Precious materials were also required on a vast scale, in order to keep up with a slew of magnificent royal building projects designed to engender both awe and obedience. Of particular note was the ‘Palace without Rival’, built by the Assyrian monarch Sennacherib at Nineveh in the early seventh century BC. It was massive–over 10,000 square metres in area–and opulently decorated with scented woods ornamented with silver, copper and intricately carved ivory. The exterior walls were decorated with a mass of coloured glazed bricks. Every centimetre of the structure was covered with detailed narrative scenes outlining the king’s triumphs. Even the furniture was made of materials of the highest quality, for it was inlaid with ivory and precious metals.59
To function successfully, the Assyrian state required a regular supply of high-quality materials and luxury finished goods on a scale that only trade, not conquest, could provide. Increasingly, it was the Phoenician cities that the Assyrian kings expected to meet these heavy demands, as well as to provide a large number of ships and crews for the royal fleet. Of particular importance from the Assyrian perspective was the flow of precious metals–especially silver, which would eventually become the accepted currency throughout the empire–and of the iron required for armaments.60 The Phoenician cities’ usefulness to Assyria meant that some would continue to enjoy a certain degree of political and economic autonomy, instead of incorporation into the empire.61 Indeed, the establishment of Kition may have been a reaction to the economic pressure that Assyria now exerted on the Phoenician cities, with Tyre no longer able to rely solely on the continued goodwill of its Cypriot trading partners.
However, the real geopolitical watershed was reached when, at the start of the eighth century BC, the Assyrian king Adad-Ninari III conquered northern Syria.62 This development could be accurately described as a mixed blessing for the Tyrians. On the positive side, the Assyrian seizure of northern Syria had removed at a stroke some of their keenest commercial competitors. On the negative side, however, the loss of an important Tyrian source of precious metals was compounded when the victorious conqueror demanded those very same commodities as Phoenician tribute. If these stupendous demands were to be met, then new sources of mineral wealth had to be prospected and exploited. Moreover, they would also require a vast expansion of the scope and geographical range of previous Phoen-ician commercial operations. It thus appears to have been survival, rather than glory, that provided the motivation for the great Levantine colonial expansion in the far-off lands of the West.63
THE ‘DISCOVERY’ OF THE WEST
There has been much academic controversy about quite when the peoples of the Levant first became involved in trade in the central and western Mediterranean. It seems clear that the first western Phoenician colonies were established during the late ninth/early eighth centuries BC; however, the evidence for ‘pre-colonial’ mercantile activity is far less certain. Some Near Eastern goods were certainly circulating in the region in the earlier period, but who transported them is unknown.64 It is also clear, however, that the central Mediterranean was no unsophisticated backwater, and that the real success of the first identifiable Phoenicians in the area derived not from the establishment of a completely new set of trading networks, but largely from their insertion into ones that already existed.
The island of Sardinia, in particular, had been the nexus of a vibrant transmarine trading circuit that included central Italy, the Aeolian Islands, to the north of Sicily, the Iberian peninsula, Crete and Cyprus and that had existed since the twelfth century or before.65 The Nuragic people who had dominated the island since the early Bronze Age possessed a complex society with a sophisticated material culture of which the most striking features are intricate bronze figurines depicting, among other things, wild animals, warriors and boats. As well as communal tombs, well-sanctuaries and subterranean monumental shrines, Nuragic settlements usually consisted of circular dwellings clustered around very substantial two- or three-storey dry-wall towers (nuraghi), sometimes enclosed within a defensive perimeter (and still familiar landmarks on the island). More elaborate complexes with central towers surrounded by smaller lateral ones are thought to have been the strongholds of petty chiefdoms, and some of them were eventually transformed into religious shrines.66 As well as having mastered advanced agricultural techniques such as viticulture, the Nuragic inhabitants of Sardinia also transported goods, including fine pottery, overseas on their own sailing vessels.
The first Phoenician immigrants appear to have arrived on the island in the late ninth or early eighth century BC. Like Cyprus, Sardinia would have been of interest to Phoenician merchants for its substantial inland deposits of copper, lead, iron and silver, which were already being mined by indigenous communities.67 However, despite the fact that there were also fertile coastal plains suitable for agriculture, it appears that the first Levantine presence on Sardinia was very different from the colonial ventures that were taking place at roughly the same time in Cyprus.
At the metalworking centre of Sant’ Imbenia, now modern Alghero, in the north-west of the island, the population was a mixed Nuragic and Phoenician one. Sant’ Imbenia was heavily involved in trading with the Etruscan kingdoms of central Italy, across the Tyrrhenian Sea, and it appears likely that its Nuragic and Phoenician inhabitants were cooperating in commercial ventures.68 Sant’ Imbenia and central Italy would also be the scene of Levantine interactions with other newcomers trying to establish their own commercial and colonial networks. At Pithecusa on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, colonists from the Greek island of Euboea had established a settlement which, like Sant’ Imbenia, had a diverse demographic that included indigenous people and a sizeable number of persons of Levantine origin. Archaeologists calculate that the latter may have made up as much as 20 per cent of the settlement’s population.69 It is thought that Euboeans were resident at Sant’ Imbenia too. It has also been suggested recently that the city of Olbia on the north-east coast of Sardinia may have been a Greek or mixed settlement from the second half of the eighth century.70 Certainly there was considerable trade, and possibly other interactions, between the two settlements.71
The chief object of establishing Pithecusa, like Sant’ Imbenia, was to acquire raw materials–particularly iron, which was exchanged with mainland neighbours such as the Etruscans and Campanians for luxury goods from the Near East and the Aegean.72 The presence of ironsmelting workshops shows that the ore was probably processed on the island. Much of the Phoenician consolidation in the West has been viewed as an emphatic response to aggressive Greek colonization in the region; however, there is in fact good evidence for Phoenician–Greek cooperation in some of these early colonies.73 Although new dating evidence seems to show that the Phoenicians were trading in central Italy slightly before the Greeks, there is little evidence for tension between the two during this period.74 At Pithecusa, the Euboeans and the Phoenicians appear to have cooperated with one another because their commercial objectives were complementary rather than competitive. The Phoenicians were interested in acquiring the abundant silver in northern Etruria, a raw material in which the Greeks, despite growing wealth, showed little interest at this time.75 One can assume that the operations in Sardinia were equally complementary. Indeed, one might argue that it is in these first colonial ventures in the central Mediterranean that one witnesses the growth of the ‘Middle Ground’ on which Phoenician, Greek and indigenous populations interacted and cooperated.76
THE PHOENICIANS AND THE RECOVERY OF GREECE
The Euboeans and Phoenicians already had a long shared history in the eastern Mediterranean. And it appears that Levantine traders had done much to reconnect the inhabitants of Greece with the Near East after several centuries of insularity and obscurity. After the implosion of the Mycenaean civilization at the beginning of the twelfth century BC, which was part of the wider regional collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, Greece had suffered a huge drop in population, calculated by some at around 75 per cent. Furthermore, its inhabi
tants had abandoned sophisticated settlements and had forgotten many of the features that we associate with civilized life: monumental architecture, figurative art and even the ability to write had disappeared, and contact with the outside world had all but ceased.77
By the tenth century BC, however, the first signs of a quiet revolution can be detected in the archaeological record. At the settlement of Lefkandi on the island of Euboea, a surprising discovery has been made among the pottery and artefacts with which its inhabitants were usually buried. Arranged around the female occupant of Tomb 86 were gilt hair-coils and dress pins, and other bronze objects. Her bleached and brittle finger bones, covered in an assortment of nine gold rings, were placed over a finely crafted gilded bronze bowl. Although it is agreed that these luxury goods had come from the Near East, the question of how they got there is controversial. The Euboeans were the only Greeks during this period with sufficient experience of medium- and long-distance trade, but there is no evidence that they were engaged in contemporary mercantile operations with the Near East.78 It is far more plausible that the Phoenicians brought these goods to Greece.79 They had been continuously involved in Aegean trade since at least the fourteenth century BC. Their interest in resource-poor Greece probably lay in the fact that Euboea, through its successful regional trading networks within Greece, was far wealthier than other population centres.80 There also appears to have been a growing demand for Euboean pottery in the Near East–a market that the Phoenicians would have wanted to control.81
At the same time that the flow of goods to Greece from the Near East was increasing–particularly as emerging Greek institutions such as temples and religious sanctuaries grouped together to arrange the import of high-status offerings from the region–so too was the quantity of Greek pottery going in the opposite direction.82 By the end of the ninth century BC the Euboeans were undoubtedly involved in trans-Mediterranean transportation, for ninth-century archaeological evidence from the north-Syrian coastal trading station of Al Mina, located near the mouth of the river Orontes, points to the existence of Phoenicians and Euboeans residing and trading together in what was most probably an indigenously controlled settlement.83
Increasingly scholars have also speculated on the Phoenicians’ involvement in joint commercial ventures with Greeks besides the Euboeans. One particularly intriguing case is the city of Corinth, the pottery of which shows a clear ‘orientalizing’ influence, and begins to be exported in large quantities to both Phoenician and Greek settlements in the central and western Mediterranean during this period.84
Luxury goods and artisan techniques were not the only things that the Phoenicians had brought with them to Greece. Although the Phoenicians went to trade and not to deliver an extended tutorial on culture, many aspects of Greek literature, language, religious ritual and art were clearly heavily influenced by the Near East.85 Perhaps most important was the alphabet.86 The great strength of the Phoenician alphabetic script was that it could easily be learned by rote, and this was the way that the creator of the first Greek alphabet would have learned it.87 The first examples of Greek writing, scratched on pottery shards from Lefkandi, on the island of Euboea, date to the second quarter of the eighth century BC, and most scholars agree that the script was an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet.88 The loan words which the Greeks borrowed from the Phoenicians–byblos (the papyrus reed used as a writing material), deltos (a writing tablet), byssos (linen), sakkos (sack), gaulos (ship), makellon (market), titanos (lime), gypsum (plaster), harpe (curved sword), macha (battle)–give some indication of the scope of these adaptations.89 Predictably, many of the most important Phoenician innovations adopted by the Greeks related to maritime commerce–such as interest-bearing loans, maritime insurance, joint financing of commercial ventures, deposit banking, and, possibly, weights and measures.90 The Phoenicians were thus the bridge which brought the economic and cultural advances of the Near East to Greece and which created the foundation not only for future cooperation but also for deep-seated tensions between Phoenicians and Greeks.
The increase in Greek mercantile activities, however, makes it increasingly difficult to separate out the Greeks’ achievements from those of the Phoenicians. The best example of this is the invention of the trireme, the dominant warship on the Mediterranean between the seventh and fourth centuries BC, an achievement claimed for both sides by modern academics. The trireme had numerous advantages over its predecessor the penteconter, a narrow craft of around 25 metres in length, powered by a team of around fifty oarsmen and a single sail. The trireme was much more powerful, having space for eighty rowers who were placed at three different levels on either side of the greatly enlarged hull. Equipped also with two sails, one large, one small, in order to catch transverse winds, it was able to cover as much as 340 kilometres without stopping. For combat, the sails and other heavy equipment would be left ashore to give the ship more manoeuvrability. On the end of its prow it had a ram made of bronze, used for smashing holes in the sides of enemy ships. The trireme’s military capabilities were further enhanced by the presence of a foredeck close to the prow, on which archers and slingers would be stationed during sea battles, raining missiles on to the enemy crews.91
A number of ancient Greek writers claimed that the trireme had been invented by the Corinthians in the eighth century BC. In fact, with some notable exceptions, most Greek authors assert that all ancient warships were invented by their fellow Hellenes.92 However, there is no artistic representation or any other evidence for Greek triremes before the late sixth century BC.93 The first unambiguous reference to the construction of triremes concerns the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II building them for use on both the Mediterranean and Red seas around the start of the sixth century BC. As the Egyptians had no previous record of constructing any kind of sea craft like the trireme, it has long been assumed that Necho must have needed outside expertise. While there is little evidence of a strong Greek connection with Egypt during that period, the Phoenicians are known to have long supplied timber for boatbuilding there.94 Furthermore, the earlier development of the Phoenician bireme, with a deck clearly constructed over the rowers below, appears to show the genesis of the design which would lead to the trireme’s upper level of oarsmen.95
More generally, the futile scholarly quest for the trireme’s origins merely serves to mask the fact that the diverse ancient claims to originality were a product of the simultaneous use by several seafaring peoples of broadly similar vessels, showing that cultural interactions were taking place throughout the Mediterranean.96
Throughout history, the Mediterranean Sea has acted as an agent of both diversity and unity. Although often perceived as a collection of interconnected seas–Ionian, Aegean, Adriatic, Tyrrhenian etc.–which all possess their own identities and histories, the Mediterranean has also provided the means for those peoples who live on its edges to interact with one another.97 The building of craft that could travel on its waters, meant that goods, people and ideas could be, and were, exchanged between areas many thousands of kilometres distant.98 Like the Mediterranean itself, those who managed to master the complex crafts and skills associated with shipbuilding and maritime navigation acted not only as agents of cultural interaction and acculturation but also as symbols of cultural distinctiveness. It was these seemingly contradictory dynamics that provided the basis for Phoenician–Greek relations. Thus, the archaeological evidence of commercial cooperation is counterbalanced by the growing ambivalence towards Phoenicians in early Greek literature.
In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey–each a product of a time when both Greek and Phoenician colonial expansion in the Mediterranean was reaching its zenith during the eighth and seventh centuries BC–a clear distinction is drawn between the Phoenicians as a people and the exquisite artefacts that they produced. In the Iliad a large silver cup, a ‘masterpiece of Sidonian craftsmanship’, is offered as a prize by the Greek hero Achilles as ‘the loveliest thing in the world’. In another episode, Hecuba, queen of Troy,
is described as possessing richly embroidered robes woven by Sidonian women and so precious that they are kept in the treasure chamber of the palace and considered worthy to be offered up to Athena.99 This admiration for Phoenician workmanship is in stark opposition to the characterization of the Phoenicians as dishonest, greedy and sly.100 In one famous episode from the Odyssey, Eumaeus, the faithful swineherd of Odysseus, explains how he ended up as a slave looking after his master’s pigs. He had in fact been born a prince in his native land, before being kidnapped by his Sidonian nurse, who had given him to Phoenician traders. Odysseus himself would almost suffer the same fate at Phoenician hands. He recounts how he had been persuaded by ‘a dishonest Phoenician, a thieving wretch who had already performed a great deal of mischief in the world’, to travel with him to Phoenicia, where he had a house. However, the invitation turned out to be nothing more than a ploy to kidnap and sell him into slavery.101 Rather than expressing genuine hostility towards Phoenicians, these depictions might be viewed as representing a general deep-seated disapproval of traders among the Greek aristocratic elite, who wanted to create a clear distance between mercantile activities and themselves. However, the weight of evidence does seem to show that this antipathy was based on pre-existent negative attitudes towards the Phoenicians, rather than their acting simply as the random fall guy in a literary discourse on Greekness or its absence. It is also generally thought that the Odyssey was written down later than the Iliad, perhaps indicating that Greek attitudes towards the Phoenicians had hardened as their commercial rivalry developed. Yet, equally, the degree of cultural assimilation and appropriation that had already been taking place between Greeks and Phoenicians strongly suggests that such entrenched views were by no means universally held.102
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