ARQ

The present course explores the modes and mechanisms of economic exchanges that pertained to the ancient Near East in the early first millennium BCE and the way they devolved, as well as precipitated, the so-called Phoenician colonization, i.e. the foundation of trading settlements and colonies across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic fringes of Europe and Africa by Near Easterners from what is now Lebanon and coastal Syria, the influx of new social customs, the spread of literacy, using a new tool, the alphabet, and the increasing monetization of the economy. It takes as a departure point the archaeological documentation of a range of different contexts (residential areas, markets, production centres, and burial grounds), as well as historical information derived from contemporary contextual data, to explore the approaches on the reconstruction of past aspects of the economy, mainly commercial exchanges, modes of transactions and elements of (proto-)monetization, including how these shifted temporally and spatially, through the vector of Phoenician colonization. The objectives of the course are threefold: (1) to familiarize students with the increasing body of knowledge concerning aspects of the ancient economyand the continuity/disruption and evolution of modes of economic exchange during the period of Phoenician colonization; (2) to demonstrate how theory from other disciplines (sociology, anthropology, behavioural economics) can be used to explore and answer questions using the archaeological record; (3) to shed light on a central facet of the socio-economic structures of Early Iron Age Phoenician culture whose impact in the pre-classical Mediterranean was radically transformative and contributed to the formation of what is referred to as the ‘Classical Antiquity’.