How to Read Ancient Texts: With a Focus on Select Phoenician Inscriptions from Malta

How to Read Ancient Texts foregrounds the principles of interpretation that scholars employ when reading ancient inscriptions. In order to better come to grips with Canaanite, such as Phoenician, inscriptions, we need to first understand how people wrote and read texts in the ancient Mediterranean world, including that of the Greeks and Romans. The use of continual script and lack of punctuation did not pose insurmountable problems to the ancients, since spoken language is not built on a di...