Contextual Approach
Fourth, we need to move beyond style and context at the heart of archaeological interpretation, even if context alone may be inadequate to permit a distinction between ethnicity and other forms of social identity. In order to do so, we need to flag and support those publications, especially of excavations, where it is not a labor best left to Heracles-Melqart to recover contextual information. Exhibition catalogues cannot replace the full and proper publication of categories of material culture recovered in research excavations. Even more important, perhaps, are those publications that result from developer-funded archaeology, which are a mine of untapped information often compiled by archaeologists who are not necessarily specialists in Phoenician and Punic studies (Gras 2009: 185). The profound effects of the dissemination of such information is well known for other fields (e.g., Bradley 2006).
Food, Cooking, and Social Identity
Fifth, if we really are what we eat, then in our attempt to define “Phoenicianness,” we surely stand to gain by directing research into foodways, and especially cooking and food. Contemplation of these issues steers us into terrain well trodden by cultural anthropologists who have long concerned themselves with the relationships between food, cooking, and social identity (e.g., Graff and Rodríguez-Alegría 2012). There have already been one or two attempts to consider the preparation and consumption of food at Phoenician Cerro del Villar, off the coast of southern Spain, and Phoenician Motya, off the Sicilian coast, by Ana Delgado and Meritxell Ferrer (Delgado and Ferrer 2007; Delgado Hervás 2010). There, pottery vessel shape and function have been related to behavior in a novel way, and the cautious suggestion of pluri-ethnic communities at these sites has much to commend it. Moreover, as far as edible commodities and other foodstuffs are concerned, we stand to gain in allowing scientific techniques to have their say in assessing what was carried in the pottery containers whose typology we have studied ad nauseum. I recall with great pleasure the moment when, at the international gathering of Phoenician and Punic studies held in Sardinia in 2013, Ayelet Gilboa announced that traces of cinnamon originating in South or Southeast Asia had been found in late tenth-century bce Phoenician flasks (Gilboa and Nadar 2015). That result opens up new possibilities for understanding the nature and value of food exotica in the Phoenician world.
People
Sixth, it is often said that the only time archaeologists really come in contact with people from the past is when they find their bodies. It is surprising, therefore, how painfully little we actually know about skeletons uncovered in the course of the last century from all the minor and major inhumation cemeteries in the Phoenician and Punic world. I am not only referring to the average tomb but also to exceptional discoveries. Why do we think only of an inscription on a reused Egyptian sarcophagus at the mention of the name of the late sixth-century bce Sidonian king Tabnit, when in actual fact in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul there is on display the king’s body and an interesting panoply of grave goods beside the sarcophagus? To my knowledge, no analyses have been done on this exceptional find (Dixon 2013: 550–52). A battery of scientific techniques, including dietary isotope analysis, offers exciting prospects for future investigations of culture change and of tracing human movements, especially in a Mediterranean, where migration, movement, and settlement are key to understand notions of origins and identity, whether real or mythical. But to do this properly we need to cast a wide net and think of large data sets. It is this approach that seems to be attracting funding, if we go by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Diaspora, Migration, Identities program that ran between 2005 and 2010 (Knott and McLoughlin 2010) and the Times of their Lives project funded by the European Research Council’s FP7 Idea program between 2012 and 2017, dedicated to the construction of precise chronologies for the Neolithic period in Europe with which to write narratives that can explain change at the scale of single generations (Whittle 2018).
Collaboration
My seventh point regards collaboration. Moscati’s success in starting on a project with a wide geographical scope rested in large part on the support of individuals and institutions—a network of collaborators that he established. How the machinery of that network was oiled will no doubt be of interest to future historians (e.g., Rossi 2015). What I mean by “collaboration” is the need to take cognizance of the fact that projects with a pan-Mediterranean scope require expertise from different fields and different specializations. The existence of centers dedicated to Phoenician and Punic studies, such as the one at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom), or the Centro de Estudios Fenicios y Punicos (Spain), is one possible way to bridge those disciplinary divides that have stifled original research for far too long. Multidisciplinary volumes, where experts on the different subfields (archaeological, art-historical, historiographical, epigraphic and linguistic, etc.) present their most recent views, such as this Handbook and the ongoing compilation of the Dizionario Enciclopedico della Civiltà Fenicia (http://www.decf-cnr.org/), are also helpful. The recent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “From Assyria to Iberia,” also put the Phoenicians at the center of an axis of Mediterranean transformations (Aruz et al. 2014; Aruz and Seymour 2016), and international conferences and their subsequent publications will continue to be crucial to foster the multinational and multidisciplinary dialogue needed to understand the Phoenician phenomenon.
Publication
My eighth and final plea is directed to those who hold in their hands the access keys to archaeological material or related archives, as well as those who withhold from scholarly attention the fruits of years of research. At the time of the editing of this Handbook, we are still waiting to see in print the final report of the important American excavations at the tophet in Carthage, carried out in 1975; we are also waiting for the proceedings of the International Congress of Phoenician and Punic Studies, held in Hammamet in 2009.
The chapters in this volume offer an update on advances achieved on a wide range of fronts, in terms of disciplines, approaches, and geographical and chronological span. The readings speak for themselves, testimony to the long way that the scattered but relentless study of Phoenician and Punic culture(s) has come since the 1980s, when the discipline saw its international launch.
References
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Aruz, J., and M. Seymour, eds. 2016. Assyria to Iberia: Art and Culture in the Iron Age. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bonzano, F. 2017. Fanum Iunonis Melitense: L’area centrale del santuario di Tas-Silġ a Malta in età tardo-repubblicana. Bari: Edipuglia.
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Delgado, A., and M. Ferrer. 2007. “Cultural Contacts in Colonial Settings: The Construction of New Identities in Phoenician Settlements of the Western Mediterranean.” Stanford Journal of Archaeology 5: 18–42.
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Part One
Histories
The East
Chapter 4
Canaanite Roots, Proto-Phoenicia, and the Early Phoenician Period
ca. 1300–1000 bce
Ann E. Killebrew
Through an analysis of the archaeological and literary evidence from the northern and central Levantine littoral, this chapter examines the Late Bronze Age roots and the emergence of a cultural entity known as “Phoenician” in later biblical and Classical sources (see chapters 43 and 44, this volume). Chronologically, the centuries under discussion here span the Late Bronze II (ca. 1400–1200/1150 bce) and Iron I (ca. 1200/1150–1000 bce) periods. They encompass the period of Hittite and Egyptian New Kingdom imperial domination of the eastern Mediterranean littoral, best expressed in those empires’ expansionist policies in the Levant and the development of the region’s first global economy. At around 1200 bce, this “Age of Internationalism” ended, interregional trade networks collapsed, and the Levant experienced a socioeconomic, political, and territorial restructuring that allowed for the emergence of new entities defined by their cultural borders. These changes were most pronounced in the south. Along the southern Levantine coastal plain, the appearance of a new Aegean-style material culture heralds the arrival of the Philistines. In the central highlands of Canaan, a dramatic shift in settlement patterns signals local migrations of displaced peoples and possibly escaped slaves, a phenomenon that evokes the biblical account of the ethnogenesis of early Israel. In contrast, the coastal city-states on the northern and central Levantine littoral are defined by their resilience, cultural continuity, and continued seafaring and commercial activities, resulting in a shared material culture that has been termed “Phoenician.”
Throughout its history, geography has played a pivotal role in the region’s socioeconomic and cultural development. Its diverse and fragmented geography is defined by its narrow coastal strip, measuring ca. 10 km at its widest, bordered on the east by the Mount Lebanon and Galilee ranges. The region was further subdivided into smaller territories by rivers and mountain spurs that reached the sea. This segmented landscape with its formidable mountainous eastern border encouraged the development of autonomous city-state polities. Many of its coastal cities, which controlled the surrounding hinterland, were located on promontories overlooking bays or natural harbors or anchorages. Two sites, Arwad and Tyre, were situated on islands just off the coast. Owing to their location and environmental setting, these coastal cities served as economic hubs of regional and international interaction that connected the Mediterranean Sea with the interior regions of the Levant and the wider ancient Near East.
Archaeologically, Iron Age Phoenicia is defined by its shared culture traits distinctive to this area, which can be discerned already in the twelfth century bce (as other chapters in this volume show), as well as a distinct language within the Northwest Semitic language group and an alphabetic script identified as Phoenician already in antiquity (see chapters 15 and 16, this volume). Based on the written sources and cultural features that demonstrate both continuity with second-millennium bce Levantine traditions and innovation, modern scholarship identifies the cultural boundaries of Phoenicia as encompassing Arwad and the Akkar Plain in the north and continuing southward to Akko and its plain until the Mount Carmel headland. Additional key settlements that have been excavated within this territory include Tell Kazel (Sumur, Simyra, Zemar), Beirut (Berytus), and Byblos (Jebail, Jebeil, Jubail, Gebal) in northern Phoenicia. Sites in southern Phoenicia, along the central Levantine coast, include Sidon (Sayda), Sarepta (Zarephath), Tyre (Ṣur, Tsor), and Tell Keisan, a satellite settlement of Akko (map 4.1). However, these borders are fluid and change over time. During the twelfth through tenth centuries bce, the port city of Dor in the Sharon Plain, located southwest of the Mount Carmel range, shared many features with Iron I Phoenicia, especially its ceramic assemblage. Thus, Dor is often considered to be p
art of the same cultural milieu of early southern Phoenician sites, prior to its ninth-century bce incorporation into the Israelite sphere of influence (see chapter 30, this volume; Gilboa, Waiman-Barak, and Sharon 2015; Gilboa and Sharon 2017).
Map 4.1 Map of Phoenician sites mentioned in chapter 4.
Source: Map from Google Earth; graphics by R. Stidsing.
Phoenician Origins
There is no consensus regarding the ethnogenesis or self-ascribed identity of a people residing in the region defined by others and in modern scholarship as Phoenicia (see Röllig 1983 and Edrey 2016 for discussions and bibliographies). Ancient authors, such as Herodotus (1.1, 7.89), describe the Phoenicians as foreigners who migrated to the Levantine coast. These later Classical sources, however, have largely been discounted by modern scholarship, as the archaeological evidence indicates pronounced cultural continuity with Late Bronze Age traditions, which supports an autochthonous origin for the Iron Age inhabitants of the northern Levantine coast. Considering the clear Iron Age ties with the preceding Bronze Age material culture, some maintain that the term “Phoenician” should be broadened to include third- (Harden 1962: 21–22) or second-millennium Bronze Age coastal Levantine peoples (e.g., Garbini 1980: 1). A majority of scholars propose that Phoenician culture of the northern and central Levantine coast developed out of the thirteenth-century bce “Canaanite” coastal (or a “Proto-Phoenician”) world following the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. This view holds that the Phoenicians were direct descendants of their Canaanite precursors (see, e.g., Markoe 2000: 12; Aubet 2001: 12; Bondi 2001: 23; Doumet-Serhal 2009: 517). Others suggest that “Phoenician” refers to a new political and entrepreneurial economic model that emerged following the collapse of state-controlled international trade during the late second millennium (Sherratt 1998). Some even question the use of the term, arguing that the concept of a Phoenician entity in antiquity is a modern construct, especially as there is no indication that peoples living within the region defined as Phoenicia self-identified as “Phoenicians,” shared a common identity, or considered themselves members of the same “ethnic” group (Quinn 2017: 25–43).
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