Search for positive impacts of climate change on the development of urban culture. Phoenician colonization of the Mediterranean as a result of climate change between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age
Abstract: Research on the impacts of climate change currently significantly accentuates the negatives of this process on the functioning and development of cities. In the spirit of this paradigm, the study of historical contexts very often mainly represents decline and extinction as a result of climate change. However, from the historical material, we can also read positive impacts of climate change on the emergence and development of settlements, which are not nearly as often presented as opposite impacts, that is, negative. The study of ancient settlements in the Mediterranean region brings both examples of negatives (e.g., the disappearance and disintegration of the settlement structure in the Levant at the turn of the Bronze and Iron Ages) and possible positives, such as the subsequent colonial expansion of urban advanced Phoenicians from the eastern to the western Mediterranean. The Phoenicians were descendants of the Canaanites, the founders of the first truly urban and often cosmopolitan settlements in the Levant. As a result of the effects of climate change on their "home" settlements (especially Tyre and Sidon) and the restructuring of social conditions in the Levant, the Phoenicians set out in search of new homes in the Central and Western Mediterranean, where they brought with them knowledge of the construction and functioning of urban settlements, several centuries before the Great Greek Colonization. The article, based on its own broader study of the development of ancient settlement in the Mediterranean region, focused on the search for an investigation of the impacts of climate change between the Bronze and Iron Ages not only on the original Phoenician cities in the Levant, but especially on their development in newly urbanized areas of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The article based on current knowledge of archaeology and history and on the author's own field research. The article envisages the elaboration of several key examples of the establishment of new Phoenician urban settlements and their impact on the urbanization of hitherto urbanized areas of today's Tunisia (especially the cities of Carthage, Kerkouan) and Spain (especially Cádiz). Therefore, the conclusion of the article could evaluate whether there are also positive impacts of climate change on urban development and the expansion of urban culture.
