The Earliest Phoenician Presence in Southern Italy

Abstract

This paper analyses the first Levantine contacts with the populations of southern Italy, which take place in an atmosphere characterized by a powerful collaboration carried out by the Phoenicians with the Cypriots. At the dawn of the 1st millennium BCE in the central Mediterranean there existed a situation very similar to that which developed in the Aegean, where modern research has brought to light intense Cypro-Phoenician commercial intercourses starting from the end of the 10th century BCE. In Italy the same trend is demonstrated by the study of the materials brought to light in the necropolis at Torre Galli, on the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria, and by the number of connections intertwined between Sardinia and the coasts of Campania, southern Etruria and Latium Vetus. Only later on, at the end of the 9th-beginning of the 8th centuries BCE, the Phoenician trade takes advantage of the
Greeks from Euboea who were particularly dynamic in the Strait of Messina and the Gulf of Naples, from where they started intense contacts with the Etruscans and Latins. This phenomenon acquired consistency especially at the beginning of the Orientalizing Period (about 725 BCE) when the wide-raging routes mingle with the local routes run by the “entrepreneurial” class of the rising colonies. The climax of such a process ensued in the first half of the 7th century BCE, when western Mediterranean became more and more colonized by the Phoenicians. Right after this period there was a violent crisis caused by Assyrian expansionism policy in the Levantine area and by the systematic control of the coastline; this crisis was to produce shortly an abrupt interruption of the contacts between the western and the eastern Phoenician worlds.