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“I went to Cyprus, Phoenicia and the Egyptians,” boasts King Menalaus in the Odyssey. But had the Phoenicians arrived in the Mediterranean by the Late Bronze or early Iron Age? This inscription, known as the Nora fragment, is yet to be deciphered. Some experts claim that the fragment cannot date to before the ninth century B.C. But Frank Moore Cross, the prominent Harvard paleographer, dates it earlier, to the 11th century B.C., suggesting an early-Iron Age date for Phoenician expansion to the west.