Josephine Quinn will become professor of ancient history at Cambridge in January. How the World Made the West is out now.
The port of As Sidr is on the Gulf of Sidra, the enormous bay biting through at the junction of Libya’s three major geographical regions: to the east, the lush agricultural land of Cyrenaica; to the west, the drier urban coastal strip of Tripolitania; to the south, the Saharan Fezzan. This has always been frontier territory, and often in dispute.
Certain places capture the imagination; others fade into the background, forgotten and overlooked. Phoenicia is one of the rare places that does both. In 1963, Sabatino Moscati, the founder of...
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