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Iron Age Canaanites from Lebanon — peoples known by the Greeks as "Phoenician" and the Romans as "Punic" — have had their histories told largely based on classical and biblical texts. It is impossible to speak of a Phoenician history due to the paucity of extant historical or literary texts penned by Phoenicians themselves - so the usual story goes. What if, instead of writing off their thousands of inscriptions, we change our own expectations of what content is seen as worthy? In this talk, we will privilege Phoenician and Punic inscriptions toward the goal of listening to the Phoenicians in their own words. Reading a curated selection of texts in translation, we will reconstruct from an emic perspective various aspects of their culture.
