Opening the Mediterranean: Assyria, the Levant and the transformation of Early Iron Age trade

Abstract

The evidence for structures of exchange in the Early Iron Age Mediterranean has been rationalised in many ways, variable in terms of both the evidence selected and the arguments applied. However, the most pervasive and tenacious explanation has been based upon a coreperiphery model, which approaches the expansion of Phoenician commerce in the Early Iron Age by conceptualising it as flowing from a largely eastern Mediterranean core to the western Mediterranean periphery. Thus the Early Iron Age expansion has been interpreted as a direct function of Neo-Assyrian imperialism (Frankenstein 1979), an idea that has circulated in the work of many scholars (Shaw 1989; Kuhrt 1995: 403’410; Coldstream 2003: 240’41, 359; Fantalkin 2006).