We may assume that different types of people would have lived on and worked these lands. We must, in any case, set aside the question of slavery, for lack of evidence in the material record. We know that there were slaves at Carthage, if we are to believe Late Roman sources (Gsell 1920: 47), but this does not imply that the situation was the same everywhere. Slaves, for one thing, do not usually leave any trace in the funerary archaeological record. Moreover, no structures or other elements have been found indicating their presence for the different aspects of production mentioned here. While eastern sources speak clearly of slaves, therefore, the same situation cannot be assumed for the western Mediterranean, despite some scholars sustaining the idea that the workforce at large was “non-free” (Wagner and Ruiz Cabrero 2015).
While there remain, then, many questions about the status of peasants, information from cemeteries points to the existence of an important group of people who had some wealth, at least since the fifth century bce. Once again, the best data come from Ibiza. On that island, each farm had its own cemetery, many of which were excavated in the twentieth century. As in the wide urban necropolis of Puig des Molins, they are characterized by chamber tombs and trenches well cut into rock. A wealth of grave goods accompanies these burials, including local pottery, but also imported vessels (mostly Greek), as well as jewelry, amulets, clay figurines, and even exotic ostrich eggs (for the Phoenician-Punic funerary world, see chapter 20, this volume). On the whole, these “rural” graves are as rich as the “better” tombs found in the city (larger, well built, rich in grave goods). In Sardinia, the cemeteries are wider and usually are connected with a village, with much more modest burials. But, still, farms excavated there in recent years give the impression of some wealth, or at least widespread well-being. For example, houses are well built, with painted or plastered walls; Attic pottery was afforded for perfumes (lekythoi), as well as for illumination (lamps); money circulated (not merely local); and even an incised weight for trade has been found. The overall image coming from the archaeological record, in Ibiza as in the Terralba district, in west-central Sardinia, therefore, is that of a powerful social group of farmers who may not have owned the land but who lived on it and managed it with indubitable success. The cliché of a poor peasant who barely survives at the brink of existence doesn’t seem to be the rule there, and as far as we know, it does not apply anywhere else in the Punic agricultural world.
But did a Punic agriculture really exist? Or was there simply one Mediterranean agriculture in antiquity, from Greece to Rome, from Etruria to Carthage? There are many shared features, but it should be remembered that, as the geographer Oliver Rackham put it, “Combined with the varied and mountainous topography, diverse geology, and the diversity of human cultures, Mediterranean lands are dramatically varied. Generalizations about the Mediterranean should be treated with suspicion” (Rackham 2003: 33; cf. also the approach in Horden and Purcell 2000).
We may conclude, then, that there was an ancient agriculture in the Mediterranean, different from the continental one, but it should be approached and studied preferably from the natural, cultural, and historical conditions of each area. Phoenician and Punic agriculture is no exception to that rule.
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Part Three
Regional Studies and Interactions
Chapter 30
The Levant
Gunnar Lehmann
Scope And Methodology
This chapter is concerned with the role of Phoenicians in the Levant during the Iron Age. Pursuing Phoenician interaction with the world demands some definitions. What were the borders of the Phoenician “homeland”? And what constituted “Phoenician” identity? As these topics are also addressed in other parts of this volume, the discussion here is confined to a short outline of the problem.
Phoenicians are defined by some scholars geographically as the inhabitants of the territory between the city of Arwad in the north and the city of Tyre in the south. Others base their definition on the alphabetic textual record of the first millennium bce and their occurrences. This approach focuses on texts, writing, and language. Again others prefer the archaeological evidence and the distribution of a particular material culture, especially ceramics, considered “Phoenician.” Yet another debate focuses on the question of whether the Phoenician phenomenon should include the second millennium bce or only the first millennium. There is an abundant literature dealing with the subject of defining “Phoenicians” and “Phoenicia” (e.g., Pastor-Borgoñon 1988–1990; Winter 2010; for Bronze Age antecedents and Iron Age Phoenicia, see chapters 4 and 5, this volume).
It is difficult to overcome common stereotypes concerning the Phoenicians, in particular as they emerged already in ancient Greek and Roman literature (Prag 2010). The assumed accuracy of antique texts led to constructions of a questionable Phoenician cultural homogeneity (Vella 2014: 25; on the Classical sources, see chapter 44, this volume). Moreover, much of the assumed “Phoenician” material heritage comes in fact from collections and the antiquities market. Handling such externally produced texts and decontextualized archaeological artifacts created “mega-catalogues” of “Phoenician culture,” yet provides little insight into the identity and the historical development of the ancient societies in Lebanon. Original local political and linguistic distinctions and regional variations of the material culture are often lumped together with little regard to their change over time and the aspirations of the peoples who lived and created the “Phoenician world.”
It would be worthwhile to concentrate on what evidence escapes such stereotypes rather than creating typologies built upon them. One case in point is the discussion regarding the “Phoenician homeland.” The detailed analysis of Early Iron Age pottery fabrics typically held to be “Phoenician” demonstrates that some of the ceramics were produced at Tyre, while others were manufactured at Dor in Israel (Gilboa and Goren 2015). Among the few notices we have concerning Early Iron Age Dor is the tradition that the city was ruled by Tjeker (or Sikils), a group understood to be of non-Semitic origin and one of the “Sea Peoples” (Gilboa 2005: 67). In the past, however, Tjeker were never considered “Phoenician.”
What, then, is the “Phoenician homeland”? In our understanding, “Phoenicia” emerged with the withdrawal of the Late Bronze Age empires and the formation of independent small city-states in the Levant that continued some of the local Bronze Age traditions until the tenth century bce. During the Early Iron Age, “Phoenicia” appears to be a region of small city-states with similar political structures located along the Mediterranean coast. Some of these city-states continued after the Late Bronze Age, while others only emerged in the twelfth–eleventh centuries bce. The political economy of these entities resembled one another, and their maritime and continental exchange was embedded in multidirectional, noncentralized networks. This “Phoenician homeland” is not ethnically defined and its borders are flexible and fluctuating. What it might have been was more of a social, political, and technological phenomenon (also see chapters in this volume on different aspects of Phoenician culture, including religion, art, technologies, and language). The most notable aspect of “Phoenicia” was probably the mercantile character of the city-states with its specific differentiation of commercial and political structures that now came to characterize the internal organization of individual and “independent states (Sherratt and Sherratt 1993: 361).
With its apparent social blend of a local population and components of “Sea Peoples,” Dor was part of the early Phoenician phenomenon. When the city was annexed by the kingdom of Israel and its socioeconomic and political structure changed, the city lost its importance as a coastal trading center. As a result, Dor bowed out of the Phoenician way and the “Phoenician homeland” simply contracted around the remaining cities in modern Lebanon. From the outside, the internal political, economic, and cultural variability of “Phoenicia” was hardly recognized and the “Phoenicians” appeared to Greeks and other neighbors as a more homogeneous identity than it in fact was.
Although the borders for “Phoenicia” disintegrate when carefully examined, one cannot simply avoid the notion. It would be illusory to assume that a more appropriate designation could just be created. In fact, the elusive character of “Phoenicia” reflects in some appropriate way the complex and flexible ancient reality. Accordingly, “Phoenicia” in this chapter is the region of city-states along the central Levantine coast, with Arwad in the north and Tyre in the south as a core. The territorial and ethnic borders were flexible and fluctuating, subject to change over time. Thus, the Phoenician homeland included in the Early Iron Age a city like Dor with a somewhat foreign “Sea-Peoples” component, yet with a compatible social, political, and economic structure. “Phoenicians” are defined as the population of these territories. The discussion here is arbitrarily restricted to the end of the second millennium and the first millennium bce, ranging from the eleventh through the sixth centuries, with an outlook on the Achaemenid period. The Levant north and south of “Phoenicia” includes northern Syria and Cilicia, as well as the southern Levant or Israel/Palestine.
The archaeological chronology of the southern Levant is crucial for the relative and absolute dating of the evidence discussed here. The density and quality of archaeological research in Israel provides an encompassing and elaborated relative chronology for archaeological contexts of the Iron Age, including excavations in Lebanon and Syria. In particular, the analysis of the Early Iron Age pottery from Dor by Ayelet Gilboa provides a firm foundation for dating the relevant evidence of the eleventh through ninth centuries bce (Gilboa and Sharon 2003).
In addition, there has been considerable progress in
pinning down the absolute chronology of the Levant. In the southern Levant, an improved chronology based on radiocarbon dates emerged in the last years from a long and controversial chronology debate (Sharon et al. 2007). While the debate is not yet concluded, there is an increasing consensus of the absolute Iron Age dates of the southern Levant (Finkelstein and Piasetzky 2011; Mazar 2011). This chronology has considerable impact on the dating of archaeological contexts throughout the Mediterranean (Toffolo et al. 2013, 2014). Although challenged (Brandherm and Trachsel 2008), the chronology of the southern Levant provides currently the best starting point for the chronological scope of this chapter (Fantalkin et al. 2011, 2015).
Thus, it is now necessary to apply this chronology to the archaeology in Lebanon, although not without critically evaluating the Lebanese and Syrian evidence. Currently, however, the relative and absolute chronology achieved in the southern Levant is not yet fully integrated in the scholarship on Phoenicia and Northern Levant (Núñez Calvo 2008).
The Early Iron Age (ca. 1130–1050 bce)
The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean Page 67