Networks of Commerce and Knowledge in the Iron Age: The Case of the Phoenicians

Abstract

Regarding the Phoenicians' expansion in the Iron Age, controversy continues over chronology, areas affected, scale of migration, organization of trade, modes of interaction between Phoenician traders/colonists and the respective indigenous populations and means of maintaining contact and of transmitting information between ‘colonial’ settlements and the mother cities in the Levant. Critical problems arise from the textual evidence from the Phoenicians' neighbours; the archaeological material is also ambiguous regarding the ethnic and cultural identities of the populations involved. The paper uses available evidence to construct a model of how a diasporic network of commodity, population and information exchange could arise and be maintained in the power vacuum of the Early Iron Age Mediterranean, how it was adapted to political and economic change, so as to provide a tertium comparationis to the Greek model of ‘colonization’.