The Social History of Achaemenid Phoenicia: Being a Phoenician, Negotiating Empires

Even though the Persian period has attracted a fair share of scholarly interest in recent years, as yet no concerted effort has been attempted to construct a comprehensive social history of Phoenician city-states as an integral part of the Achaemenid empire. This monograph 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 sketch just such a history. This study examines developments in Persian-period Phoenician city-states on the three levels: that of the individual household, the city-state, and the administrative unit of the Persian empire. These three societal levels are analyzed within the contexts of economic competition between and among the Phoenician city-states, their burgeoning economic ties with the outside world, and their interaction with the Persian imperial influence in the Levant.

Vadim S. Jigoulov is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Lecturer at the Department of Classical Studies and in the Honors College at the University of Michigan. In his published articles and reviews he focuses primarily on the history of the Achaemenid Levant, religions of ancient Mediterranean West Asia, and interpretations of the Hebrew Bible.