Exploring Private Life in Ancient Phoenicia

 

Our first event, sponsored by the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies, for the Spring semester will be a public lecture by Dr. Helen Dixon. 

 

 

The Phoenicians are famous as a civilization of pioneers – the inventors of the first alphabet, the first recorded sailors to circumnavigate Africa, even the purported discoverers of purple dye and glass-making technology.  Though their roles as traders and innovators are well documented, much less is known about ordinary life in Phoenicia during the first millennium BCE.

 

This lecture will survey archaeological and textual evidence to explore the everyday experiences of these people.  What were Phoenician families like?  How did everyday people worship?  What mattered most to them?  What did the inhabitants of what is today coastal Syria, Lebanon, and Israel think of their “Phoenician-ness,” and how did merchants traveling abroad think about their “homeland”?  Though we cannot yet give definitive answers to many of these questions, the results of the past forty years of archaeological excavations, along with a newly constructed database of Phoenician burials, allow us to begin to visualize the details of private life in ancient Phoenicia.

 

Dr. Helen Dixon is a post-doctoral teaching scholar in NCSU’s History Department. She completed her PhD in Near Eastern Studies in 2013. Check out her work and experience HERE and HERE, and her dissertation entitled “Phoenician Mortuary Practice in the Iron Age I – III (ca. 1200 – ca. 300 BCE)Levantine “Homeland” HERE.

 

I hope you can join us then!