., 99–101 #179 (Idalion), ##180–81 (Kition), ##184–93 (provenance unknown).

192. V. Karageorghis, “Kition,” in Cyprus BC: 7000 Years of History (ed. V. Tatton-Brown; London: British Museum, 1979) 83–86, esp. p. 85 ##260–61.

193. O. Masson, “À propos de la découverte d’une inscription chypriote syllabique à Kition en 1970,” RDAC (1971) 49–52, pl. 21.

194. S. Hadjisavvas, “Recent Phoenician Discoveries on the Island of Cyprus,” Actas 4, 3.1023–33.

195. RES 1214; P. Lacau, “Une inscription phénicienne de Chypre,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale 2 (1902) 207–11, fig. 1; A. Caquot and O. Masson, “Deux inscriptions phéniciennes de Chypre,” Syria 45 (1968) 295–320, esp. pp. 295–302. The word translated “sculptor” (hqlʿ) could also mean “slinger,” from a homophonous root, and allude to the missiles that were the attributes of Reshep and that made this God the Semitic equivalent of Apollo, with whom he is identified at Idalion.

196. RPC 112–13, pl. 14:2; J. Teixidor, “The Phoenician Inscriptions of the Cesnola Collection,” MMJ 11 (1976) 55–70, esp. p. 68, #27; É. Puech, “Remarques sur quelques inscriptions phéniciennes de Chypre,” Sem 29 (1979) 19–43, esp. pp. 28–29.

197. RES 1209A–B; RPC 108–10, pl. 12; Puech, “Remarques sur quelques inscriptions phéniciennes de Chypre,” 30–31; E. Lipiński, “Le Baʿanaʾ d’Idalion,” Syria 63 (1986) 379–82; P. Bordreuil and E. Gubel, “Bulletin d’antiquités archéologiques du Levant inédites ou méconnues,” Syria 63 (1986) 417–35, esp. p. 421, fig. 5A–B.

198. P. Flourentzos, “Two Tombs from the Late Cypro-Archaic Necropolis of Kornos,” RDAC (1987) 141–47, pls. 44–49. The tombs barely antedate the end of the seventh century, and only one of them (Tomb 5, pp. 141–44) contained a bit of Phoenician Red Slip, Black-on-Red, and Black Slip pottery.

O. Masson, “Kypriaka,” BCH 92 (1968) part 2, 375–409, pls. 21–22, esp. pp. 380–86; idem, “Chypriotes et Phéniciens à Golgoi de Chypre,” Sem 39 (1990) 43–46, pls. 43–44.

RPC 113–14, pl. 14:3–4; Puech, “Remarques sur quelques inscriptions phéniciennes de Chypre,” 27. The inscription is “Shubbaʿal” (šbʿl), the personal name of the merchant whose products were contained in the jar and who may or may not have been a resident of Golgoi.

199. RPC 104–7, pl. 8:2.

200. A. Christodoulou, “A Cypro-Archaic I Tomb-Group from Maroni,” RDAC (1972) 156–60.

201. M. Hadjicosti, “The Family Tomb of a Warrior of the Cypro-Archaic I Period at Mari,” RDAC (1997) 251–66, pls. 49–54.

202. M. Sznycer, “Une nouvelle inscription phénicienne d’Amathonte (Chypre),” Sem 49 (1999) 195–97.

203. RPC 94–95, pl. 9:1.

204. W. M. Davis, “Ancient Naukratis and the Cypriotes in Egypt,” Göttinger Miszellen 35 (1979) 13–23; idem, “The Cypriotes at Naucratis,” Göttinger Miszellen 41 (1980) 7–19.

205. J. Boardman, Excavations in Chios 1952–1955: Greek Emporio (London: British School of Archaeology at Athens / Thames & Hudson, 1967) 193; G. Schmidt, Kyprische Bildwerke aus dem Heraion von Samos (Samos VII) (Bonn: Habelt, 1968); H. Kyrieleis, “New Cypriot Finds from the Heraion of Samos,” in Cyprus and the East Mediterranean in the Iron Age (ed. V. Tatton-Brown; London: British Museum, 1989) 52–67; L. Wriedt Sørensen, “Cypriote Terracottas from Lindos in the Light of New Discoveries,” in Cypriote Terracottas (ed. F. Vandenabeele and R. Laffineur; Brussels: Vrije Universiteit / Liège: Université de Liège, 1991) 225–40, pls. 64–69.

206. J. N. Coldstream, “The Phoenicians of Ialysos,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London 16 (1969) 1–8, pls. 1–3; A. Peserico, Le brocche “a fungo” fenicie nel Mediterraneo: Tipologia e cronologia (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1996) 114; idem, “Il ruolo di Rodi e dell’area egea nell’espansione fenicia verso Occidente: La documentazione ceramica,” in Patavina Orientalia Selecta (ed. E. Rova; Padua: Sargon, 2000) 139–64; W. Culican, “Almuñécar, Assur and Phoenician Penetration of the Western Mediterranean,” Levant 2 (1970) 28–36, pls. 25–27; repr. in idem, Opera Selecta: From Tyre to Tartessos (Gothenburg: Åströms, 1986) 673–84.

207. L. Schofield, “The Influence of Eastern Religions on the Iconography of Ivory and Bone Objects in the Kameiros Well,” in Ivory in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic Period (ed. J. L. Fitton; London: British Museum, 1992) 173–84.

208. G. Shipley, A History of Samos, 800–188 BC (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) 42–46; I. Strøm, “Evidence from the Sanctuaries,” in Greece between East and West: 10th–8th Centuries BC (ed. G. Kopcke and I. Tokumaru; Mainz: von Zabern, 1992) 46–60, pls. 5e–7; H. Kyrieleis, “The Heraion at Samos,” in Greek Sanctuaries: New Approaches (ed. N. Marinatos and R. Hägg; London: Routledge, 1993) 125–53.

209. A. Jackson, “Sea-Raiding in Archaic Greece with Special Attention to Samos,” The Sea in Antiquity (ed. G. J. Oliver et al.; BAR International Series 899; Oxford: Hedges, 2000) 133–49; J. Curtis, “Mesopotamian Bronzes from Greek Sites: The Workshops of Origin,” Iraq 56 (1994) 1–25.

210. E. Guralnick, “Greece and the Near East: Art and Archaeology,” in Daidalikon: Studies in Memory of Raymond V. Schoder, S.J. (ed. R. F. Sutton Jr.; Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1989) 151–76; idem, “East to West: Near Eastern Artifacts from Greek Sites,” in La circulation des biens, des personnes et des idées dans le Proche-Orient Ancien (ed. D. Charpin and F. Joannès; Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1992) 327–40; idem, “A Group of Near Eastern Bronzes from Olympia,” AJA 108 (2004) 187–222.

211. S. Dalley and A. T. Reyes, “Mesopotamian Contact and Influence in the Greek World: 1. To the Persian Conquest,” in The Legacy of Mesopotamia (ed. S. Dalley; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 85–106.

212. H. W. Catling, “New Light on Knossos in the 8th and 7th Centruries B.C.,” Annuario della Scuola Archeologia di Atene 61 (1983) 31–43.

213. C. Baurain, “Le rôle de Chypre dans la fondation de Carthage,” Carthago, 15–27.

214. D. B. Harden, The Phoenicians (Ancient Peoples and Places 26; New York: Praeger, 1962) 66–75; S. Lancel, “Les fouilles de la mission archéologique française à Carthage et le problème de Byrsa,” Carthago, 61–89; R. Rakob, “La Carthage archaïque,” HAAN, 31–43; H. G. Niemeyer, “A la recherche de la Carthage archaïque: Premiers résultats des fouilles de l’Université de Hambourg en 1986 et 1987,” ibid., 45–52.

215. Lancel, “Les fouilles de la mission archéologique française à Carthage et le problème de Byrsa.”

216. Rakob, “La Carthage archaïque.”

217. Harden, The Phoenicians, 30–35.

218. A. M. Bisi, “Chypre et les premiers temps de Carthage,” Carthago, 29–41, esp. pp. 34–35.

219. C. Picard, “Les navigations de Carthage vers l’Ouest: Carthage et le pays de Tarsis aux VIIIe–VIe siècles,” PhWest, 167–73; A. Peserico, Die offenen Formen der Red Slip Ware aus Karthago: Untersuchungen zur phönizischen Keramik im westlichen Mittelmeerraum (Hamburger Werkstattreihe zur Archäologie 5; Munster: LIT Verlag, 2002).

220. M. Botto, “Indagini archeometriche sulla ceramica fenicia e punica del Mediteraneo centro-occidentale,” RSF 29 (2001) 159–81, esp. p. 172.

221. C. Briese, “Die Chapelle Cintas: Das Gründungsdepot Karthagos oder eine Bestattung der Gründergeneration?” ASKaW, 419–52, pls. 35–37.

222. R. F. Docter, “Carthage and the Tyrrhenian in the 8th and 7th Centuries B.C.: Central Italian Transport Amphorae and Fine Wares Found under the Decumanus Maximus,” Actas 4, 1.329–38.

223. M. Fantar, “L’impact de la présence phénicienne et la fondation de Carthage en Mediterranée occidentale,” Carthago, 3–14; Y. B. Tsirkin, “The Economy of Carthage,” ibid., 125–35.

224. Bisi, “Chypre et les premiers temps de Carthage.”

225. M. Gras, P. Rouillard, and J. Teixidor, “The Phoenicians and Death,” Berytus 39 (1991) 127–76, esp. pp. 141–45; M. Gras and P. Duboeuf, “L’architecture de la tombe de Yadaʿmilk à Carthage: Essai de Restitution,” in Da Pyrgi a Mozia: Studi sull’archeologia nel Mediterranea in Memoria di Antonia Ciasca (ed. M. G. Amadasi Guzzo, M. Liverani, and P. Matthiae; Vicino Oriente: Quaderno 3/1; Rome: Università degli Studi di Roma, “La Sapienza,” 2002) 253–66.

226. A. M. Bisi, “Les sources syro-palestiniennes et chypriotes de l’art punique (à propos de quelques objets de Carthage),” Antiquités Africaines 14 (1979) 17–35.

227. B. Quillard, Bijoux Carthaginois, I: Les Colliers; II: Porte-Amulettes, Sceaux-Pendentifs, Pendants, Bouiles, Anneaux et Bagues (d’après les collections du Musée National du Bardo et du Musée National de Carthage) (Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut Supérieur d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, 1987); C. Picard, “L’essor de Carthage aux VIIe et Vie siècles,” Carthago, 43–50.

228. A. M. Bisi, “Une figurine phénicienne trouvée a Carthage et quelques monuments apparentés,” Mélanges de Carthage: Offerts à Charles Saumagne, Louis Poinssot, Maurice Pinard (Cahiers de Byrsa 10; Paris: Geuthner, 1964–65) 43–53, pls. 1–5.

229. C. Baurain, “Le rôle d’Chypre dans la Fondation de Carthage,’’ Carthago, 15–27, esp. pp. 18–22.

230. P. Bartoloni, “Apunti sulla ceramica fenicia tra Oriente e occidente dall’VIII al VI sec. a.C.,” Transeu 12 (1996) 85–95.

231. A. Peserico, Le brocche “a fungo” fenicie nel Mediterraneo: Tipologia e cronologia (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1996) 161.

232. A. Ciasca, “Note sul repertorio ceramico fenicio di Occidente,” Dialoghi di Archeologia 5/2 (1987) 7–12.

233. See, for instance, F. Lo Schiavo, “Le fibule della Sardegna,” Studi Etruschi 46 (1978) 25–46.

234. P. Bartoloni, “Anfore fenicie e ceramiche etrusche in Sardegna,” in Il commercio etrusco arcaico: Atti dell’Incontro di Studio, 5–7 dicembre 1983 (ed. M. Cristofani et al.; Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1985) 103–18; C. Tronchetti, “La Sardegna e gli Etruschi,” Mediterranean Archaeology 1 (1988) 66–82.

235. M. Gras, Trafics tyrrhéniens archaïques (Bibliothèques des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 258; Rome: École Française de Rome, 1985) 135–44.

236. M. Køllund, “Sea and Sardinia,” HBA 19/20 (1992–1993) 201–14.

237. L. Bonfante, “The Etruscan Connection,” in Studies in Sardinian Archaeology, II: Sardinia in the Mediterranean (ed. M. S. Balmuth; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986) 73–83.

238. M. Botto, “Anfore fenicie dai contesti indigeni del Latium Vetus nel periodo orientalizzante,” RSF 21 (1993) Supplement, 16–27, pls. 2–3; E. Acquaro, “Los Fenicios y Púnicos en Cerdeña,” Actas 4, 1.71–81.

239. P. Bernardini, “Fenomeni di interazione tra Fenici e indigeni in Sardegna,” in Fenicios e Indígenas en el Mediterráneo y Occidenti: Modelos e Interacción (ed. D. Ruiz Mata; Cádiz: University of Cádiz, 1998) 39–98, esp. p. 48.

240. PFPS 57–61.

241. E. Acquaro, “Tharrica 1988–1991,” Actes 3, 1.16–19; P. van Dommelen, “Some Reflections on Urbanization in a Colonial Context: West Central Sardinia in the 7th to 5th Centuries B.C.,” in Urbanization in the Mediterranean in the 9th to 6th Centuries B.C. (ed. H. Damgaard Andersen et al.; Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen—Museum Tusculanum, 1998) 243–78.

242. L. Vagnetti, “La ‘nuotatrice’ di Tharros,” RSF 21 (1993) 29–33.

243. S. Moscati, “Centri artigianali fenici in Italia,” RSF 1 (1973) 37–52, pls. 12–31, esp. pp. 50–51, pls. 29b, 31b.

244. Idem and M. L. Uberti, Testimonianze fenicio-puniche a Oristano (ANLM 8/31, fasc. 1; Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1988) 6–61, pls. 1–26, esp. pp. 43–52.

245. Moscati, “Centri artigianali fenici I Italia,” 49, pl. 29a.

246. F. G. Fedele, “Tharros: Anthropology of the Tophet and Paleoecology of a Punic Town,” Atti 1, 3.637–50.

247. R. D. Barnett and C. Mendelson, Tharros: A Catalogue of Material in the British Museum from Phoenician and Other Tombs at Tharros, Sardinia (London: British Museum, 1987).

248. S. Moscati, I Gioielli di Tharros: Origini, Caratteri, Confronti (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1988).

249. R. D. Barnett, “Phoenician and Punic Arts and Handicrafts: Some Reflections and Notes,” Atti 1, 1.19–26, pls. 1–6, esp. pp. 22–23. S. Moscati, “Découvertes phéniciennes à Tharros,” CRAIBL (1987) 483–503, esp. p. 483.

250. P. Bartoloni, “Le relazioni tra Cartagine e la Sardegna nei secoli VII e VI a.C.,” EVO 10 (1987) 79–86, esp. p. 80; PFPS 50–56.

251. S. Moscati, Fenici e Greci in Sardegna (ANLR 3/40, fasc. 7–12; Rome, 1985) 265–71; P. Bernardini, “Fenomeni di interazione tra Fenici e indigeni in Sardegna,” in Fenicios e Indígenas en el Mediterráneo y Occidenti: Modelos e Interacción (ed. D. Ruiz Mata; Cádiz: University of Cádiz, 1998) 39–98, esp. p. 47.

252. C. Tronchetti, “Sardaigne,” CPPMR, 712–42, esp. p. 721.

253. P. Bernardini, “Lo scavo nell’area del Cronicario di S. Antioco e le origini della presenza fenicia a Sulci,” Riti funerari e di olocausto nella Sardegna fenicia e punica: Atti dell’incontro di studio Sant’Antioco, 3–4 ottobre, 1986 (Cagliari: Edizioni della torre, 1990) 135–49.

254. Idem, “Un insediamento fenicio a Sulci nella seconda metà dell’VIII sec. a.C.,” Atti 2, 2.663–73, esp. pp. 668–69.

255. P. Bartoloni, “Urne cinerarie arcaiche a Sulcis,” RSF 16 (1988) 165–79; idem, “Riti funerari fenici e punici nel Sulcis,” Riti funerari e di olocausto nella Sardegna fenicia e punica: Atti dell’incontro di studio Sant’Antioco, 3–4 ottobre, 1986 (Cagliari: Edizioni della torre, 1990) 67–81, esp. p. 75; idem, “Ceramica fenicia tra Oriente e Occidente,” Atti 2, 2.641–53, esp. pp. 648, 651.

256. Idem, Orizzonti commerciali sulcitani tra l’VIII e il VII sec. a.C. (ANLR 8/41, fasc. 7–12; Rome, 1987) 219–26, esp. pp. 221–24; idem, “S. Antioco: Area del Cronicario (campagne di scavo 1983–1986): I recipiente chiusi d’uso domestico e commerciale,” RSF 18 (1990) 37–79, pls. 5–6.

257. P. Bernardini, “S. Antioco: Area del Cronicario (campagne di scavo 1983–1986): La ceramica fenicia—forme aperte,” RSF 18 (1990) 81–98.

258. A. Peserico, Le broche “a fungo” fenicie nel Mediterraneo: Tipologia e cronologia (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1996) 66, 92, 135, 225–26.

259. C. Briese and R. Docter, “Der phönizische Skyphos: Adaption einer griechischen Trinkschale,” MM 33 (1992) 25–69.

260. A. Peserico, “Phönizisches Tafelgeschirr und regionale Keramik-Produktion im westlichen Mittelmeerraum,” ASKaW, 375–87.

261. G. Hölbl, Ägyptisches Kulturgut im phönikischen und punischen Sardinien I–II (Leiden: Brill, 1986) 54–58 and passim. There are fewer of these Egyptian or Egyptianizing items at Sulcis than there are at Tharros. Some are seventh century, but the majority are later and so register the influence of Carthage and North Africa in southern Sardinia.

S. Moscati, Stele sulcitane con animale passante (ANLR 8/36, fasc. 1–2; Rome, 1982) 3–8, pls. 1–13; idem, Le stele di Sulcis: Caratteri e confronti (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricereche, 1986); idem and S. F. Bondì, Italia Punica (Milan: Rusconi, 1986) 240–62; M. L. Uberti, “La collezione punica Don Armeni (Sulcis),” OrAnt 10 (1971) 277–312, pls. 39–47. The majority of steles postdate the seventh century, and steles with an animal passant (usually a lamb or sheep) date to the third and second centuries B.C.E.

262. G. Pesce, “Due opere di arte fenicia in Sardegna,” OrAnt 2 (1963) 247–56, pls. 41–45, esp. pp. 247–53, pls. 41–42.

263. E. Acquaro, “Appunti su una stele da Sulcis,” OrAnt 8 (1969) 69–72, pl. 1.

264. WSS 273 #733; S. Moscati, L’arte della Sardegna punica (Milan: Jaca Book, 1986) pl. 71; idem, ed., The Phoenicians (New York; Abbeville, 1988) 528.

265. F. Barreca, “Nuove iscrizioni fenicie da Sulcis,” OrAnt 4 (1965) 53–57, pls. 1–2, esp.pp. 55–57, pl. 2.

266. P. Bartoloni and G. Garbini, “Una coppa d’argento con iscrizione punica da Sulcis,” RSF 27 (1999) 79–91, pl. 5.

267. P. Bartoloni, “L’insediamento di Monte Sirai nel quadro della Sardegna fenicia e punica,” Actes 3, 1.99–108; C. Perra, “Monte Sirai: Gli scavi nell’abitato 1996–1998,” RSF 29 (2001) 121–30.

268. A. Peserico, “La ceramica fenicia: Le forme aperte,” RSF 22 (1994) 117–44. On Bitia, see S. Moscati and S. F. Bondì, Italia Punica (Milan: Rusconi, 1986) 226–39. On Villasimius, see L. A. Marras, “I Fenici nel golfo di Cagliari: Cuccureddus di Villasimius,” Atti 2, 3.1039–48.

269. P. Bartoloni, “Contributo alla cronologia delle necropolis fenicie e puniche di Sardegna,” RSF 9 (1981) Supplement, 13–29, figs. 1–3. See also M. Botto, “Nora e il suo territorio: Resoconto preliminare dell’attività di recognizione degli anni 1992–1995,” Actas 4, 3.1269–76.

270. Pesce, “Due opera di arte fenicia in Sardegna,” 253–56, pls. 43–45.

271. Bartoloni, “Le relazioni tra Cartagine e la Sardegna nei secoli VII e VI a.C.,” 80.

272. See, for example C. Del Vais, “Nota preliminare sulla tipologia dei vasi “à chardon” da Tharros,” RSF 22 (1994) 237–41.

273. J. Maluquer de Motes, “La dualidad commercial fenicia y griega en Occidente,” FPI, 2.203–10; U. Morgenroth, “Southern Iberia and the Mediterranean Trade-Routes,” OJA 18 (1999) 395–400.

274. C. R. Whittaker, “The Western Phoenicians: Colonisation and Assimilation,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 20 (1974) 58–79; C. G. Wagner and J. Alvar, “Fenicios en Occidente: La colonización agrícola,” RSF 17 (1989) 61–102.

275. M. E. Aubet Semmler, “The Phoenician Impact on Tartessos: Spheres of Interaction,” Bierling, 225–40.

276. M. Almagro-Gorbea, “El mundo orientalizante en la Península Ibérica,” Atti 2, 2.573–99.

277. H. Schubart, “Phönizische Niederlassungen an der ibrischen Südküste,” PhWest, 207–34.

278. F. Ben Abed, “Les Phéniciens dans la péninsule ibérique: Une nouvelle lecture des données archéologiques,” Actes 3, 1.109–22; R. González, F. Barrionuevo, and L. Aguilar, “Presencia fenicia en el territorio tartésico de los esteros del Gualdalquivir,” Actas 4, 2.785–94.

279. J. M. Martín Ruiz, “Ceramicas a mano en los yacimientos fenicios de Andalucía,” Actas 4, 4.1625–30.

280. M. E. Aubet Semmler, “Zur Problematik des orientalisierenden Horizontes auf der iberischen Halbinsel,” PhWest, 309–35; C. G. Wagner and J. Alvar, “Fenicios en Occidente: La colonización agrícola,” RSF 17 (1989) 61–102, esp. pp. 92–93.

281. M. Belén et al., “Presencia e influencia fenicia en Carmona (Sevilla),” Actas 4, 4.1747–61.

282. F. Chaves et al., “El complejo sacrificial de Montemolín,” Actas 4, 2.573–81.

283. W. Culican, “Phoenician Incense Stands,” in Oriental Studies Presented to Benedikt S. J. Isserlin (ed. R. Y. Ebeid and M. J. L. Young; Leiden: Brill, 1980) 85–101, pls. 1–4; F. J. Jiménez Ávila, “Timiaterios ‘chipriotas’ de bronce: Centros de producción occidentales,” Actas 4, 4.1581–94.

284. J. Mancebo Dávalos, “Análisis de los objetos metálicos en el período orientalizante y su conexión con el mundo fenicio: Los cuchillos afalcatados,” Actas 4, 4.1825–34.

285. M. Almagro Basch, “Über einen Typus iberischer Bronze-Exvotos orientalisichen Ursprungs,” MM 20 (11979) 133–83, pls. 13–26.

286. Ibid., 136–40, pls. 13–14a; 140–42, pl. 16a–b.

287. B. B. Shefton, “Greeks and Greek Imports in the South of the Iberian Peninsula: The Archaeological Evidence,” PhWest, 337–70, esp. p. 342.

288. M. Pellicer Catalán, “Huelva Tartesia y Fenicia,” RSF 24 (1996) 119–40.

289. P. Rufete Tomico, “Die phönizische Roteware aus Huelva,” MM 30 (1989) 118–34.

290. J. A. Barceló et al., “Análisis estadístico de la variabilidad de los platos fenicios en el sur de la península ibérica,” Actas 4, 4.1459–66. The change in diet may have included various fish dishes: in contemporary Judah, fish was a growing part of the national diet and had to be included in a revision of the dietary laws (Deut 14:9–10).

291. P. Cabrera, “Greek Trade in Iberia: The Extent of Interaction,” OJA 17 (1998) 191–206.

292. M. E. Aubet Semmler, “Some Questions Regarding the Tartessian Orientalizing Period,” Bierling, 199–224, esp. pp. 206–10.

293. E. Galán Domingo, “Las estelas del Suroeste entre el Atlántico y el Mediterraneo,” Actas 4, 4.1789–97; A. J. Domínguez, “New Perspectives on the Greek Presence in the Iberian Peninsula,” in The Hellenic Diaspora, from Antiquity to Modern Times, Volume I: From Antiquity to 1453 (ed. J. M. Forsey; Amsterdam: Gieben, 1991) 109–61, esp. pp. 112–13.

294. J. P. Garrido et al., “Sobre las inhumaciones de la necrópolis orientalizante de la Joya, Huelva: Problematica y perspectivas,” Actas 4, 4.1805–10.

295. D. Ruiz Mata, “El Poblado metalúrgico de época tartésica de San Bartolomé (Almonte, Huelva),” MM 22 (1981) 150–70.

296. M. Belén, “Importaciones fenicias en Andalucia Occidental,” FPI, 2.263–78.

297. I. Gamer-Wallert, “Zwei Statuetten syro-ägyptischer Gottheiten von der ‘Barra de Huelva,’’’ MM 23 (1982) 46–61, pls. 1–25.

298. M. E. Aubet Semmler, “Phoenician Trade in the West: Balance and Perspectives,” Bierling, 97–112.

299. J. L. Escacena, “Gadir,” FPI, 1.39–52, pls. 1–14. M. L. Lavado et al., “El Asentamiento Antiguo de Cádiz a través de las últimas excavaciones arqueológicas,” Actas 4, 2.869–79. C. Carballo Torres, “Objetos de adornos personales fenicios en materials no metálicos,” Actas 4, 4.1467–73.

300. A. Perea Caveda, “Phoenician Gold in the Western Mediterranean: Cádiz, Tharros and Carthage,” in Encounters and Transformations: The Archaeology of Iberia in Transition (ed. M. S. Balmuth, A. Gilman, and L. Prados-Torreira; Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology 7; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997) 135–40.

301. Ruiz Mata, “El poblado metalúrgica de época Tartéssica de San Bartolomé (Almonte, Huelva).”

302. Idem, “The Beginnings of the Phoenician Presence in Southwestern Andalusia—with Findings from the Excavations at Cabezo de San Pedro (Huelva), San Bartolomé (Almonte, Huelva), Castillo de Doña Blanca (Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz) and El Carambolo (Camas, Sevilla),” Bierling, 263–98, esp. pp. 274–86.

303. Idem, “Las cerámicas fenícias del Castillo de Doña Blanca (Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz),” FPI, 1.241–63.

304. Idem, “The Ancient Phoenicians of the 8th and 7th Centuries B.C. in the Bay of Cádiz: State of the Research,” Bierling, 155–98, esp. pp. 184–90.

305. J.-L. Cunchillos, “Las inscripciones Fenicias del Tell de Doña Blanca (IV),” Sefarad 52 (1992) 75–83, esp. pp. 81–83.

306. Idem, “Las inscripciones Fenicias del Tell de Doña Blanca (II),” Sefarad 51 (1991) 13–22.

307. Idem, “Las inscripciones Fenicias del Tell de Doña Blanca (IV),” 75–78 (ʾb[y]) and pp. 78–80 (yḥ[mlk]).

308. Idem, “Inscripciones Fenicias del Tell de Doña Blanca (V),” Sefarad 53 (1993) 17–24; J. Naveh, “The Phoenician Hundred-Sign,” RSF 19 (1991) 139–44.

309. M. Pellicer Catalán, “La colonización fenicia en Portugal y la orientalización de la Península Ibérica,” ASKaW, 531–38; A. M. Arruda, Los Fenicios en Portugal: Fenicios y mundo indígena en el centro y sur de Portugal (siglos VIII–VI a.C.) (Cuadernos de Arqueología Mediterránea 5–6, 1999–2000; Barcelona: Universidad Pompeu Fabra—Laboratorio de Arqueología, 2002); J. L. Cardoso, “Fenícios e Indígenas em Rocha Branca, Abul, Alcácer do Sal, Almaraz e Santarém: Estudio comparado dos mamíferos,” Actas 4, 1.319–27.

310. F. Mayet, C. Tavares, and Y. Makaroun, “L’établissement phénicien d’Abul (Portugal),” CRAIBL (1994) 171–88.

311. Cardoso, “Fenícios e Indígenas em Rocha Branca, Abul, Alcácer do Sal, Almaraz e Santarém: Estudio Comparado dos Mamíferos”; A. M. Cavaleiro Paixão, “Ein neues Grab mit Skarabäus in der eisenzeitlichen Nekropole Olival do Senhor dos Mártires,” MM 22 (1981) 229–35, pl. 16; I. Gamer-Wallert, “Der neue Skarabäus aus Alcácer do Sal,” MM 23 (1982) 96–100, pl. 27.

312. C. G. Wagner and J. Alvar, “Fenicios en Occidente: La Colonización Agrícola,” RSF 17 (1989) 61–102; J.-P. Morel, “Quelques remarques sur l’économie phénico-punique dans ses aspects agraires,” Actas 4, 1.411–23.

313. A. Recio Ruiz, “Vestigios materiales cerámicas de ascendencia fenicio-púnica en la provincia de Málaga,” MM 34 (1993) 127–41; J. Gran Aymerich, ed., Málaga phénicienne et punique: Recherches franco-espagnoles 1981–1988 (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1991).

314. A. Blanco, “Notas de arqueología Andaluza,” Zephyrus 11 (1960) 151–63, pls. 1–6, esp. pp. 151–53.

315. J.-M. J. Gran Aymerich, “La scène figurée sur l’ivoire de Malaga et l’imagerie phénicienne,” Sem 38 (1990) 145–53; idem, “Málaga, fenicia y punica,” FPI, 1.127–47, esp. p. 141, fig. 4.1.

316. M. E. Aubet Semmler, “Die phönizische Niederlassung vom Cerro del Villar (Guadalhorce, Málaga): Die Ausgrabungen von 1986–1989,” MM 31 (1990) 29–51, pls. 9–22; idem, “Notas sobre las colonias del sur de España y su función en el marco territorial: El ejemplo del Cerro del Villar (Málaga),” Atti 2, 2.617–26; idem, “A Phoenician Market Place in Southern Spain,” in Ana šadî labnāni lū allik. Beiträge zu altorientalischen und mittelmeerischen Kulturen: Festschrift für Wolfgang Röllig (ed. B. Pongratz-Leisten, H. Kühne, and P. Xella; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997) 11–22.

317. Idem, “Die phönizische Niederlassung vom Cerro del Villar (Guadalhorce, Málaga): Die Ausgrabungen von 1986–1989.”

318. H. G. Niemeyer, “Orient im Okzident: Die Phöniker in Spanien. Ergebnisse der Gradungen in der archäologischen Zone von Torre del Mar (Málaga),” MDOG 104 (1972) 5–44; idem, “El Yacimento Fenicio de Toscanos: Urbanistica y función,” AuOr 3 (1985) 109–26.

319. M. E. Aubet Semmler, “Los Fenicios en España: Estado de la Cuestión y Perspectivas,” AuOr 3 (1985) 9–30, pls. 1–9, esp. pp. 20–21; Pellicer Catalán, “Huelva Tartesia y Fenicia,” 125.

320. M. E. Aubet Semmler, “Notes on the Economy of the Phoenician Settlements in Southern Spain,” Bierling 79–95, esp. p. 90.

321. B. B. Shefton, “Greeks and Greek Imports in the South of the Iberian Peninsula: The Archaeological Evidence,” PhWest, 337–70, esp. pp. 338–39.

322. P. Rouillard, “Phéniciens et Grecs à Toscanos: Note sur quelques vases d’inspiration gréco-géométrique de Toscanos (1967),” MM 31 (1990) 178–85, pls. 20–21; C. Briese and R. Docter, “Der phönizische Skyphos: Adaption einer griechischen Trinkschale,” MM 33 (1992) 25–69, esp. pp. 25, 38.

323. Shefton, “Greeks and Greek Imports in the South of the Iberian Peninsula: The Archaeological Evidence,” 345–50; J. Boardman, “Copies of Pottery: By and for Whom?” in Greek Identity in the Western Mediterranean: Papers in Honour of Brian Shefton (ed. K. Lomas; Mnemosyne Supplement 86; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 149–62.

324. Niemeyer, “Orient im Okzident: Die Phöniker in Spanien,” 13–20, 29–35. R. F. Docter, “Karthagische Amphoren aus Toscanos,” MM 35 (1994) 123–39.

325. T. Júdice Gamito, “Greeks and Phoenicians in Southwest Iberia—Who Were the First? Aspects of Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence,” in The Hellenic Diaspora—from Antiquity to Modern Times, I: From Antiquity to 1453 (ed. J. M. Fossey; Amsterdam: Gieben, 1991) 81–108; J. de Hoz, “The Greek Man in the Iberian Street: Non-Colonial Greek Identity in Spain and Southern France,” in Greek Identity in the Western Mediterranean: Papers in Honour of Brian Shefton (ed. K. Lomas; Mnemosyne Supplement 86; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 411–27.

326. D. Marzoli, “Anforas púnicas de Morro de Mezquitilla (Málaga),” Actas 4, 4.1631–44, pp. 1631–32.

327. M. L. Ramos Sainz, “Los ritos de incineración e inhumación en las necrópolis hispanas (ss. VIII–II a.C.),” Actas 4, 4.1693–96.

W. Culican, “Almuñécar, Assur and Phoenician Penetration of the Western Mediterranean,” Levant 2 (1970) 28–36, pls. 25–27; repr. in idem, Opera Selecta: From Tyre to Tartessos (Gothenburg: Åströms, 1986) 673–84; M. Pellicer Catalán, “Sexi fenicia y púnica,” FPI, 1.85–107; F. Molina Fajardo, “Almuñécar a la luz de los nuevos hallazgos fenicios,” ibid., 193–226; idem and A. Bannour, “Almuñécar a la luz de los nuevos hallazgos fenicios,” Actas 4, 4.1645–63.

328. H. G. Niemeyer, “The Trayamar Medallion Reconsidered,” in Oriental Studies Presented to Benedikt S. J. Isserlin (ed. R. Y. Edied and M. J. L. Young; Leiden: Brill, 1980) 108–13; M. Blech, “Goldschmuck aus Almuñécar,” MM 27 (1986) 151–67, pl. 19.

329. A. Suárez et al., “Abdera: Una colonia fenicia en el Sureste de la Península Ibérica,” MM 30 (1989) 135–50, pls. 11–12; I. Negueruela et al., “Seventh-Century BC Phoenician Vessel Discovered at Playa de la Isla, Mazarron, Spain,” IJNA 24 (1995) 189–97; idem, “Descubrimiento de dos barcos fenicios en Mazarrón (Murcia), Actas 4, 4.1671–79; N. Easterbrook, C. More, and R. Penfold, eds., Master Seafarers: The Phoenicians and the Greeks (London: Periplus, 2003) 40–49.

330. M. Barthélemy, “El comercio fluvial fenicio en la península ibérica,” Actas 4, 1.291–97.

331. A. González Prats and A. García Menárguez, “El conjunto fenicio de la desembocadura del río Segura (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante),” Actas 4, 4.1527–37. A. M. Poveda Navarro, “Penetración cultural fenicia en el territorio indígena del valle septentrional del Vinalopó (Alicante),” ibid., 1863–74.

332. A. González Prats, “La Fonteta—El asentamiento fenicio de la desembocadura del Río Seguar (Guardamar, Alicante, España): Resultatos de la excavaciones de 1996–1997,” RSF 26 (1998) 191–228, pls. 2–9; idem, A. García Menárguez and E. Ruiz Segura, “La Fonteta: A Phoenician City in the Far West,” Bierling, 113–25; A. J. Sánchez Pérez and R. C. Alonso de la Cruz, “La ciudad fenicia de Herna (Guardamar del Segura, Alicante),” RSF 27 (1999) 127–31; A. González Prats, “Las importaciones y la presencia fenicias en la Sierra de Crevillente (Alicante),” FPI, 2.279–302.

333. J. Elayi, A. González Prats, and E. Ruiz Segura, “Une lampe avec inscription phénicienne de La Fonteta (Guardamar, Alicante),” RSF 26 (1998) 229–42, pls. 10–14.

334. Aubet Semmler, “Phoenician Trade in the West: Balance and Perspectives,” 106.

335. M. Almagro-Gorbea, “Pozo Moro y el influjo fenicio en el periodo orientalizante de la Península Ibérica,” RSF 10 (1982) 231–72, pls. 50–56; J. M. Blázquez, “La colonización fenicia en la alta Andalucia (Oretania), s. VIII–VI a.C.,” RSF 14 (1986) 53–80, pls. 1–4; W. Trillmich, “Early Iberian Sculpture and ‘Phocaean Colonization,’” in Greek Colonists and Native Populations: Proceedings of the First Australian Congress of Classical Archaeology held in Honour of Emeritus Professor A. D. Trendall, Sydney, 9–14 July 1985 (ed. J.-P. Descoeudres; Oxford: Clarendon, 1990) 607–11.

336. A. Ribera and A. Fernández, “Las ánforas del mundo fenicio-púnco en el País Valenciano,” Actas 4, 4.1699–1711.

337. D. Asensio et al., “Las cerámicas fenicias y de tipo fenicio del yacimiento del Barranc de Gàfolo (Ginestar, Ribera d’Ebre, Tarragona),” Actas 4, 4.1733–45.

338. O. Arteaga, J. Padró, and E. Sanmartí, “La expansion fenicia por las costas de Cataluña y del Languedoc,” FPI, 2.303–14.

339. M. Mascort, J. Sanmartí, and J. Santacana, “Aldovesta: Les bases d’un modèle commercial dans le cadre de l’expansion phénicienne au nord-est de la péninsule ibérique,” Atti 2, 3.1073–79.

340. C. Gómez Bellard, “Die Phönizier auf Ibiza,” MM 34 (1993) 83–107; idem, “Baléares,” CPPMR, 762–75.

341. M. P. San Nicolás Pedraz, “Interpretación de los sanctuaries fenicios y púnicos de Ibiza,” Actas 4, 2.675–89.

342. J. Elayi and A. Planas Palau, Les pointes de flèches en bronze d’Ibiza dans le cadre de la colonisation phénico-punique (Transeuphratène Supplement 2; Paris: Gabalda, 1995). There are 139 arrowheads belonging to 31 different types. Types I, VIII, and XVI belong to the seventh century: there are 32 of type VIII.

343. A. M. Bisi, “Sull’iconografia di due terrecotte puniche di Ibiza,” Studi Magrebini 7 (1975) 19–36, pl. 1; idem, “Iconografie fenicio-cipriote nella coroplastica punica (a proposito di alcune terrecotte di Ibiza),” Studi Magribini 8 (1976) 25–38, pls. 1–4; idem, “La coroplastica fenicia d’Occidente (con particolare riguardo a quella ibicena),” FPI, 1.285–94; M. C. D’Angelo, “Artigianato eburneo da Ibiza: Las sfinge,” Actas 4, 4.1511–17.

344. C. Gómez Bellard, “L’île d’Ibiza dans le commerce en Méditerranée occidentale à l’époque archaïque: Quelques données nouvelles,” in Numismatique et histoire économique phéniciennes et puniques (ed. T. Hackens and G. Moucharte; Studia Phoenicia 9; Louvain: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1992) 299–309; B. Costa and J. H. Fernández, “El establecimiento de los fenicios en Ibiza: Algunas cuestiones actualmente en debate,” Actas 4, 1.91–101.

345. M. G. Amadasi Guzzo and P. Xella, “Eshmun-Melqart in una nuova iscrizione fenicia di Ibiza,” SEL 22 (2005) 47–57.