ABSTRACT
This environmental pre-adaptation was a fortunate circumstance for the founders of Carthage, for they brought with them from their homeland not only their religion, their language and their legendary commercial acumen, but also their well-cultivated taste for wine. Southern coastal Syria, Lebanon and Palestine had been a grape-growing and wineexporting region since the late 4th millennium B.C. In the Early Bronze Age, Byblos was a center for the export of wine and other luxury products to the elites of Old Kingdom Egypt (see chapter 13 by James, this volume). In the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, many commodities, including wine, were shipped from Canaan to all parts of the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean in so-called “Canaanite Jars” (see chapter 15 by Leonard, this volume). In the early Iron Age, wine, fine textiles and carved ivory headed a list of precious goods distributed from the cities of coastal Phoenicia to points throughout the Near East and Mediterranean world (Harden 1971: ch. 12; Gras et al. 1989: ch. 4). Such precedents suggest that it was indeed the Phoenicians who introduced domesticated grape to North Africa.
