Her previous publications include Negotiating Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean: The Archaic and Classical Greek Multiethnic Emporia.
Demetriou applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Phoenicians among Others: Why Migrants Mattered in the Ancient Mediterranean, and reported the following:
Mobility and migration, both in antiquity and today, challenge migrants and states: migrants mobilize adaptive strategies to encourage a sense of membership and belonging and construct new identities, host and home states employ different policies to promote or regulate migration, and migrants transform both themselves and the societies they join. Phoenicians Among Others examines the case of Phoenician immigrants who settled in Greek states, Egypt, Carthage, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Malta, from the fourth to the first centuries BCE.Learn more about Phoenicians among Others at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 contains the end of the introduction to a chapter on various rewards – monetized, honorific, legal, and residency and citizenship – that Greek states granted to migrants. Fittingly, this page contains one of the main arguments of the book: that processes like that of granting honors and privileges to foreigners and immigrants led to the creation of multiple social statuses that migrants could inhabit along a fluid spectrum of participatory membership in a political community. The last paragraph of the introduction on page 99 also hints at something developed later in the chapter: that in granting such awards Greek states favored the wealthiest of foreigners – those who could afford to repeatedly bestow lavish gifts on their host states –thereby exacerbating inequalities within their societies.
The book argues that Phoenician immigrants (and migrants more broadly) living among Greeks, Carthaginians, and Egyptians transformed Mediterranean societies. Though technically without any direct political say in their host states, the evidence presented in the book shows that with innovative strategies, such as the creation of trade associations, they opened doors through which they could participate in politics. The negotiation of issues of taxation arising from immigration and the need to manage the limits of citizenship and domicile ultimately broadened what it meant to be a resident and even a citizen of a state. Over time, products of migration such as tombstones or religious dedications in foreign alphabets, temples dedicated to foreign gods, names of individuals that sounded Greek or Egyptian but were actually Phoenician became integrated into the social fabric of society, changed how cities looked, and altered the daily sounds of communities. In the ancient Mediterranean, mobility and migration created polities comprising a diverse population with different religions, languages, and institutions that came together to form coherent civic bodies in which immigrants and citizens alike were integral and contributing members.
--Marshal Zeringue
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