Ep. 023 - Setting Up Shop in the Central Med

The Phoenicians are now on the move, pushing the scope of our podcast to the west. While they were mainly concerned with expanding their access to natural resources like copper, iron, and silver, they weren't entering a vacuum. The Nuragic people of Sardinia were active in a regional trade centered on the Tyrrhenian Sea, and soon after the Phoenicians reconnected the Euboeans with the Mediterranean trade networks, both of them had set up colonies on Sardinia and in western Italy. We look at archaeological evidence for all the activity there, but in the end, this episode is a stepping stone to the Phoenician presence in the far west of the Mediterranean, just as Sardinia was for the Iron Age mariners.

[asmodeodurante]

The recent discovery of four Nuragic transport vessels from Pyla Kokkinokremos, Cyprus (one of which locally made), and of five Nuragic bowls + a cooking pot from Hala Sultan Tekke (Cyprus again) in votive pits next to the tombs opens up new scenarios... Both contexts are dated loosely to the 13th century bc, the Hala Sultan Tekke pits are possibly slightly older

[BigBennKlingon]

IMO, classical Greece doesn't exist without the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians reconnected the Greeks to the bonze/iron age cultural continuum. The fact that Greeks came out of their dark age using a Phoenician alphabet and had a drive to colonize the Mediterranean isn't a coincidence. I suspect that Heracles is the Greek interpretation of Melqart.