Category Archives: Phoenicians / Canaanites

Assyrian / Babylonian wisdom: Sibyl of Babylon on the superiority of the Judean people (second century BCE)

Babylonian diasporas: Josephos and others on legends of migration from Babel (first-second centuries CE)

Barbarian wisdom: Celsus and Origen of Alexandria (second-third centuries CE)

Barbarian wisdom: Ephoros on inventors (mid-fourth century BCE)

Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Phoenicians: Julius Africanus on competitive chronologies (ca. 222 CE)

Egyptians: Herodotos on customs and legendary kings (fifth century BCE)

Ethiopians: Herodotos on southern peoples at the ends of the earth (mid-fifth century BCE)

Judeans, Syrians, Celts, Scythians and others: Plutarch on the “barbarian” origins of fearing the gods, or “superstition” (early second century CE)

Judeans, Syrians, Indians, and others: Porphyry of Tyre on abstinence from meat (third century CE)

Kretans, Spartans, Carthaginians, and Romans: Polybios on superior and inferior societal organization (second century BCE)

Libyans: Dionysios of Mytilene and Diodoros on competing claims about the god Dionysos (third / mid-first century BCE)

Mediterranean peoples: Claudius Ptolemy on astrological effects on peoples (second century CE)

Mediterranean peoples: Pliny the Elder on inventors around the world (first century CE)

Phoenician, Egyptian and Babylonian wisdom: Porphyry of Tyre and Antonius Diogenes on Pythagoras (third century CE)

Scythians and other Pontic peoples: Herodotos on the “most ignorant peoples of all” (fifth century BCE)

Scythians: Lucian on a competition between Toxaris and Mnesippos about ethnic superiority (mid-second century CE)

Thracians, Getians, Paionians, and others: Herodotos (mid-fifth century BCE)

Various peoples: Herodotos on the mixed composition of the Persian army under Xerxes (fifth century BCE)