ABSTRACT
In these chapters, we have combined evidence from all major sources of our knowledge about Achaemenid Phoenicia in order to arrive at a viable socio-historical picture of Achaemenid Phoenicia. Modeled after Elayi and Sapin’s book on Transeuphratene studies (1998), our methodology strives to treat each source of socio-historical information on its own terms and thus seeks to avoid elevating one source of information over others. As much as possible, we tried to align all of these often linguistically, historically, and ideologically disparate sources with each other, in order to complement and clarify social and historical information contained therein. At times, this task was tantalizing since we had to wade through various agendas and biases – some better concealed than others – to analyze the socio-political developments on three levels of Phoenician society: the household, the city-state, and the imperial administrative unit. It is our hope that the study has resulted in some proposals that may contribute to Achaemenid, Hellenistic, and general historical studies and to our understanding of the social, economic, and political processes not only in Persian-period Phoenician city-states, but also in the wider Levant and the “globalizing” eastern Mediterranean region.
