Download or read book Towards a Social History of the Phoenician City-States in the Achaemenid Empire written by Vadim Serge Jigoulov and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though the Persian period has attracted a fair share of scholarly interest in recent years, as yet no concerted effort to construct a comprehensive social history of Phoenician city-states has been attempted. Moreover, few analyses have been attempted of "Phoenicia" as a conglomerate of independent city-states and as an integral part of the Achaemenid empire. This dissertation explores the evidence from Persian-period literary (both ancient Jewish and classical), epigraphic, and numismatic sources, as well as material culture remains, in order to arrive at a socio-historical model of the Phoenician city-states. The results of this investigation suggest that Phoenician material culture artifacts were marked by continuity across chronological and geographic expanses. Furthermore, our iconographical analysis of imagery used on Phoenician coinage reveals a compliant relationship of Phoenician city-states with the Achaemenid empire, as well as eclecticism of styles and susceptibility to foreign elements, particularly Greek and Persian.