Phoenician kings (that is, kings with Phoenician names) are attested in other Cypriot kingdoms than Kition. At Salamis, a Phoenician dynasty possessed the throne before Evagoras chased king Abdymon/Abdemon (he was of Kitian origin, according to Theopompos, fr. 111 2 = Yon 2004: no. 61; he was from Tyre according to Diodorus, XIV 98 1, but that may simply mean “Phoenician”). At Lapethos, coinage and inscriptions reveal a series of successive kings, some bearing Greek names, others Phoenician ones (Masson and Sznycer 1972: 97–100). Einar Gjerstad (1979: 247–48, 251) considered that they were all members of a Phoenician dynasty that was installed by the Persians after the repression of the Ionian revolt, which most Cypriot kings had joined. The supposed “medophily” of Phoenicians in Cyprus, however, is a complex issue, which has been somehow obscured by modern considerations. We know of no king of Lapethos before Demonikos I; no positive evidence proves that the dynasty was new, and backed by the Persians. Abdemon of Salamis was a usurper, as explicitly stated by Isocrates (Evagoras 19–20), but, according to the same author, he gained power by abusing the confidence of the king, not thanks to a foreign intervention (contra Gjerstad 1979: 253). Moreover, after repression of the Ionian revolt, the Persians restored Gorgos, brother of Onesilos and the legitimate king, to the Salaminian throne—they did not install a Phoenician ruler. The Idalion bronze is the only primary evidence that shows the presence of Persian troops along with Kitians (Masson 1983: no. 217). The siege was at that time unsuccessful but one may suppose that Persian military aid proved decisive in Idalion’s conquest. The Persians were asked to intervene again in the affairs of Cyprus at the beginning of the fourth century bce, but it was at the request of the kings of Soloi and Amathous together with the king of Kition, against Evagoras of Salamis, who aimed at conquering the whole island (Diodorus XIV 98 2). The Kitians had obviously no Persian ally when they defeated the Salaminians and the Paphians in 392 bce in a decisive battle, as recorded in the trophy inscription (Yon 2004: no. 1144) (on the Phoenicians under Achaemenid rule, see chapter 7, this volume).
Epilogue: Phoenicians in Hellenistic Cyprus
Phoenicians did not disappear from Cyprus the day Cypriote kings transferred their allegiance from Persia and joined Alexander in the siege of Tyre in 332. King Pumayyaton of Kition remained on his throne until 312, when he was executed by Ptolemy, at a time of turmoil that led to the abolition of all Cypriot kingdoms. Moreover, the evidence shows that Phoenician elites continued to play a prominent role in the political and religious life of the island, especially in the former Cypro-Phoenician kingdoms of Kition and Lapethos (Fourrier 2015). Phoenician presence remained widespread in Cyprus, as documented, for example, by a short inscription dated to the third century bce and found at Palaepaphos (Masson and Sznycer 1972: 81–86). It is a dedication to Astarte PP (transliterating the syllabic Greek pa-pi-a; i.e, “Paphian” = Astarté from Paphos), that is an exact translation in Phoenician of the Greek “Aphrodite Paphia,” which demonstrates a profound acquaintance with local cultic epithets.
The unification of the island under Ptolemaic rule, however, slowly led to the abandonment of locally embedded languages and scripts, which were closely tied to the age of the kingdoms: syllabic script, “Eteocyprian” language, and Phoenician alphabet. In the absence of script as a safe marker, Phoenician presence becomes elusive. Kition remained a populous harbor city. It was active in the commerce with the Levant (as shown by the high percentage of Cypriot pottery found in Phoenician cities), and its political importance is reflected in the right of coinage, which the city shared with the capital city of Nea Paphos and with Salamis.
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Chapter 32
The Aegean
Nikos Stampolidis
Literary Sources
In the thirteenth year of Nero’s reign at Rome, in 66 ce, an earthquake hit Knossos in Crete. Among the ruins, some earlier graves were opened, one of which contained sherds with peculiar inscriptions, which were sent to the emperor. Nero identified the script as Phoenician and called experts to translate the text (Stampolidis and Kotsonas 2006: 337–38).
Naturally, that was not the first time ancient scholars dealt with the Phoenicians (Stampolidis and Kotsonas 2006: 337n1; for the name and the region, Aubet 2001: 6, 13, etc.; Markoe 2000; Morris 1995: 124; Helck 1995: 130–35). Long before Roman times, the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, mentioned the Phoenicians (identified as Sidonians) in various verses. The information regarding the Phoenicians in these texts varies: in the Odyssey, they appear as avid travelers (13.272, 14.19, 15.404, 15.455–58), traders of various commodities, including textiles (4.646, 15.116) and slaves (14.190, 15.414), gaining a bad reputation especially for the enslavement and sale of people (8.159, 13.283, 14.288, 15.403). In the Iliad, presumably older than the Odyssey, the image is not very different, but they are mentioned less frequently. Here too, though, Phoenician women work in textiles and Sidonian craftsmen create a lavish silver krater; Phoenician traders “brought it into port from beyond the sea, and made a present of it to Thoas” (23.740) (Stampolidis 1998: 26).
From these citations, most important for this chapter’s topic are those referring to sea routes, from Sidon toward the northern harbors of the Near East and those of south and southwest Anatolia, and via Crete or the eastern islands to the Aegean proper. There is no mention, though, in the Homeric poems of Phoenicians settling in the Aegean (for the currents, winds, and routes of the Mediterranean, see Aubet 2001: 182–88 and pl. 40; for the Phoenicians in the Aegean, Coldstream 1969 and 1982; Stampolidis 2003a; Niemeyer 2003: 201–202, fig. 1; Fontan 2007: 281).
This picture of the northwestern sea route is reinforced by Thucydides (2.69.1) and other later writers, such as Josephus (AJ 8.324), who mention that King Ithobaal (887–856 bce) founded Botrys (modern-day Batroun) in Phoenicia, while Pseudo-Scylax refers to the Phoenician port of Myriandros, at the Gulf of Alexandretta (modern-day Iskenderum), thus indicating their very early settlement in North Syria and Cilicia (Stampolidis 2003b: 56).
Herodotus (6.47) picks up from Homer’s last Phoenician station in the Aegean, at the island of Lemnos (Stampolidis 1998: 26), and moves farther north to that of Thassos, where he mentions Phoenicians mining gold (for the Phoenicians at the northern Aegean, see Tiberios 2004: 298–99). This seems to be one of the earliest mentions in ancient literature presenting the Phoenicians not as mere seafarers and traders but as a long-term presence, as gold-mining procedures require. A historiographical fragment of Ergias of Rhodes (transmitted by Athenaios, 8.360) refers to an initial Phoenician settlement at Ialysos on the island of Rhodes and to the incident of Phalanthos and the expulsion of the Phoenicians from the town called Achaia at Ialysos (FGrH 513 = now BNJ 513; for the Phoenicians at Ialysos, Coldstream 1969; Stampolidis 2003a: 218). Diodorus Sicilus (5.58.2–3), drawing on earlier Rhodian historians such as Zenon and Ergias, offers details on the connection between Kadmos (the legendary founder of Thebes) and the founding of the sanctuary of Poseidon at Ialysos, and on the heritable right of the Ialysian priests.
Herodotus again (1.105) mentions that the sanctuary of Aphrodite at the island of Kythera was founded by Phoenicians, a statement repeated by Pausanias many centuries later (1.14.7), and that Phoenicians had settled and registered as Athenian citizens, when they were chased out of Tanagra, in Boeotia (Hdt. 5.57).
Finally, later sources, as attested in Stephanus of Byzantium’s work, mention settlements at Thera and Anaphe, under Memvliaros, while Stephanus of Byzantium himself mentions that the Phoenicians were some of the oldest inhabitants of Itanos, in Crete, and Melos (Helck 1995: 131).
This discussion of the written sources is not intended as comprehensive but, rather, to offer a minimum context for the archaeological discussion that is the main focus of this chapter (for the Phoenicians in the Classical sources, see chapter 44, this volume).
Archaeological Sources
The discovery of a certain number of “exotically” produced artwork—that is, artifacts manufactured in areas of the eastern Mediterranean, Phoenicia, or the Near East (even in Egypt), has been interpreted by researchers as proof of Phoenician trading activity in the Aegean. Nonetheless, before reaching this conclusion, one should be able to: (1) define what a Phoenician artefact is and therefore how it can be distinguished from other similar artifacts from the wider region, such as Aramaic, Syrian, or even Cypro-Phoenician, Cypriot, or Egyptian/Egyptianizing; (2) prove or confirm that production and circulation were done by the same group of people, or at least groups of people with common characteristics; and (3) conclude that the traders-transporters of Phoenician or other eastern Mediterranean products were in fact Phoenicians themselves (for Phoenician and Orientalizing art, see chapters 23 and 24, this volume).
The accomplishment of the last prerequisite becomes even more difficult in our case regarding the Aegean, as the recipients of these “exotic” Orientalizing products (individuals, groups, communities, sanctuaries, etc.) were not passive receivers or unfamiliar with travel and trading but, rather, Greeks, a nation whose geographic location and history define them as clearly nautical—if not elsewhere, at least in the Aegean—and could therefore transport eastern artworks themselves as a result of their contacts with the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean and the Syro-Palestinian coast, already attested si
nce the Late Bronze Age (sixteenth–eleventh centuries bce). And, of course, no one can exclude other mediating traders of “exotic” products in the Aegean, such as the Cypriots (Stampolidis 2003b: 53–57, 62–63, and elsewhere).
Taking all this into consideration, one notes that only a sufficient number of “exotic” artifacts from well-documented and carefully excavated sites (in association with stratified assemblages and an algorithmic statistical approach) can offer answers with relative sufficiency to the question of the physical presence of the Phoenicians in the Aegean. We can possibly manage the evidence by distinguishing the following types of contacts and contexts: (1) a single, random commercial (direct or indirect) contact; (2) a continuous commercial presence in ports or other locations; (3) a settlement of shorter or longer duration for more specialized relations and apart from commercial activities; and (4) a long and continuous presence among or side by side with the local communities with subsequent effects (simple influence, diffusion of ideas and know-how, amalgamation, assimilation, etc.). All these factors denote that the discovery of “exotic” products in the Aegean, including Egyptianizing/Egyptian artifacts from the Syro-Palestinian coast, the Near East, and Cyprus could theoretically signify a direct or indirect presence of Phoenicians in the Aegean. What follows is a summary of the main evidence from the most relevant areas.
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