The Phoenician Plates Overseas and their Sequential and Chronological Connections with the Motherland.

Abstract

Winged-plates, also known as “red-slip plates”, represent one of the paramount ceramic types in Central and Western Phoenician sites. Object of many analyses over the years, the aim of this article is to explore their sequential and chronological connections with the ceramic repertoire of metropolitan Phoenicia. To do so, the main Iron Age plate types in the motherland, on the one hand, and the evidence from the oldest sites in the West, on the other, are analysed. The result is the need for a new approach to this issue and the achievement that the sequential origin of this type has to be sought in the final stages of the Middle Iron Age, the time of the first contacts, when the prototypes of this type influenced the first overseas productions. These earliest winged-plates experienced a parallel and somehow autonomous evolution later on, a phenomenon that reflects the situation of most parts of the overseas Phoenician productions.