
Palermo
History of Sicily and Palermo
People lived in caves on Mount Pellegrino,
overlooking today's Palermo,
during the Paleolithic age of 35,000–9,000 BCE.
The first repeated contacts between Sicily
and the wider Mediterranean
occurred during the Mycenaean age of 1600–1150 BCE.
Mycenaean traders from the Peloponnese regularly visited
Sicily, part of a trading network that also included
Rhodes and Cyprus.
Amazon 0691208018
The Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200–1150 BCE
affected civilizations all around the eastern Mediterranean.
Mycenaean palaces and cities in Greece
were either destroyed or abandoned,
and their bureaucrats stopped using the Linear B script.
Minoan palaces and cities on Crete were abandoned.
The Egyptians,
the Hittites across Anatolia,
the Mesopotamians,
and other civilizations were disrupted.
Phoenician settlement on Sicily began in the 8th century BCE,
and a Phoenician colony was established around 750 BCE
at what today is Palermo's harbor.
Greek colonies were established in the 8th through 6th
centuries BCE all around the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
This was
Μεγάλη
Ελλάδα
or "Greater Greece",
and it included colonies along the coasts of Sicily
and the southern Italian peninsula.
Phoenicians had founded the city of Carthage
on the North African coast in the 9th century BCE.
Conflicts between Carthagenians and Greeks continued
over the following centuries.
That led to the First Punic War
between Rome and Carthage
in 264–241 BCE,
and to Rome's eventual control of Sicily.
The Western Roman Empire began to disintegrate in the
4th century CE.
The Vandals took control of Roman North Africa in 429 CE
and began raiding Sicily.
Romulus Augustus, the rather nominal last Emperor
of the Western Roman Empire,
was deposed by the barbarian general Odoacer in 476 CE.
In 486 the Vandal leader Gaiseric took control of all
of Sicily, and in 494 he sold it to Odoacer.
The Eastern Roman Empire, what we now call the
Byzantine Empire, based at Constantinople,
took control of Sicily in 535.
Siracusa or Syracuse became the main city
of Byzantine Sicily.
The Arabs first landed on Sicily in 827,
seized Palermo in 831,
and within 50 years had taken control of the entire island.
Palermo became al-Madinah or "The City",
known as "the city of a thousand mosques".
It was the capital of an emirate and
a rival to Cairo and Cordoba in splendor.
The Arabs brought skilled craftsmen,
both Jewish and Muslim.
They greatly improved agriculture with
terraced fields, irrigation, and water storage systems,
allowing them to plant many new crops.
Norse adventurers had raided and then settled
northern France in the 9th and 10th centuries.
Their Old Norse name Norðmaðr
led to the French Normans
for the people, and Normandy
for their territory.
The Normans arrived in Sicily in 1060,
and by 1091 they controlled all of Sicily.
They adapted to the established mix of
Greek, Latin, Arab, and Jewish traditions and customs.
Yes, these are the same Norse people who in 1066
landed in southern England.
By 1194 the Normans' time in Sicily was over,
beginning a series of dynasties from the north —
Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, Bourbons.
Centuries of Spanish mis-rule led to Sicily's decline.
Where Next In Italy?
🚧 = under construction
In the late 1990s into the early 2000s I worked on a project to
scan cuneiform tablets
to archive and share 3-D data sets,
providing enhanced visualization to assist reading them.
I worked on the project with Gordon Young,
who was Purdue University's only professor
of archaeology.
Gordon was really smart,
he could read both Sumerian and Akkadian,
and at least some of other ancient languages
written in the cuneiform script.
He told me to go to Italy,
"The further south, the better."
Gordon was right.
Yes, you will very likely arrive in Rome,
but Italy has domestic flights and a fantastic train system
that runs overnight sleepers all the way to
Palermo and Siracusa, near the western and southern corners
of Sicily.
So, these pages are grouped into a south-first order,
as they should be.
By ferry from Napoli to Palermo