Archaeology of the Town Square and the Emergence of Democracy in the Phoenician Mediterranean

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Popular government, or “democracy,” spread from Lebanon to the rest of the Mediterranean in the early first millennium BC. This form of state-level, consensus-based sociopolitical organization emerged as a face-to-face practice where members or citizens witnessed and participated in communal debates and decisions. While the Phoenician colonists themselves exercised their rights to assembly, they eventually incorporated and enfranchised indigenous societies, introducing their concept of the state through democratic institutions and urban planning. Historical and epigraphic evidence relay a famous example of one Phoenician national assembly with the Carthaginian People’s Assembly. In recent years, many other town squares that would have hosted assemblies have been excavated at Phoenician and Punic city-states in the Levant, the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, Sardinia, and Sicily. In this talk, I propose that this phenomenon was not just an extension of contacts with Greece. Rather, it was a result of centuries of Phoenician investment in popular governance, expressed archaeologically through town squares established by the first Phoenician settlers. Through tracking instances of town squares or other planned city plazas, so can we reconstruct and date the spread of democracy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35692.0