By Josephine Quinn

The ancient Phoenicians are the Mediterranean’s first celebrities: sailors and merchants who traveled from their narrow strip of coastline in the Levant across the Mediterranean and through the pillars of Hercules, refining the arts of trade and navigation. From at least the ninth century BCE they founded settlements from Cyprus to North Africa to the Atlantic coast of Spain. This was long before the Greeks started their colonial expeditions, and Herodotus reports that the Phoenicians taught the Greeks many things, including the alphabet. Their homeland cities, including Tyre and Sidon, were conquered by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, but in the west Carthage went on to survive two Punic Wars and was only finally destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE.

Byblos, Temple of the Obelisks. All images courtesy of Josephine Quinn.

Carthage.

Sidon.

Tharros, Sardinia.

Tophet at Carthage.

In their own eyes, however, the Phoenicians don’t seem to have existed. ‘Phoenician’ was a label Greek writers used for Levantine mariners who spoke similar dialects of a language very different from their own. The term implied little about those people’s cultural or ancestral ties, and it apparently meant nothing to the people themselves: no one from the coastal cities or their overseas colonies ever to our knowledge described themselves as ‘Phoenician’.

In fact, there’s no evidence that they thought of themselves as a community at all. Scholars sometimes suggest that the people we call Phoenician called themselves ‘Canaanite’, but there are only two late, weak pieces of evidence for the use of this term as a straightforward self-description. One is a Phoenician inscription from a Numidian city in second century BCE Algeria that is often said to be dedicated by a ‘man of Canaan’ (ʾŠ KNʿN), although it was pointed out as long ago as the 1960s that the final ‘N’ in is fact an ‘L’. The other is an anecdote recorded by St. Augustine more than five hundred years later about Algerian peasants who call themselves ‘Chanani’, but the Latin of the passage is corrupt, the manuscripts are in disagreement, and the comment provides suspiciously convenient evidence for the theological argument being made in the passage concerned.

This lack of evidence for ethnic identification is not simply due to a lack of evidence: we have over 10,000 Phoenician inscriptions from the Levant, the western colonies (especially Carthage), and other Mediterranean cities, almost all of them funerary or votive – which is to say they describe a person who is being commemorated or making an offering. And they describe them in different ways, sometimes as coming from particular towns – Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Carthage – or by their political offices, but most frequently in terms of their families, regularly going back two or three generations and in some cases sixteen or seventeen.

Perhaps things would look different if we had Phoenician equivalents of the Homeric epics or the Hebrew Bible, where we can read of larger identities people found beyond their towns and families, as ‘Achaeans’ or ‘Sons of Israel’, identities that could persuade them to act together to face foreign foes. But whether Phoenician literature is lost or never existed, we just don’t know what it might have said – and in any case, literary accounts can be quite misleading in such matters: the views of a small coterie of intellectuals are easy to read onto a larger group of people who may not share them or even know about them.

Luckily, explicit self-description isn’t the only way people reveal their sense of themselves: we can also look at the evidence for what they do, and in particular what they do together. In the case of the Phoenicians this sometimes picks out regional identities much smaller than ‘Phoenician’, but it can also reveal larger groups that cross what are now considered ethnic boundaries.

To take religion as an example, in the former category a small group of Levantine settlements clustered around the Straits of Sicily in the central Mediterranean practiced child sacrifice to Baal in communal sanctuaries, a very distinctive behavior that would have marked them off in social and cultural terms from other peoples in the region, including other ‘Phoenicians’. And in the latter we find the much more widespread cult of Melqart, a god who mapped so easily and often onto the Greek god Herakles that it is frequently difficult to tell whether their followers saw any significant difference between them at all: this was a god who brought Greek and Phoenician speakers together across the whole of the Mediterranean.

How did we get from a world of local identities and idiosyncratic regional communities to the modern image of the Phoenicians as a distinct historical and cultural group? This is a relatively recent development, fully emerging only in the later nineteenth century, and in part it reflects modern European assumptions about the universality of national or ethnic identities and even of identity itself. But it also reflects the unexpected role played by the Phoenicians in the construction of modern nationalisms.

In sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain a fantasy that the island had been colonized by this sophisticated and adventurous maritime people helped differentiate the British from the French, associated more closely with the Romans and their territorial empire. In eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland, by contrast, similar stories of Phoenician ancestry recast the British occupation of Ireland in terms of the great struggle between noble Carthage and the savage imperial power of Rome. And in the early twentieth century, back in the Levant, successful Catholic agitation for a separate Lebanese state was based on a claim to a common Phoenician past that repudiated the new country’s Arab history and heritage in favor of a Mediterranean identity.

The reality is that the Iron Age Levant, like the Mediterranean as a whole, was a patchwork of different kinds of community with different needs, desires, and identities. Some, like the Israelites and Moabites, seem to have been actively seeking a common identity in this period; others, like the Phoenicians, were ignoring or even rejecting that possibility.

In part this was the result of their environment: a set of natural harbours open to the sea, but cut off from the hinterland by the bulk of Mount Lebanon and from each other by deep river valleys. These cities may look like neighbours on a map, but their most obvious contacts, customers, and relationships were overseas.

It may also however have been deliberate: James C. Scott argued in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) that self-governing people living on the periphery of expansionary states tend to adopt strategies to avoid incorporation, and to minimize taxation, conscription, and forced labor. This produces what he calls ‘shatterzones’, areas where people live mobile lives, often physically dispersed in rugged terrain that is hard to police from the outside. They tend to resist state formation and expansion among themselves as well as by their more powerful neighbours, and they often have flexible identities, easy to change and hard to read. This picture rings true too for the ancient ‘Phoenicians’, both in the mountainous Levant, on the edge of the great plains empires of Mesopotamia and Iran but never fully subject to them, or as migrants in the Mediterranean, another kind of shatter zone, where the activities of Levantine sailors were invisible and unaccountable to their overlords further east, and often to each other.

Josephine Quinn is Associate Professor (University Lecturer) in Ancient History at Oxford University, and Fellow and Tutor of Worcester College, Oxford. She is the author of In Search of the Phoenicians.