Abstract
In the middle of the 2nd century BCE, a group of wealthy Phoenicians constructed a monumental villa at Anafa in the rural Upper Galilee. They decorated the walls of their villa with painted and gilded stucco, constructed private baths, and imported Aegean wine, fine tablewares and delicate blown glass to Anafa in huge quantities (Herbert, 1979). The residents of Anafa relied on an intimate trading connection with the coast in order to access the finest luxury goods the Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean had to offer. The villa complex at Anafa is far from the sole indicator of the wealth and cosmopolitanism of the Galilee Region in the Middle Hellenistic period. When the Galilee was incorporated into the Roman client kingdom of Judea in 63 BCE the region looked entirely different. Small, isolated Jewish villages dotted the landscape. These communities constructed synagogues and Jewish ritual baths, largely consuming foodstuffs produced in the Galilee, eating and drinking from ceramic and stone vessels they made themselves. The coastal to inland highway on which imported goods had flowed freely in the 2nd century BCE was curtailed dramatically so that imported goods were not traded far beyond the region’s coastal plain. This research aims to explore the dramatic changes in coastal to inland trade that occurred during this period through the application of social network methodologies. This effort will elucidate the connective routes used by merchants to move goods from the coast inland in three subphases of the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods and explore how changes to the political, bureaucratic and social structure of the region may have affected this movement.