ABSTRACT
The record of civilian Syrians – that is, in this case, non-military and non-religious Syrians – in the empire outside their homeland is a great deal sparser than it is with soldiers and the Syrian gods. Civilians were apparently much less inclined to spend their time and money on memorialising themselves and their activities. For the Hellenistic period, when the Phoenician presence was commercial rather than military or colonising, there are records of Phoenician merchants in Egypt and in the Aegean, just as there are records of Jews in Egypt and in Asia Minor, and Carthaginians in Spain, Sicily, and Sardinia. Egypt, of course, was a country with which Syrians had had strong connections since before the origins of agriculture, with constant movements of population to and fro between the two countries. There is a thin scattering of records of Syrian civilians in the Balkan region north of Greece and along the frontier as far as the North Sea.
