Phoenician

Phoenician language – twin brother of Hebrew" –

Phoenician and hebrew are very similar languages if one compares phonetics, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. We can conclude that this are not two separate lenguages, but dialects of former canaanite language, its two parallel developements. Therefore, in studying one of them, comparision with another is very useful.

Keywords: Phoenician language, Hebrew language, Phoenician alphabet, Phoenicia, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon

Historical sources regarding Hellenistic-period Galilee are few and ambiguous and do not provide a clear picture about the identity of its population. Rich Hellenistic strata were uncovered at sites on the boarders of Galilee – mainly at Scythopolis in the south and Tel Anafa and Kedesh up north (belonging already to the Phoenician realm). Very little is known, however, about the inner parts of Galilee in this period. While we have ample evidence for a dense Jewish population in the area in the Early Roman period, we do not know if and how it relates to that of the Hellenistic era. This information is imperative for understanding the ethnic and cultural background in which Second Temple period Judaism and early Christianity developed in the Galilee.
The Hellenistic Galilee Project was initiated by a team of the Hebrew University, in an attempt to shed light on these questions through an investigation of the material culture and settlement dynamics in the Galilee in the period under discussion. The research includes an excavation of a key site called Khirbet el-‘Eika, in the Eastern Lower Galilee, and a survey of Hellenistic period sites between the Mediterranean coast and the Sea of Galilee. The material culture revealed at Khirbet el-‘Eika points to a population with close ties to the Phoenician coast, most likely gentile. The site came to a sudden end in a dramatic destruction and the rich assemblage of artifacts allowed us to pinpoint this event to ca. 145/4 BCE. Furthermore, newly published excavations, as well as the results of our survey, point to additional Galilean sites that seem to have been abandoned in the mid-2nd century BCE and this hitherto unknown occasion seems to be a wide phenomenon. The paper discusses the political situation, the settlement patterns and the material culture in the Galilee during the Hellenistic period and the transition of the region from a Phoenician-oriented to a Hasmonean-controlled area.

From its first adoption of writing at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, ancient Cyprus was home to distinctive scripts and writing habits, often setting it apart from other areas of the Mediterranean and Near East. This well-illustrated volume is the first to explore the development and importance of Cypriot writing over a period of more than 1,500 years in the second and first millennia BC. Five themed chapters deal with issues ranging from the acquisition of literacy and the adaptation of new writing systems to the visibility of writing and its role in the marking of identities. The agency of Cypriots in shaping the island's literate landscape is given prominence, and an extended consideration of the social context of writing leads to new insights on Cypriot scripts and their users. Cyprus provides a stimulating case to demonstrate the importance of contextualised approaches to the development of writing systems.

Chapter 1 available with open access here: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/284465

This paper is a short review of some of the arguments regarding the relationship between the Proto Semitic / Sinaitic/ Canaanite inscriptions and Paleo Hebrew. It looks at the film of Timothy Mahoney with a disputation between such scholars as Orly Goldwasser and Christopher Rollston and David Rohl and Petrovitch around the studies of Joseph Naveh. Naveh notes that in the tenth century BC Paleo Hebrew, Aramaic and Phoenician were indistinguishable, leaving the door open for a bridge between Proto sinaitic and Paleo Hebrew.  The genius of the alphabet was needed in oder for the Torah to be written. Spome scholars argue that the Proto Sinaitic inscriptions are in fact the earliest form of Hebrew. Rohl sughgest it was designed by Joseph whilst he was in Egypt because of the coincidence between the first inscriptions and Josephs's period in Egypt.

According to generally accepted estimates, the corpus of Phoenician-Punic inscriptions comprises about 10,000 inscriptions from all the countries of the Mediterranean region. The sheer quantity and scattered nature of the documents, spread over a very wide span of time, have severely affected research and caused considerable difficulties in the knowledge, availability and use of these sources. In order to tackle these problems and to try to resolve them, by making Phoenician texts –presented with rigorous and uniform criteria – available to the academic community, the project called CIP (Corpus Inscriptionum Phoenicarum necnon Punicarum, also known as the PhDB or Phoenician Data Base) came into being. For the first time, this project produce a collection and a critical edition of all the Phoenician and Punic epigraphic documents in the form of a data bank; also include all the available information on every Phoenician epigraphic document considered of interest for correctly understanding them. It presents the relevant data in an ordered and programmatic form, together with graphic and photographic material. The project in question, born from an Italian initiative (CNR) that early on made use of collaboration with a Spanish team (CSIC) is directed by Paolo Xella and co-directed by José-Ángel Zamora. The aim of this article is to document the progress of the project, explaining its objectives and illustrating the criteria underlying the work completed so far [as of 2007].

In recent years it has become evident that the origin of the great Punic goddess Tanit is in Phoenicia. Her cult is attested in Palestine from the Persian to the Late Roman periods. Related finds have been discovered mainly, but not only, at the sites of coastal cities belonging to the Phoenician cultural sphere. Remarkable evidence for the cult of Tanit might be recognized in the enigmatic deity Phanebalos who appears on the coinage of Ascalon from the reign of Augustus to the closing of the city’s mint in the time of Maximinus. Many attempts have been made to identify this Ascalonian deity; the main obstacle seems to be a difficulty in establishing its sex. On certain coins Phanebalos
appears as a male, while on other types a definitely female figure is depicted.
It is possible that Phanebalos is not one god, but a pair of deities, male and female, probably a local interpretation and development of the Phoenician-
Punic Tanit and Ba‘al Haman.

The Karatepe inscriptions contain an intriguing image of a woman walking fearlessly with spindles. This image builds on the symbolism of the spindle in the ancient Near East as an emblem of femininity and highlights the gendered language of the passage in which it occurs. In the context, the figure of the woman with spindles is contraposed with the image of the fearful man. The contrast between them portrays the magnitude of the positive changes accomplished by Azitawada, the ruler who commissioned the inscriptions.

The main purpose of this dissertation is to describe the economic aspects at the beginning of the Phoenician colonization across the Iberian Peninsula. These mercantile characteristics are connected with the primary sector and include agriculture, cattle or fishing, among others. Equally, this starting point is useful to investigate the nature of the relationship between settlers and the indigenous communitiesin Southern Iberia, which would finally end up being called Tartessos. In order to fulfil the goal, I check the original ancient documents about this subject and, at the same time, I evaluate the archaeological remains that prove the Phoenician presence in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the native lands in the eastern Mediterranean. First of all, we must attempt to investigate the situation that was taking place in the Phoenician's mother-cities. This should inform us about the daily circumstances in the metropolis, why Phoenician people decided to leave their homes and where they went. This is an important point because the original conditions that led to a colonial movement are crucial for understanding the subsequent practices in distant places. After studying the basic condition, I carry out a meaningful research about the core elements that have influenced the colonization process. In addition to this, we try to understand the mechanisms beneath those primary settlement patterns. Without doubt, a deep analysis of the marine environment (such as winds, oceanic currents or ships) is crucial to understanding the nature of the Phoenician's routes across the Mediterranean Sea. Likewise, I have deepened into the features and characteristics of the Phoeniciansocial classes focused on commerce and trading. Knowing which kind of people took part at the beginning of this unpredictable colonial process has made my work even more meaningful. This section of the research has been extremely useful to trace this complex historical process. The study of the religious mechanisms that were implemented by the Tyre authorities in order to

Le projet de recherche Police pour les Inscriptions Monétaires (PIM) a pour objectif la création d’outils adaptés pour retranscrire les informations contenues dans les inscriptions monétaires, au-delà de leur contenu sémantique. Les informations textuelles et les caractéristiques graphiques présentes sur une monnaie peuvent fournir de nombreuses informations concernant son origine et la société dans laquelle elle a été frappée. Mais jusqu’à aujourd’hui, aucune fonte numérique ne pouvait retranscrire à la fois intégralement et fidèlement les inscriptions monétaires.

Ce billet, publié sur le blog de la BnF, vise d’abord à retracer la genèse du projet ainsi que les grandes étapes depuis l’annotation des monnaies de la BnF jusqu’à la réalisation des fontes.

This Phoenician style text dating to 1170 BCE was written in the empire language of Alphabetic Akkadian/Aramaic. Phoenician like all other alphabetic writing derives from the Minoan writing tradition but is a separate lineage from the similar letter tradition of the Philistine/Israelites further south and the Etruscan/Carthaginians of the western Mediterranean. This text provides an almost complete summary of the Ancient Pagan Paradigm. It is blaming the astrological powers for the drought which ended the Bronze Age. Deities referenced are Yahu, Utu, Atu (and his sun form Hu), crescent moon goddess Ayu, and full moon god Su. Also mentioned are owls and eagle-vultures and network editors. This text distinguishes between the "enclosed region" as the night sky under the earth plane where ancestral souls reside from the night sky as the source of astrological motion powers due to its moving planets.

In G. Garbati, T. Pedrazzi (eds), Transformations and Crisis in the Mediterranean. "Identity" and Interculturality in the Levant and Phoenician West during the 12th-8th Centuries BCE (Proceedings of the International Conference held in Rome, CNR, May 8-9 2013, Supplemento alla Rivista di Studi Fenici XLII (2014), Pisa, Roma 2015, 159-170.

Compared to other Syro-Anatolian city-states, indigenous documents from Iron Age Cilicia are rare. Whereas Karkamish, for example, has provided us with ca. 80 inscriptions (and counting), only five inscriptions thus far come from Cilicia. One of those is the ÇİNEKÖY inscription  of king Waraika  of Hiyawa (= Que, classical Cilicia), a Phoenician-Luwian bilingual. Found in 1997, it now supplies the third bilingual text from Cilicia , in addition to the well-known Phoenician-Luwian KARATEPE 1 bilingual , and the extremely eroded and nearly illegible Assyrian-Phoenician İncirli bilingual .  As an important political document with historical implications, it is necessary to correctly identify the main protagonists, especially the Assyrian king, and the location of the narrated events.
Based on a reanalysis of the river name Sapara (= Seyhan) in ÇİNEKÖY § 8 as hapas pari(ya)n ‘Beyond-the-River’, which is best interpreted as a calque on Phoenician ʾbr nhr and Assyrian eber nāri, I will argue that the building activities described in ÇİNEKÖY § 8-10 do not take place in the heartland of Hiyawa near the Seyhan river, but in the territory of Gurgum, to the east of Hiyawa.

Researcher and Independent Student ASIN: B07JMY43YX Abstract: This research is about a solution of the figures carved in the famous Inga Stone. Brazilian researchers tell us about indigenous abilities to organize communities and rituals of funerals, cultivation and planting of grains, plant breeding, and fertile soil maintenance, but although ceramic artifacts show quite developed ornaments and figures, so far, any form of writing from these peoples, or evidence of advanced botanical knowledge, would have been identified. The Inga stone reveals, however, the knowledge of the fertilization and crossing of the Ingazeira (a type of Brazilian tree), besides the verification of the origin of languages that evidently derived from the botanical knowledge. In the state of Paraíba, Brazil, there is a stone twenty-four meters wide and three meters high with curious engravings. This is the stone of Ingá, or Itacotiara, which according to some translators of the Tupi-Guarani indigenous language means "scratched stone". Although it is a very visited stone and even known abroad, there are not many studies about its origin or the meaning of its figures. And, likewise, no current information is available on what would mean so many notches. It adds to this sad result the lack of interest of public or private institutions in supporting the science, history and social culture of our own country, either financially or through patrimonial protection. I then contribute, describing my interpretation of Ingá's stone engravings, which, as I have shown, is a botanical cycle, more precisely of the life cycle, fertilization and crossing, of the plant species known as Ingazeira. I also note that their symbols described as part of the life cycle of the plant in question are found in inscriptions of ancient Mesopotamian languages, as if botanical knowledge had established a language and many other languages in the world. The carvings of the Ingá stone are 6,000 years old according to the last dating, at which time it would coincide with the end of the last ice age, whose melting glaciers in the oceanic region near Antarctica would be responsible for the Sumerian flood. The Sumerian civilization was the earliest to mention, in written form, a disaster such as that of the universal flood, to this day. His songs, business records, records of buying and selling of real estate, and a list of kings and rulers engraved on clay tablets (made available digitally by Oxford University), have been in existence for at least five thousand to six thousand years, about. They lived in the region south of Mesopotamia, where today lies Iraq.

Visit web site: https://www.ouhs.org/issue-xi?fbclid=IwAR2tGA7HDwpmmQUmqzeXJqQOnK3As3SjfUPQf2XBVSh8EQkoFmEaQj18p1U

Perhaps no civilization in history is as associated with the sea as the Phoenicians, whose ships and seafaring ability allowed them to travel, trade, and establish colonies across the Mediterranean. Search and survey operations in the Mediterranean have resulted in the discovery of a limited number of Canaanite, Phoenician, and Punic shipwrecks, which have been found in both deep and shallow water.

These assemblages provide valuable evi­dence of this culture's critical maritime component, improving our knowledge and under­standing of Phoenician and Punic seafaring, while also helping us better understand the written accounts we do possess about these mariners and their activities. Within the last decade in particular, the excavation of the shipwreck at Bajo de la Campana (Spain) has shed new light on Phoenician seafaring and ship construction, while the discovery of the Xlendi Gozo wreck (Malta) has provided new evidence for Phoenician activity in the cen­tral Mediterranean.

Survey and excavation off the northwest coast of Sicily, in turn, has provided a remarkable material counterpart to the textual evidence for the events at the end of the First Punic War. When combined with the deep-water wrecks off the coast of Ashkelon and the smaller, locally oriented wrecks off the coast of Mazarrón (Spain), a more coherent-albeit still very incomplete-picture of Phoenician and Punic activity be­gins to take shape.

A updated version, with the correction of some typos is available here: http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=779. 

Abstract:  This article is the second of two parts debunking the recent claims of Douglas Petrovich (in a presentation at the Nov 2016 academic meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research and in a forthcoming volume from Carta publishers in Jerusalem) that the inscriptions from the Egyptian sites of Serabit el-Khadem and Wadi el-Hol (etc.) are Hebrew.  This sort of proposal was first made in 1923....and it was not accepted then.  This article is lexical and epigraphic in nature.

The present paper is a study on the religious continuities and changes in North Africa from the
3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, therefore from the pre-Roman (“Phoenician-Punic”) to
Roman era. Starting from the archaeological and epigraphic evidences, it combines and compares
the documentation related to the so-called Tophet sanctuaries with that related to the temples
dedicated to Saturn. The goal is to analyse the evolution and transformation of sacred places, rituals
and representations of the deities throughout a historical context characterized by variegated and
changeable political and religious landscapes.

Cet article présente une étude des continuités et des innovations religieuses que l’on observe en Afrique
du Nord du IIIe siècle av. J.-C. au IIIe siècle apr. J.-C., donc de l’époque préromaine (phéniciennepunique)
à l’époque romaine. Il propose notamment de combiner et de confronter, à partir d’une
documentation en majorité archéologique et épigraphique, le dossier de ce que l’on nomme les
tophets à celui des sanctuaires de Saturne afin d’analyser le développement et la transformation des
aires sacrées, des pratiques cultuelles et de la représentation des divinités dans un contexte historique
caractérisé par des paysages politiques et religieux diversifiés et mouvants.

The arid pre-desert lands along the fringe of the Sahara have proven to be an especially fertile source of epigraphic remains from Roman Late Antiquity. In particular, the former Roman region of Tripolitania has yielded a small corpus of roughly sixty Punic inscriptions, dating from the first century of the common era to the fifth century. This corpus differs from other inscriptions in that language not only for its comparatively late time span, but also by virtue of the script in which it was composed. In the final stage before it disappeared completely from history, the Punic of Tripolitania was written in a modified form of the Latin script, which was apparently adapted to the phonology of Late Punic much as the Latin script was later adapted to represent other languages, including related languages like Maltese. In this paper, I will argue that the orthography of the Latino-Punic inscriptions represents the first unified and consistent system to render any Semitic language alphabetically, with full indication of vowels, rather than by syllabary or abjad. That is to say, I will argue that the orthography of the Latino-Punic inscriptions was unique in its time because it reflects the phonemes of Late Punic as it was spoken in Tripolitania at the time, solely for the benefit of Tripolitanian Punic speakers, rather than an attempt to render the sounds of Late Punic according to the orthography of other languages for the benefit of their speakers, such as Origen and Jerome’s roughly contemporary efforts to transcribe a closely related Semitic language (Hebrew) into the Greek and Latin scripts, respectively, for the express benefit of speakers of these two languages.

Democracy has never been more popular. It is successfully practiced today in a myriad of different ways by people across virtually every cultural, religious or socio-economic context. The forty-five essays collected in this companion suggest that the global popularity of democracy derives in part from its breadth and depth in the common history of human civilization. The chapters include exceptional accounts of democracy in ancient Greece and Rome, modern Europe and America, among peoples’ movements and national revolutions, and its triumph since the end of the Cold War. However, this book also includes alternative accounts of democracy’s history: its origins in prehistoric societies and early city-states, under-acknowledged contributions from China, Africa and the Islamic world, its familiarity to various Indigenous Australians and Native Americans, the various challenges it faces today in South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the latest democratic developments in light of globalization and new technologies, and potential future pathways to a more democratic world. Understanding where democracy comes from, where its greatest successes and most dismal failures lie, is central to democracy’s project of inventing ways to address the need of people everywhere to live in peace, freedom and with a say in the decisions that affect their lives.