Phoenicians and the “Orientalizing Kit:” New Perspectives on the Iron Age Mediterranean
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Meeting pass code: Usem441
In the early first millennium BCE the Mediterranean saw deep cultural and economic changes, as the Phoenicians wove new commercial and colonial networks and built on pre-existing ones. This unprecedented connectivity allowed Iron Age groups such as Greeks, Etruscans, Sardinians, Cypriots, and Iberians to join in a new international koine that included urbanization, alphabetization, monumental architecture, and shared artistic tastes labeled “orientalizing” by art-historians. By contextualizing the Phoenician expansion and restoring their agency (particularly that of Tyre), and by focusing on select cultural artefacts, sphinxes and volute capitals among them, López-Ruiz argues that Phoenician encounters with local groups lie behind a selectively adopted “orientalizing kit” across the Mediterranean. These interactions transformed Iron Age cultures in profound ways, and yet the Phoenician role has often been diluted as part of a vague wave of “Near Eastern” influence, hence these historical actors are poorly integrated in our Mediterranean histories, especially among classicists. At the same time, looking at this new Mediterranean through Phoenician lenses offers us the unique opportunity to step back from our well-trodden Hellenocentric and Eurocentric perspectives and reconstruct an alternative narrative that recenters other local groups, not those who wrote our prevailing histories.
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