The distribution of these layouts in many other settlements around the Mediterranean, which are certainly not Punic (e.g., Athens, Olynthos, Megara Iblea, Morgantina, Locri Epizefiri), illustrates how the organization of the interior of the houses does not have to be derived from traditions of the Early Iron Age in the east. Rather than deriving from Levantine paragons, these layouts spread due to a Mediterranean koine, which also influenced the residential buildings in the period between the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the third century bce—for example, in Carthage and particularly in Selinus. The equipment of the houses—in particular, the installation of floors in opus signinum and walls with polychrome stucco—demonstrates that Selinus was part of a broad Hellenistic koine. (On Phoenician-Punic residential architecture, see also chapter 28, this volume.)
Conclusions
The monumentalization of the Punic settlements in the late period of the Roman Republic has greatly affected the preceding Phoenician and Punic levels. Almost all indications of significance relating to the Phoenician and Punic phase of the island come from Motya and Selinus, which were not built over in the Roman phases. These cities show an urban organization with buildings aligned to the settlements’ perimeter. Regarding the temples, with utmost probability, as has emerged from Motya, the Pfeilertempel can be regarded as the prototype for the Phoenician temple on Sicily. A type of temple characteristic of Punic Sicily, as particularly shown by Selinus, could be recognized in the temple without peristasis of the type oikos or in antis, generally considered being of Aegean origin. These temples, as well as other elements of the Punic settlements like the houses, the fortifications, or the necropoleis, in particular from the fourth century bce onward, are evidence of an advanced degree of Hellenization, that in this phase can be considered as the result of a Mediterranean koine.
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Chapter 36
Malta and Gozo
Nicholas C. Vella and Maxine Anastasi
The Phoenicians have always mattered in Malta.
—Culican (1971: 1)
&nbs
p; Antiquarian Origins and Archaeological Directions
The material relics of the Phoenicians of Malta have been known for a long time. As far back as 1630 their presence on the island was commemorated through the erection of a plaque with an inscription over the site in Rabat where a terracotta sarcophagus, properly identified as Phoenician, was found six years earlier (Abela 1647: 153). The person who wrote about this find, the erudite vice-chancellor of the Order of the Knights of St John, Gian Francesco Abela, had obtained the sarcophagus for his “cabinet of curiosities,” where he also had on display two bilingual inscriptions on cippi which were to be instrumental a bit more than a century later for Jean-Jacques Barthélemy to decipher the Phoenician script (CIS I, 122 and 122bis). With a dearth of written sources for the Maltese Islands in antiquity, it was natural for travelers and antiquarians to turn to objects and sites for establishing historical sequences. Among those sites were Malta’s megalithic monuments, to which many art historians held tenaciously as fitting examples of Phoenician architecture. Since their idiom was not in any way Classical—of the sort that could be seen, for example, at nearby Agrigento in Sicily—by elimination they had to belong to a named entity, hence “Phoenician” or “Punic” (e.g., Perrot and Chipiez 1885).
Antiquarian interest in the archipelago never waned. Inscriptions were particularly sought after, possibly because they were often considered to be direct historical sources. They were studied firsthand whenever possible, or documented in order to facilitate knowledge transfer among foremost European scholars (Vella 2013). By the time the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (CIS) was compiled, the inscriptions from Malta and Gozo numbered eleven. And the flurry of antiquarian activity that ensued in the course of the nineteenth century must have resonated with members of the educated classes. For the Maltese, since 1815 subjects of the British Crown, the megalithic ruins were a reminder of a great past to be recalled, a defining element of modern Maltese identity alongside the Maltese language, held by some to have greater affinities with “Canaanite” and “Phoenician” rather than Arabic (see Grima 2011: 349–53). The point is not that such strongly held beliefs were wrong, not least because the megalithic buildings were clearly assigned to prehistory by the end of the century and the language’s Arabic roots officially recognized by no less an authority than Gesenius himself (Gesenius 1810). Rather, it is that sectors of the more educated members of the Maltese population, including seasoned politicians, found it hard to slough off their appropriation of the Phoenicians for purposes that we would find ideologically tendentious today (e.g., Strickland 1925). Even on the eve of obtaining independence from Great Britain in 1964, the pro-Italian Maltese nationalists in government made a calculated move that upset research agendas of mainstream British archaeologists who for years had enjoyed exclusive digging rights on the archipelago. An Italian archaeological mission led by Sabatino Moscati and his associates had begun at the site of Tas-Silġ (figure 36.1b), unearthing inscriptions that showed it to consist in part of the remains of the temple to Phoenician Astarte (Rossi 2017). The repercussions must have reached the British-born Australian archaeologist William Culican in the corridors of Valletta’s National Museum of Archaeology in 1970, where he appears to have been working on a corpus of Phoenician pottery (Sagona 2002: 9). What he exclaimed the following year on the relevance of the Phoenicians for Malta (reproduced as an epigraph to this chapter) must surely be understood in a sense that goes beyond mere antiquarian interests.
Figure 36.1 (a) Westward view approaches to the Maltese islands from the sea; (b) Location map of the Maltese islands with the principal sites mentioned in the text; (c) Amphorae and quern stone cargo from the shipwreck discovered off the coast of Xlendi, Gozo; (d) Map of the central Mediterranean.
Source: (a) & (c) Courtesy of T. Gambin; (b) & (d) Drawing by M. Anastasi and N. C. Vella.
Culican’s early death in 1984 stopped his study in its tracks, with few publications to show for it (Culican 1970, 1982). It was only a decade later that his unfinished work was to be taken up by another colleague from Australia, whose monograph on the tombs of Phoenician and Punic Malta remains a milestone in the literature (Sagona 2002). It includes the discoveries made in the islands until the late 1960s but nothing later, despite the fact that several rock-cut tombs have been found during the last two decades, mostly as a result of developer-funded archaeology. Sadly, all these remain unpublished bar one, in Xemxija (Vella et al. 2001). Besides burial sites, research projects have been set up to revisit the sanctuary site of Tas-Silġ (Bonanno and Vella 2015; reports in Scienze dell’Antichità 13 [2005–2006] and 18 [2012]) and the farmsteads of Punic origins at San Pawl Milqi (Locatelli 2005–2006) and Żejtun (Vella et al. 2017). Fieldwalking projects have also thrown light on the nature of the rural landscape in Malta (Docter et al. 2012) and in Gozo (Azzopardi 2014) targeted for the production of olive oil and wine in the later Punic period; in the case of Gozo, a shrine with Punic origins at Għar ix-Xiħ overlooking the cove at Mġarr ix-Xini has been identified and explored between 2005 and 2010 (figure 36.1b). Offshore underwater surveys carried out since 2007 have also revealed the remains of an early seventh-century bce shipwreck with a mixed cargo of amphorae and quern stones (figure 36.1a–b; Gambin 2015; Sourisseau 2015), off the headland of Ras il-Wardija where the Italian archaeological mission had explored and excavated a Punic shrine between 1964 and 1967 (Cagiano de Azevedo et al. 1967: 87–97). Other discoveries of note, including the remains of a building in Żurrieq in Malta, crowned with an Egyptianizing cavetto cornice, and first mentioned in 1680 (Wettinger 1985: 144–45; Hölbl 1989: 146–49), warrant further study.
Periodization and History
That the periodization of Malta’s ancient history has deep antiquarian origins will have become manifest from the preamble given here. In Maltese chronology, the Phoenicians displace a gigantomachy first, then a fictitious Greek period was laid to rest, and later, once an idea of prehistory was embraced, the Phoenicians were placed firmly in Malta sometime in the opening centuries of the first millennium bce. The discovery in 1950 of imported fine Greek pottery inside a Phoenician rock-cut tomb at Għajn Qajjet, in the Rabat countryside, would have the period of Phoenician settlement start in the early seventh century bce (Semeraro 2002). Archaic pottery from Tas-Silġ and pottery from a tomb allegedly found in northern Malta in 1912 would suggest Phoenician settlement at least two generations earlier (Vella 2005: 443–44). In more recent years, and in the wake of new archaeological evidence that would see the Phoenicians active on Iberian shores in the ninth century bce (González de Canales et al. 2004), a Phoenician presence in Malta at the same time has been mooted (Sagona 2008). Certainly, the recent recognition of a handful of Early Geometric potsherds from old excavations at the long-lived site of Borġ in-Nadur (Tanasi 2011) would suggest that the opening centuries of the first millennium bce may have brought the archipelago in contact with an eastern world possibly through the nearest neighbors on Sicily with whom an indigenous network of short-range interaction and knowledge exchange had already been established in the latter part of the Bronze Age (Tanasi and Vella 2014). From Sicily came plumed painted pottery and one double spiral bronze fibula, discovered in a reused apse of the prehistoric temple at Tas-Silġ, dated to the tenth–eighth centuries bce (figure 36.2; Cazzella and Recchia 2012: 34, fig. 7c). But so far the nature of the earliest presence of the Phoenicians on the Maltese archipelago remains fuzzy. A gamut of possibilities that would have the islands visited before settlement, colonized, and subsequently developed by a foreign group has yet to be posed. Some points are made here in order to elucidate whether the archipelago was drawn into the surge of long-distance connectivity characteristic of the first millennium bce Mediterranean. The position taken here assumes that maritime connectivity, surmised from the discovery of maritime transport containers (amphorae), constitutes in itself social action and will have affected cultural development in the archipelago. The aim is also to break down the chronological bound
ary that makes too much of the Punic–Roman transition set by Livy to 218 bce (Liv. XXI, 51).
Figure 36.2 Development of cult site of Tas-Silġ, Malta. Prehistoric temple complex and reuse (ca. 3000–1000 bce); Phoenician installation with a reconstruction of the tripillar and chapel foundations (from after seventh–sixth centuries bce); Punic modifications with screen walls and stepped altar dedicated to Astarte; major alterations in the Roman period to house the cult of Juno and Isis.
Source: Site plans and stepped altar adapted from Cazzella and Recchia 2012; Rossignani 2012.
Although unfashionable in island studies, biogeography may be a useful exploratory tool in this context, if we accept that island settlement by the Phoenicians implies a landscape learning process that rested on the development and acquisition of an array of locational and social information. The Maltese islands constitute a pelagic archipelago (figure 36.1d)—that is, more than a day’s sail from the nearest mainland—in the south-central Mediterranean, 96 km or 52 nautical miles off the nearest Sicilian cape. This is “a rather wide and dangerous stretch of sea,” to quote Cicero (Verr. II, 4), affected by a regime of tricky currents, winds, coastal configuration, and sea marks. Still, the archipelago may have turned east–west voyages into a more manageable affair for the Phoenicians, “foreshortening” distance and providing that link that has been thought to bring micro-regional voyaging networks together in the archaic period (Malkin 2011: 152–56). Even if it is assumed that the techniques of latitude sailing had been properly harnessed by this time, nothing excludes the possibility that the Phoenician venturers used local pilots for extending seaways to the west, an idea that has already been proposed for an earlier period (Tanasi and Vella 2014: 65; Broodbank 2013: 446–47, 494). Then there is the archipelago’s size: combined, the islands are 560 times the size of what Tyre island seems to be have been in the eighth century bce (Aubet 2009: 94) and a staggering fifth of all of modern-day Lebanon’s coastal plain and hills (Assaf 2009). Moreover, there are the affordances provided by their geomorphology and pedology, even in conditions of significant land degradation that are characteristic of the periods following the Bronze Age (Carroll et al. 2012): springs from aquifers in the areas in the uplands of Malta and Gozo to sustain life generally and horticulture, wide basins suitable for agriculture and often flanked by rocky terrain where tombs could be dug, grazing of sheep and goats allowed, and firewood collected. Besides, the coastline had several bays to support the sort of maritime connectivity the Phoenicians were pursuing in the early Archaic period, particularly for Malta with Marsaxlokk in the southeast, the innermost reaches of the Grand Harbor, and those of Burmarrad on the east coast (figure 36.1b). The distribution of seventh-century bce tombs located far away from these bays, scattered in the environs of Rabat, would suggest that those affordances were swiftly recognized and exploited by the Phoenician-speaking migrant communities who must have capitalized on their contacts with the indigenous population, choosing to settle permanently rather than to visit for trade purposes alone (map 36.1).
The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean Page 80