Josephine Quinn – författare

'One of the most fascinating and important works of global history to appear for many years' William Dalrymple'Quinn has done a lot more than reinvent the wheel. What we have here is a truly encyclopaedic and monumental account of the ancient world' The TimesAncient Greece and Rome are considered the parents of Western civilisation. But the ancient world was much more interconnected than we realise - a place of constant exchange, commerce and theft, sex, war and enslavement.Journeying from the Levant of 2500 BC to the dawn of the Age of Exploration, Josephine Quinn argues that the roots of the West can be found in everything from Indian mathematics to the chariots of the Steppe, from Arabic poetry to the Phoenician art of sailing. The result is an epic and revelatory history of our shared past.'Superb, refreshing and full of delights, this is world history at its best' Simon Sebag-Montefiore‘Full of little gem-like shifts of perspective’ Guardian‘Scintillates with its focus on the unexpected’ Economist‘A work of great confidence, empathy, learning and imagination’ Rory Stewart‘This is, in every way, a big book’ Times Literary SupplementLONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2025A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR: The Times/Sunday Times, Observer, Economist, Guardian, BBC History Magazine, i-paper and History Today

Who were the ancient Phoenicians—and did they actually exist?The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the "Phoenicians" never actually existed as such. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies—and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.

Who were the ancient Phoenicians, and did they actually exist? The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the "Phoenicians" never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies--and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources. Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and communities these people really constructed for themselves in the ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices.She traces how the idea of "being Phoenician" first emerged in support of the imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized as a component of modern national identities in contexts as far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon. In Search of the Phoenicians delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays, painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to twenty-first century Tunisia.

A Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman, The Rest is Politics and Waterstones Highlight for 2024 'A work of great confidence, empathy, learning and imagination' RORY STEWART 'Bold, beautifully written and filled with insights . . . Extraordinary' PETER FRANKOPAN 'One of the most fascinating and important works of global history to appear for many years' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE The West, the story goes, was built on the ideas and values of Ancient Greece and Rome, which disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages and were then rediscovered by the Renaissance. But what if that isn't true? In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope, Josephine Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept - developed in the Victorian era - of separate 'civilisations'. Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, How the World Made the West reveals a new narrative: one that traces the millennia of global encounters and exchange that built what is now called the West, as societies met, tangled and sometimes grew apart. From the creation of the alphabet by Levantine workers in Egypt, who in a foreign land were prompted to write things down in their own language for the first time, to the arrival of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, Quinn makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong. It is contact and connections, rather than solitary civilisations, that drive historical change. It is not peoples that make history - people do.