The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean
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The notion of an Orientalizing phenomenon emerged from strictly stylistic and motival (iconographic) analysis of luxury objects—in particular, decorated metal bowls and bronze cauldrons—found in Greece and Italy that were associated with Phoenician craftsmanship (Riva and Vella 2006: 4–10; Gunter 2014: 83–84). A variety of evidence was marshaled in support of a Phoenician attribution for these items. The cauldrons, however, are now more often associated with the northern Levantine and Urartian regions, a situation that spotlights the fuzzy boundaries between the cultural products of the greater Levant and northern Mesopotamia, discussed later in this chapter. The evidence includes Homeric references to the Phoenicians as the manufacturers and traders of precious luxury goods; the use of Egyptianizing motifs (Phoenicia being best known archaeologically from the city of Byblos, which exhibited strong Egyptianizing tendencies and close political and economic relations with Egypt during the third and second millennia bce, although practically nothing of the first millennium Iron Age settlement is known [Thalmann 2007; Markoe 2000: 202–203]); the appearance on Cyprus, known to have been settled in part by Phoenicians, of similar bowls; and the presence of Phoenician inscriptions on two of the vessels found in Italy. This set of circumstantial evidence remains the basis for defining a Phoenician “high” art, as opposed to pottery, terracottas, or glyptic, all of which exhibit a distinct stylistic and motival difference from the luxury arts. Yet, it is only the “non–high arts” that can be securely connected to the Phoenician cities of the Levantine coast, from which in fact no “high” (luxury) arts have appeared (Van Dongen 2010: 474–77; Martin 2017: 30). A similar situation ensues at Phoenician settlements abroad, such as Carthage, where despite much greater archaeological exposure than at the Levantine cities and the excavation of around 3,000 tombs, practically no arts of this “high”/luxury type have been recovered (see discussion that follows). Nonetheless, it is the style and motifs of these “high” arts that are seen as the catalysts for the emergence of Classical arts and civilization in the West (see, e.g., Pallottino 1965). The difficulty of linking these “high” arts solely to Phoenician production is explored in the latter part of this chapter.
Critiquing “Orientalizing”
In recent years, a series of trenchant critiques have been brought to bear on the concept of “Orientalization,” which in turn have had a profound impact on questions surrounding the Phoenicians and their role in this phenomenon (e.g., Purcell 2006; Gunter 2014). Among the most incisive of these critiques is the false dichotomy established between an Orient (i.e., the East) and the West, a dichotomy whose ramifications continue to reverberate through our modern political world, making it a particularly insidious aspect of the concept (Gunter 2014; Martin 2017). Rooted in an anti-Semitic and Orientalist framework that estranged those cultural regions not considered Western (including the Middle East and North Africa), this dichotomy reified a hierarchy crowned by Classical Greece and its purported followers on the Italian and Iberian Peninsulas.
The reification of Classical civilization finds its clearest expression in the concept of transformation that the Ex Oriente Lux model espouses, in which the torch of civilization transferred from east to west during this period. The development of Greek vase painting is often used to illustrate this process of transference and transformation. The Orientalizing period in Greece is most clearly expressed by scholars through painted ceramic horizons, the most notable of which are the late eighth- and seventh-century bce Protocorinthian from Corinth, the Wild Goat style of the mid-seventh century from Rhodes and South Ionia, and later Protoattic ware in Athens in the second half of the seventh century. These ceramic styles are characterized by newly complex figural scenes, files of animals, and mythological creatures such as sphinxes and griffins, which represent a contrast with the preceding Geometric period pottery. The somewhat sudden appearance of new styles and motifs in Greek pottery, many of which exhibit links to “high-art” objects presumed to come from the Near East, especially ivory carving and metalworking, has led to the scholarly interpretation that the newly invigorated Greek ceramic tradition was inspired by Near Eastern precedents. That Near Eastern pottery of this same time period for the most part eschewed decoration and especially figural scenes, however, has been seen to highlight the innovative and unique quality of the emerging Greek art, which was inspired by but not bound to—derived from but ultimately surpassing—the East.
By implying a fundamental difference between supposed Eastern and Western cultures (with the concomitant implication of the cultural homogeneity within each of these entities), the dichotomy also obscures, on the one hand, the diversity of sociocultural entities that constitute the “Orient” (Van Dongen 2014), and on the other hand, the complexity of interactions happening within and across the “Western world” from Greece to the Iberian Peninsula (e.g., Purcell 2006: 26; Dietler and López-Ruiz 2009). Within this polarized view of East and West, the Phoenicians have come to represent almost the entirety of the East.
It is often assumed that the term “Phoenician” (phoinikes) is a Greek invention and that there was no self-identification by the people to whom it was applied (Aubet 2001: 6–9; Prag 2006; chapter 44, this volume). Moreover, the designation “Phoenician/Phoenicia” represents a generalized regional grouping, which lent itself well to external stereotyping (often but not always pejorative). The term does not signify a specific political identity, which was typically restricted to the individual city-states, such as Tyre or Sidon (Prag 2014). The peoples of the Early Iron Age Levant, therefore, identified themselves primarily with their home city, rather than with a broader ethnic or regional entity. The Levant itself was a multilingual space where numerous West Semitic and Indo-European languages were spoken: among the West Semitic languages, in addition to Phoenician, the most widespread were Aramaic, Hebrew, and Moabite, with Luwian as the primary Indo-European language. These languages did not always align neatly with known political entities. We have unfortunately inherited the later Greco-Roman sources’ tendency to conflate language with ethnicity, and it is these very sources that have defined for us a “Phoenician” culture that is an oversimplified perception of what was in fact a variegated and heterogenous set of populations (Bondì 2014: 60). We might echo here Nicholas Vella’s (2014: 41) rallying cry in describing the “Punic” Mediterranean as “a rich palimpsest, replacing the monolithic essence conveyed by Moscati’s invented ‘Phoenicians,’” or Nicholas Purcell’s (2006: 26) image of the Mediterranean as “kaleidoscopic.”
Phoenician Art Abroad?
We know (or at least feel fairly confident) that people from the Levantine cities associated by the Greeks with the Phoenicians (principal among them, Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre) began establishing settlements and trading outposts across the Mediterranean, including on Cyprus perhaps before 1000 bce, followed by settlements in North Africa (especially Carthage at the end of the ninth century bce), on various islands including Sicily and Sardinia, the coast of Tyrrhenian Italy, and the southern and southwestern Iberian coast from the eighth century onward (Aubet 2001; see also various chapters in this volume for their presence in the different areas). These people have been identified as Phoenician through later literary allusions to their mother cities, the presence of Phoenician “low” material culture (typically ceramics), and their use of the Phoenician language and script. While the earlier phases of this expansion remain fuzzy, the evidence becomes clearer for these historical activities by the eighth century bce (Aubet 2001). However, a large gap exists between our historical knowledge of these “colonizing” activities and the material objects—especially the “high” arts—often assigned to the Phoenicians as definitive of their culture. Indeed, many of the hallmarks of supposedly Phoenician artistic production have no strong basis for their exclusive connection with the Phoenician-speaking Levantine city-states or their settlements elsewhere around the Mediterranean. Among the most commonly cited of these objects are ivory carvings, metal bowls, and engraved tridacna
shells. If we consider each one in turn, we find that their exclusive identification with the Phoenicians cannot be supported by the evidence. (For Phoenician art, see also chapter 23, this volume.)
Ivories
Since at least the early twentieth century, with Frederik Poulsen’s 1912 publication Der Orient und die frügriechische Kunst, the large corpus of carved ivories known from sites throughout the Near East and Mediterranean has been divided in its attribution to either the Phoenicians or the North Syrians (“Hittite” in Poulsen’s parlance). The overwhelming number of these ivories derives from the royal storehouses of the Assyrian empire and is presumed to represent the tribute and booty of its kings’ repeated military campaigns (Herrmann et al. 2009). Indeed, it has been acknowledged throughout the scholarship that ivories are preeminently mobile and thus their location of deposition often does not correspond to their site of production (e.g., the case of the Arslan Tash ivories: Winter 1981; also Feldman 2014). Almost no ivories have been archaeologically recovered from the cities of the Phoenician heartland themselves (still relevant, Winter 1976). Thus, identification of these ivories as Phoenician rests principally on stylistic and motival evidence internal to the ivories themselves—namely their heavily Egyptianizing motifs executed in spare, elongated proportions (often cited as refined or elegant) (on the ivories, see chapter 23, this volume, with figures). That such an Egyptianizing tendency should be linked to Phoenicia lies at the very base of formulating a Phoenician artistic and hence cultural style.
While there may be good cause to propose that a certain likelihood of Egyptianizing elements would occur in the artistic production of the Phoenician city-states, there is growing evidence that such Egyptianizing trends existed more widely across the southern Levant and even into the northern parts, rather than being limited to the Phoenician cities. For example, arguments attributing the ninth- to eighth-century bce Egyptianizing ivories found at Samaria—the capital of Israel from the ninth century to its conquest by Assyria in 701 bce—to the Phoenicians (as a result of the biblically attested marriage of Ahab to the Phoenician princess Jezebel) have recently been challenged, for a number of reasons. For instance, there is a growing number of carved ivories known from early Israelite settlements, and the inclusion of unworked ivory pieces among the Samaria assemblage suggests local production (Naeh 2015; Uehlinger 2005). Indeed, a growing opinion is emerging that the boundaries for the stylistic classification of Levantine ivories are more permeable and ill-defined than first thought (Suter 2015). When we turn to the closely linked corpus of decorated metal bowls, a similar pattern emerges.
Metal Bowls
The small bowls (most likely drinking and libation cups), typically of bronze, silver, or more rarely gold, exhibit detailed decoration executed through repoussé and chasing techniques. Initially identified as Phoenician in part owing to references to elaborate “Sidonian” silver mixing bowls in the Iliad and Odyssey (Hom. Il. 23.740–50; Od. 4.615–19), it is now recognized that these bowls represent a diversity of styles and iconography indicative of multiple production locales throughout the Levant and quite possibly well beyond (Markoe 1985: 3). Specimens have been excavated at sites from southwestern Iran in the east to Italy in the west and span a chronological range from at least 900 to around 600 bce. Like the ivories, with which they are often linked, the corpus has been divided between a more Egyptianizing Phoenician group and a North Syrian or Aramaean group, although they continue to be referred to as a whole as “Phoenician bowls” (Markoe 1985: 3).
Several of the bowls preserve inscriptions on them in a variety of languages (Phoenician, Aramaic, Luwian, Greek-Cypriot, and Akkadian), which have been used to attribute manufacture in some instances—in particular the Phoenician and Aramaic inscribed examples (Barnett 1967; Markoe 1985: 72–74; Feldman 2015). Yet, even in following this approach, questions arise regarding the linking of artistic styles with ethnic identities such as Phoenician. For example, a distinctive group from Cyprus exhibiting Egyptianizing elements has been associated with the Phoenician presence on the island and often referred to as Cypro-Phoenician (Markoe 1985). However, five of these vessels bear inscriptions in Greek written in the Cypriot syllabary, while none of them uses the Phoenician language, despite several of them exhibiting quintessential Phoenician artistic style and motifs such as one from the Kourion Treasure (figure 24.1). The only metal vessels from the island inscribed in Phoenician are a set of small fragments of what were probably two bronze bowls said to have been found in the vicinity of Limassol in the 1870s (Masson and Sznycer 1972: 77–78; Masson 1985; Sznycer 1985). Because only small fragments survive, none of which preserve decoration, they cannot contribute to a discussion of the stylistic characteristics of Phoenician art, even if one could associate inscribed language with cultural identity. Indeed, equating language with identity is difficult in the best instances, and is particularly fraught on Cyprus, where three different languages (Cypriot Greek, “Eteocypriot,” and Phoenician), and three scripts (Cypro-Syllabic, Greek, and Phoenician alphabets) co-occur, even within shared cultic spaces (Ulbrich 2016). For example, Anja Ulbrich (2016: 85–86) cites sixth-century bce inscriptions found at a sanctuary dedicated to Athena at Idalion, including a Phoenician inscription naming Anat and a Greek Cypro-Syllabic inscription to A-ta-na (Athena). (On the Phoenicians in Cyprus, see chapter 31, this volume).
Figure 24.1 Gilded silver bowl with Greek inscription in Cypriot syllabary naming Akestor and Timokretes, from the Treasure of Kourion, diameter 16.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 74.51.4554.
Source: Public domain.
The presence of Phoenician language inscriptions on some of the objects attributed to Phoenician manufacture—for example, two highly Egyptianizing vessels found in Italy—is also not an unequivocal indicator of production by or in a “Phoenician” settlement, since the Phoenician language served as a lingua franca of the greater Levantine region from at least the ninth century through the seventh century bce, when Aramaic slowly superseded it (Teixidor 1975: 123). There are numerous examples of Phoenician inscriptions, some bilingual with Luwian, used for display purposes in the northern Levant and southeastern Anatolia (Feldman 2014: 35–36; Özyar 2016: 140–41). The Phoenician alphabet was widely used during the early centuries of the Iron Age to write a variety of other languages, including even to write Greek names on Cyprus (Smith 2008: 266; Van Dongen 2010: 472–74). While there appears to be a hardening of ethno-linguistic identities over the course of the eighth and seventh centuries bce, suggesting a closer association between language and ethnic identity in the following centuries, the by-then extensive and longstanding dispersal of Phoenician-speaking populations cautions us against equating the use of the language as part of a single, homogenous cultural entity (and with similar arguments regarding the early use of Greek, see Hall 1997: 180–81).
Tridacna Shells
A last class of objects that is often associated with Phoenician production (as well as Phoenician trade and Orientalizing influence) is the engraved tridacna shell (Tridacna squamosa; figure 24.2). Typically carved with the figure of a winged female or human-headed bird, the head formed from the umbo (hinge) of one side of the bivalve mollusk, such tridacna shells have been excavated at sites in Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Egypt, western Anatolia, the Aegean, Greece, and one example from Italy (Caubet 2014). Their date of production appears to be limited to the mid-seventh through early sixth centuries bce. Like the ivories and bowls, the tridacna shells were first generally classified as “Phoenician.” Later, the attribution shifted to “North Syrian” based on comparisons with the so-called North Syrian ivories, especially the facial renderings of the female heads carved on the umbo (Stucky 1974). More recently, according to close stylistic comparisons with stone cosmetic palettes from Jordan (with which the tridacna shells also appear to share a function in terms of their use for holding cosmetics) and the natural habitat of the mollusk species Tridacna squamosa in the Red Sea (in addition to the Persian
Gulf and Indian Ocean), their place of production has been located in inland Palestine and the Transjordan region (Stucky 2007; Caubet 2014).
Figure 24.2 Tridacna shell engraved with winged female, from Ashur (Assyrian house 58), width 25.2 cm, height 16.3 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiastisches Museum, VA 05526.
Source: Vorderasiatisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz; photograph: Olaf M. Teßmer.
Phoenician Middlemen?
If such luxury objects were not solely produced in Phoenician settlements, was it therefore a situation where the Phoenicians served as the mechanism by which these foreign materials traveled to their new locales? This might be supported by the references in Homer, in which Phoenicians are described as the purveyors of all sorts of trinkets and baubles (athyrmata; e.g., Od. 15.416). However, the Homeric references should be read with caution, as it has been demonstrated that they exhibit uneven opinions regarding the Phoenicians that cast doubt on their trustworthiness as documentary evidence (Winter 1995; Martin 2017: 30). Regardless by what mechanism these and other small-scale luxurious items moved around the Mediterranean during the Iron Age, their probable production at sites beyond those of Phoenicia and Phoenician settlements calls into question whether Phoenicians can be credited—at least as sole agents—with the stylistic and motival elements that have been seen to motivate Orientalizing trends.