The island of Sicily was a highly contested area throughout much of its history. Among the first to exert strong influence on its political, cultural, infrastructural, and demographic developments were the two major decentralized civilizations of the first millennium BCE: the Phoenicians and the Greeks. While trade and cultural exchange preceded their permanent presence, it was the colonizing movement that brought territorial competition and political power struggles on the island to a new level. The history of six centuries of colonization is replete with accounts of conflict and warfare that include cross-cultural confrontations, as well as interstate hostilities, domestic conflicts, and government violence. This book is not concerned with realities from the battlefield or questions of military strategy and tactics, but rather offers a broad collection of archaeological case studies and historical essays that analyze how political competition, strategic considerations, and violent encounters substantially affected rural and urban environments, the island’s heterogeneous communities, and their social practices. These contributions, originating from a workshop in 2018, combine expertise from the fields of archaeology, ancient history, and philology. The focus on a specific time period and the limited geographic area of Greek Sicily allows for the thorough investigation and discussion of various forms of organized societal violence and their consequences on the developments in society and landscape.

This monograph presents the almost completely reconstituted Naos of the Decades with an excellent set of photographic images. The four additional fragments, recovered in East Canopus during the excavations of the European Institute of Underwater Archaeology, are examined with the two original fragments from the Louvre and Greco Roman Museum (Egypt). The largest of the new fragments consists of a cosmogony of over 20 columns with no known parallel, disproving the order of the decades as it was initially assumed and suggesting a far older tradition of Egyptian astrology. Price approx.