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The Journal has served in its primary role of a platform for presenting the annual input of new archaeological data from Polish excavations in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East for the better part of 30 years. Nothing can stay what it is too long and the journal has also undergone an evolution and transformation in an effort to rise to new challenges while sustaining the best of a long-standing and successful tradition. This is about the changing face of the Journal, the newest of which readers now hold in their hands.

Malta, Gozo and Comino, the Thrinacia of Homer and the Melitē, Phoebe and Lampas of Scylax, form an archipelago in the centre of the Mediterranean Sea inhabited by both Phoenicians and Greeks before the coming of the Romans to those islands. Many geographers mention them, but other authors refer to their importance as places of production of textiles and other natural goods like oil and honey. Of particular importance was the site of the temple of Juno and Hercules known to Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans as well as to Numidians. Malta and Gozo were also praised for their good harbors and stone. The Grand Harbour itself served as an important Byzantine base with its tower and inner harbour, both places bearing Greek names. Malta was converted to Christianity in AD 60 following St Paul’s shipwreck there, where he spent three winter months. The aim of this article is to scrutinize the information about Malta and Gozo in numerous Greek, Roman and Christian sources.

Advances into the origins of monetisation in the Mediterranean have shown that even with state-controlled currency circulating, (coinage-less) credit economies existed in parallel, using written documents for transactions, well into the Roman period. The current paper documents that a credit economy facilitated the Phoenician commercial expansion in the Mediterranean (9th-7thc. BCE), becoming the vehicle by which the west Semitic abjad, the Phoenician ‘alphabet’, was rapidly adopted and adapted into various phonetic and syllabic scripts in the Mediterranean. This led to the rapid spread of literacy in societies that had been fully illiterate by then, as the Greeks, or that had never developed literacy. In contrast with previous explanations that saw the spread of literacy in the Mediterranean as a corollary to international trade, the present study postulates that literacy played a functional role within the credit economies that grew with international commerce, thereby providing the impetus for the spread of literacy, providing documentation that substantiates this hypothesis. The study links the rapid spread of literacy to the institutional role of the script within the context of monetised commercial transactions, utilizing archaeological evidence from both ends of the Mediterranean, and interpreting it within its historical context.

A comparative approach allowed the debate on different realities of migration and colonization, both in space as in time. Thus, this dossier shall be an interesting asset to those who need to compare bibliographies, sources, usages of concepts and opinions in order to put in perspective their own perceptions of the same phenomenon.