Hegemonies, connections and contextual specificities. Towards the Phoenician west (5th-2nd centuries BCE): An introduction

In the TCM II introduction (2016), I took the opportunity to emphasize an aspect that has largely characterized the scientific approaches of recent years, and which has gradually become an unavoidable component of our sector of studies. I refer to the growing centrality assumed by the examination of specificity and local variability, which, beyond the shared cultural aspects among different contexts, marked very complex processes, such as the arrival of the Phoenicians in the western Mediterranean and the progressive emergence of the hegemonic role played by Carthage. The centrality of such factors has been translated into the study of the situational and local dimensions and also, inevitably, into the analysis of the dynamics of interaction maintained by the Phoenicians with the indigenous communities and with the other great interlocutors of the time (above all, the Greeks). This perspective has entailed, in part at least, the rereading of those same macro-processes - the Phoenician diaspora and Carthaginian hegemony - using more nuanced approaches, so as not to yield to the tendency to see such processes as monolithic systems, but rather as complexes of dynamics that took on specific forms in the various times and places concerned. Now, the question of local specificity and variability is also highly pertinent (and it could not be otherwise) to the period explored in the third and final TCM volume, which after all overlaps with the preceding volume at the upper chronological border. For the western Mediterranean, the 5th to the 2nd centuries BCE were certainly a very complex and in some ways troubled period; indeed, they were marked by rather precarious balances, constantly oscillating between tendencies towards centralization and connection - more or less forced and traumatic, if not violent - and deep local differentiations, between the affirmation of shared languages and the local variations that those languages took on. It is therefore worth dwelling briefly on some features of the historical context behind the contributions that make up the second section of this book. The intention is not of course to offer a detailed description of the processes and phenomena - ranging from contextual peculiarities to pressures to connect - that occurred during the period in question, as that would be unachievable in a limited space; rather, the aim is to set the case studies that will be presented within a general framework, and perhaps to suggest some food for thought.