Trading Post VS. Settler Colony: Some Reflections on Concepts of the Phoenician Expansion in the Mediterranean

Abstract

The Phoenician expansion in the Mediterranean has for a long time been considered a mainly commercial enterprise conducted by seafaring traders. This interpretation is primarily based on mentions of Phoenician trade activities in Biblical, Greek, and Roman sources, as well as the idea that the Phoenicians, since they were a Semitic people, were inherently different from Indo-European peoples like the Greeks. The notion that the Phoenicians were a “commercial people” whose society was dominated by maritime trade is deeply rooted in modern scholarship. However, in the last few decades, intensified archaeological fieldwork, new theoretical frameworks, and an improvement of scientific methods have challenged these concepts. This paper aims to review the rich historiographic tradition relating to the supposed commercial nature of Phoenician settlements by analysing how this interpretation was formed, and by contrasting it with recent archaeological results from Sardinia, Iberia, and Sicily to demonstrate that Phoenician sites in the Central and Western Mediterranean were by no means mere “trading posts”.