Greeks and the Iberian Peninsula

Abstract

Within the Mediterranean region, the Iberian Peninsula is the only place where Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Greeks interacted during the same time period and participated equally in the Mediterranean network of exchanges. It is also the only territory where groups of both Semitic and Greek origin lived side by side for five centuries without the geographical boundaries that existed in Sicily. Trading centers on the Iberian Peninsula share two basic traits: they are small and do not occupy much land, and they are without an extensive hinterland or chora. This chapter makes the case for the Greek contribution to the colonial situation and challenges a number of prior assumptions on the basis of recent archaeological excavations. In particular, it presses the case for “colonization without colonies,” arguing that the number of alien colonists in Iberia, Greek or Phoenician, was very small and confined to rather modest settlements of a distinctive type that it calls “Hispanic emporia.”

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.