I.K.H. Halayqa investigates lexical correspondences of Ugaritic and Canaanite: "Ugaritic was a spoken and written language in an area adjacent to various Canaanite dialects, such as the language of the El-Amarna letters from the city states in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine and Phoenician in Lebanon. Ugaritic was still a spoken language in the El-Amarna period, to which Old Canaanite belongs. Therefore the generic relationship between Ugaritic and Canaanite cannot be dispensed. It therefore seems appropriate to compare etymologically all the Ugaritic lexemes to those of the Northwest Semitic languages, in particular with the Canaanite branch." "The position of the Ugaritic language among the Northwest Semitic languages remains a question of lively debate. Ugaritic has been grouped with Amorite, Canaanite, Arabic and Old South Arabic. It has even been considered early Hebrew or early Phoenician or has been seen as a separate Northwest Semitic language distinct from Canaanite and Aramaic. Nevertheless, neither general acceptance nor satisfactory classification has been firmly established." "The process of searching and investigating all the possible Canaanite correspondences for 2254 Ugaritic lexemes has lead to the emergence of our lexicon, which contains 1643 certain and uncertain lexemes (1302 + 341) In other words, of 2254 lexemes only 1643 have been found with certain and uncertain Canaanite cognates."

"Religions" are always costly - one has to give offerings (with material value) to the gods, one has to provide the salary for religious specialists who offer their service for their clients, one has to arrange festivals and liturgies - and of course, one has to provide the material means for building temples or shrines. But these costs also repay - as the gods give health or well-being as reward for the offerings. Even if one can never be absolutely certain about such a reward, one at least might earn social reputation because of one's (financial) involvement in religion. But temples are also economic centres - "employing" (often in close relation to the palace) people as workers, craftsmen or "intellectuals" in different positions whose "costs of living" are supplied by the temple. Individual religious specialists receive payment for their service to cover their own costs of living. Although this might sound "modern", religion and economy were intertwined with each other in ancient society also. For this reason, the papers of this conference volume analyse and discuss how the cults, rituals and institutions in Anatolia in the 2nd and 1st millennium contribute to the economic process in those areas.

Phoenician culture was that of autonomous city-states. Indeed, the Phoenicians seem to have zealously held on to this Bronze Age social structure long after it gave way to nationalism and statehood in the southern Levant. Modern scholars often tend to emphasize the regional and individual nature of each Phoenician city to a point that some even question whether the Phoenicians can be referred to as an ethnic unit. As Aubet (2001: 9) stated, the Phoenicians were "a people without a state, without territory and without political unity." In this study, the author aims at examining this very issue through an analysis of the Phoenicians in the eastern Mediterranean during the Iron Age I-III, ca. 1200-332 BCE, the zenith of the Phoenician civilization. By analyzing various aspects of the material culture which were unique to the Phoenicians throughout the periods in question, the author shall attempt to identify a 'Phoenician koine', i.e. a shared material culture which reflected a common ethnic, religious, cultic, and social identity (Burke 2008: 160), which developed despite the lack of political unity.