Customer Reviews

The Phoenicians: The Purple Empire of the ancient world

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I guess this book was a bit of a hit in Germany since the inside flap of my dust jacket proclaims "250,000 of the original hardback edition sold." Can you imagine? My sense is that the Germans have quite the appetite for this kind of subject. Although the Phoenicians invented the alphabet, they left little in the way of writing behind, such that this history of the Phoenicians is more like the history of what other peoples thought about the Phoenicians: The phoenicians as seen by the Egyptians, by the Jews, by the Greeks, etc.

There is a paucity of accesible material on the Phoenicians, so I enjoyed reading this book, but after the first couple of chapters I didn't learn a whole lot that I didn't actually know. In particular, the later of the portion of the book, focusing on Carthage, reads like a recap of dozens of books on Rome that I've read already.

Again- I emphasis that is a Steven Ambrose style of popular history- leave your fussy scholarly opinions at home before you take on this book.

The author of this book makes grave errors in citing biblical history and seems to "understand" very little at all about the history of ancient civilizations. His iterations about ancient Molech worship meanders into wasteful and serious flaws concerning the practices of his beloved Phoenician culture. What a waste of an hour or two; nothing substantial but fanciful conjecture citing scant and ambiguous records of an enigmatic society. And his reference to and interpretation of biblical writings are just incorrect at best.