This popular book about the mysterious Phoenicians and their exploration of the ancient world is now fully updated with intriguing new material and captivating images. It is the complete telling of their intricately-woven story, drawn from many actual documents and extensive archaeological findings. Experience a wealth of rich details about the Phoenicians and their deep interactions with Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and other societies through devastating wars and peaceful trade.Instead of seeing darkness in the years before classical Greece, we now see glimmers of light revealing a continuous parade of remarkable societies, great leaders and epic events. Drawing back the veil of secrecy surrounding the Phoenicians uncovers new glimpses of these remarkable people and the extraordinary individuals they encountered.It is true these famous sea traders of antiquity were known for their cedar ships, royal-purple cloth and long-lived cities in Lebanon. But there was so much more to their lives and their society. Two of their cedar boats were placed in the Great Pyramid by the Egyptians in 2560 BC. Homer’s Iliad included Phoenician traders in his recounting of the Trojan War. Herodotus told of the Phoenician alphabet being brought to the Greeks, who became masterful writers themselves. Alexander the Great performed his landmark siege of the Phoenician city of Tyre. And of course Carthage and Hannibal took on Rome in the Punic Wars which opened the way for Rome’s empire.Willingly or unwillingly, the Phoenicians were part of so many epic events in the ancient world that seeing these moments through their eyes opens the human side of what happened. We are among them as they experience days of desperation and loss, as well as times of joyous prosperity with their families amid the arts and fine living. This is a walk among fascinating people on the idyllic shores of the Mediterranean you will long remember.

    Landscape of Hope and Despair examines this refugee experience in Lebanon through the medium of spatial practices and identity, set against the backdrop of prolonged violence. Julie Peteet explores how Palestinians have dealt with their experience as refugees by focusing attention on how a distinctive Palestinian identity has emerged from and been informed by fifty years of refugee history. Concentrating ethnographic scrutiny on a site-specific experience allows the author to shed light on the mutually constitutive character of place and cultural identification.Palestinian refugee camps are contradictory places: sites of grim despair but also of hope and creativity. Within these cramped spaces, refugees have crafted new worlds of meaning and visions of the possible in politics. In the process, their historical predicament was a point of departure for social action and thus became radically transformed. Beginning with the calamity of 1948, Landscape of Hope and Despair traces the dialectic of place and cultural identification through the initial despair of the 1950s and early 1960s to the tumultuous days of the resistance and the violence of the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Most significantly, this study invokes space, place, and identity to construct an alternative to the received national narratives of Palestinian society and history.The moving stories told here form a larger picture of these refugees as a people struggling to recreate their sense of place and identity and add meaning to their surroundings through the use of culture and memory.

    The Lebanese capital stands for Arab cosmopolitanism and cultural effervescence but also for its tragedies of destruction. This book examines the historical formation of Beirut as a multiply contested Mediterranean city.Fin de Siecle Beirut is a landmark contribution to the growing literature in Ottoman studies, in Arab cultural history and on Mediterranean cities. Combining urban theory, particularly Henri Lefebvre's work on cities and capitalism, with postcolonial methodology, the central thesis of this book is that modern Beirut is the outcome of persistent social and intellectual struggles over the production of space. The city of Beirut was at once the product, the object, and the project of imperial and urban politics of difference: overlapping European, Ottoman, and municipal civilising missions competed in the political fields of administration, infrastructure, urban planning, public health, education, public morality, journalism, and architecture.Jens Hanssen offers a comprehensive, original account of the emergence of modern Beirut out of an economic shift away from Acre in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. He argues that the Ottoman government's decision to heed calls for the creation of a new province around Beirut and grant it provincial capital status in 1888 paved the way for fundamental urban and regional reconfigurations long before colonial policies during the French Mandate period. This new Ottoman province came to constitute the territorial embodiment of regional self-determination for Arab nationalists in Beirut until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.Drawing on published and unpublished Ottoman government documents, Arabic sources, and European archival material, Hanssen's book traces the urban experience of modernity in the Ottoman Empire. The transformation of everyday life in late nineteenth-century Beirut and the concomitant policies of urban management is vividly set against the devastating civil war in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860.

    This anthology offers a rich and diverse selection of works from more than one hundred and forty prominent Arab writers of fiction. The collection reflects Arab writers' formal inventiveness as well as their intense exploration of various dimensions of modern Arab life, including the impact of modernity, the rise of the oil economy, political authoritarianism, corruption, religion, poverty, and the Palestinian experience in modern times.Salma Khadra Jayyusi, a renowned scholar of Arabic literature, has included short stories and excerpts from novels from authors in every Arab country. Modern Arabic Fiction contains writings stretching from the pioneering work of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors to the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and the stories of contemporary Arab writers. In addition to familiar names such as Mahfouz, the anthology presents excerpts from writers well known in the Arab world but just beginning to find an audience in the West, including early twentieth century Christian Lebanese writer Jurji Zaydan, whose historical epics were eye-openers for generations of Arab readers to the achievements of medieval Islamic civilization; Yusuf Idris's complex and brilliant portrait of Egypt's poor; 'Abd al-Rahman Muneef's searing exploration of the ecological and social impact of oil production; Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's sophisticated description of the dilemma's of modern Arab intellectuals; and Jamal al-Ghitani's impressive employment of mythical time and the continuity of the past in the present.Jayyusi provides biographical information on the writers as well as a substantial and illuminating introduction to the development of modern Arabic fictional genres that considers the central thematic and aesthetic concerns of Arab short story writers and novelists.

    Despite Ottoman domination, regional turmoil, civil conflict and religious intolerance, Lebanon has consistently produced world-class wines.Michael Karam and Norbert Schiller take us on a journey from the Bekaa Valley to the little vineyards of Mount Lebanon. We meet the people who epitomise a proud tradition that began with Bronze Age man and culminates in the world’s finest wine lists. At once a wine guide and cultural history, this extensively illustrated book is a valuable reference for wine buffs, travellers and casual readers alike. It is a long-overdue tribute to one of the world’s oldest winemaking regions.Michael Karam is Lebanon’s leading wine writer. Born in London in 1965, he was raised and educated in England. He moved to Lebanon in 1992 where, after a brief career in teaching, he entered into journalism, becoming features editor and then a business reporter for the Beirut Daily Star. Dividing his time between business journalism and wine writing, he is a contributor to both the award-winning Wine Report and Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Wine Companion. He is the author of Life’s Like That: Your Guide to the Lebanese, a light-hearted look at his fellow countrymen. He lives with his wife and two children in Beirut.Norbert Schiller is a Californian who in 1979 made his way to Egypt via Greece, where he worked as a shepherd. He has been one of the most prolific Middle East news photographers of the last 25 years. As well as working for Associated Press and Agence France Presse, his work has featured regularly in The New York Times and Der Spiegel. His books include Spectacular Egypt and Be Thou There: The Holy Family's Journey in Egypt. Norbert Schiller currently lives with his wife and two children in Beirut.