Towards a social history of the Phoenician city-states in the Achaemenid empire.

Abstract

Even though the Persian period has attracted a fair share of scholarly interest in recent years, as yet no concerted effort to construct a comprehensive social history of Phoenician city-states has been attempted. Moreover, few analyses have been attempted of Phoenicia as a conglomerate of independent city-states and as an integral part of the Achaemenid empire. This dissertation explores the evidence from Persian-period literary (both ancient Jewish and classical), epigraphic, and numismatic sources, as well as material culture remains, in order to arrive at a socio-historical model of the Phoenician city-states. The results of this investigation suggest that Phoenician material culture artifacts were marked by continuity across chronological and geographic expanses. Furthermore, our iconographical analysis of imagery used on Phoenician coinage reveals a compliant relationship of Phoenician city-states with the Achaemenid empire, as well as eclecticism of styles and susceptibility to foreign elements, particularly Greek and Persian. A combination of different data sets allows us to conceptualize the political and economic situation in the Persian Levant. The city-states of Tyre and Sidon emerged as the most economically powerful and most competitive polities in the Levant in the Persian period. The Achaemenid approach to administering these and other polities in the Levant can be viewed as a managed autonomy that allowed Phoenician city-states to run their affairs largely unhindered by the central Persian authorities. Furthermore, the Sidonian royalty shrewdly exploited the ideological program of the Achaemenid empire, evident through its territories, in order to maintain its economic, religious, and political supremacy in the local region. This dissertation also incorporates issues of ideology and bias that characterize both ancient sources and their modern interpretation, as well as the issue of Phoenician identity emerging from various sources. We advance an interpretation of specific sections of the Deuteronomistic History and other ancient Jewish texts against the historical situation of the latter half of the first millennium BCE. More specifically, consideration of the Persian period with its distinctive economic and political circumstances facilitates an increased understanding of the ideological overtones and diachronic changes evident in the ancient Jewish treatments of Tyre and Sidon.