Professor Frendo’s paper shows, via the examination of a Phoenician literary micro-text of circa the 8th century B.C. from Nora in Sardinia, that the fields of philology and literary appreciation can work hand in hand to find meaning in texts and to reach a reasonable interpretation. He will focus his attention on a close reading of this minute text, arguing all along that one concrete way of breaking the impasse of the hermeneutic circle is via what the philosopher Bernard Lonergan called ‘the self-correcting process of understanding’.

Professor Frendo is Head of the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Studies and a member of the Department of Classics and Archaeology in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta. His main area of interest is the study of the ancient Near East, with a special focus on Syria-Palestine; he mainly concentrates on Biblical Archaeology and Northwest Semitic, especially Classical Hebrew and Phoenician-Punic. He holds a Ph.D. in Biblical Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London, as well as a Doctorate from the University of Rome in Ancient Near Eastern studies, besides having degrees in philosophy, theology and biblical exegesis. He has published numerous articles and critical reviews in international scholarly publications, besides editing one of the special issues of Journal of Mediterranean Studies, which focused on Malta and the Phoenician World.