In this revised and updated second edition, Mark Woolmer brings to bear recent historiographical developments and archaeological discoveries to provide a fresh and absorbing appraisal of the people known to history as the Phoenicians. Presenting the Phoenicians in all their paradoxical complexity, Woolmer explains how and why this fascinating, yet elusive, Semitic people could be both lauded by their contemporaries as skilled artisans and mariners par excellence whilst simultaneously being denounced as blood thirsty pirates and profiteers who cruelly traded in human lives. Through discussions of material culture, language and alphabet, governance, religion, funerary customs, trade, and expansion into the Western Mediterranean, the volume unravels several of the many mysteries surrounding the Phoenicians. Particularly close attention is given to the lives and experiences of Phoenician women, a crucial topic that has frequently been overlooked in previous-studies of Phoenicia. Also contained in this revised edition are new or expanded discussions of several important topics including the production and use of purple dye, Phoenician technologies and technological innovations, the Phoenician settlement of Ibiza. the intriguing commercial relationship between Sidon and Athens during the fourth-century BC, and the nature and extent of Hellenisation in a during the last few centuries of the First Millennium BC. This new edition thus provides the reader with a comprehensive yet concise introduction to the social, political, economic, and religious history of the Phoenicians. Book jacket.