The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

  Sentries patrol near the site of Moloch’s statue, the fiery god to whom babies were sacrificed. In the amphitheater the blood of Christian martyrs flowed and their persecutors shouted, “Behold, they are baptized.”

  This was Carthage. (Morin 1958)

  In contrast, the ancient city also provided a somewhat positive model for a type of imperialism befitting the postcolonial era, one based upon commercial networks rather than military occupation, an economic imperialism that appealed to American sensibilities and interests. This positive image of ancient Carthage dominated discussions of the pending sister-city relations (e.g., Carthage Press 1971a–j).

  Ancient Sources and Modern Interpretations

  Since antiquity, Phoenicians have received admiring assessments of their stable constitution and their cultured urbanity: “Phoenicians, a clever bunch, made Phoenicia famous, outstanding in war and peace, in letters and literature, and in other crafts, too—how to cross seas by ship, how to clash against fleets, how to rule over others, and how to strategize for control and for conflict” (Mela 1.65 [1.12]).

  According to Aristotle, the Phoenician settlement at Carthage had an ideal constitution that led to long-term stability, on a par with those of Sparta and Crete. It provided the rare example of a praiseworthy foreign polity, one that balanced aristocratic merit (aretē/aristindēn), oligarchic wealth (ploutos/ploutindēn; Arist. Pol. 1273a, 1293b, Isoc. 3.24; cf. Isaiah 23:8, Ezekiel 26:16), and the interests of the commons (demos), the affection of whom they ostensibly won by distributing agricultural allotments at peripheral settlements (Arist. Pol. 1273b, 1320b). Besides portraying these three elements in balance, by turn he labeled Carthage as specifically oligarchic (Arist. Pol. 1273b), aristocratic (Pol. 1293b), then democratic (Pol. 1316b). While Aristotle suggested that an excess of oligarchic wealth and venal corruption led to its downfall (Pol. 1273a–b), Polybius saw the ascendancy of the democratic element as the cause of decay, even though he conceded that the Carthaginian mixed constitution had served the city well (Polyb. 5.51; cf. Strab. 1.9 C66; Cic. Rep. 2.42; Brink and Walbank 1954). Contemporary scholars tend to ignore the constitutional balance and the prominence of the democratic and aristocratic elements, focusing instead on the venal oligarchy engaged in seaborne trade, with an essentialist understanding that this constitutional endorsement of wealth held “true to their Semitic ancestry” (Harden 1962: 79).

  The type of wealth that derived from banausic industry and seaborne trade contrasted with that derived from farm and field, from vineyards and olive groves. As idealized in Greco-Roman sources, land ownership fostered citizen militias, as opposed to an overreliance on mercenaries (e.g., Arist. Pol. 1.65–88, 6.52). Honorable wealth from estates supported a warrior class, but somehow, corrosive wealth from sea trade and craftsmanship did not (Cic. Rep. 2.7–9; Hdt. 2.166–67; cf. Thuc. 1.121), and certain modern popular histories have accepted this distinction (Bagnall 1990: 8–10; Griffith 1935: 225n1). Yet in order to claim that the Phoenicians purchased valor, rather than demonstrating it by serving in militias themselves, one must again ignore contrary evidence since, for example, Carthaginians awarded citizens prizes for valor (Arist. Pol. 1324b). In any case, one would be hard pressed to distinguish, on the one hand, between their conscript allies and their mercenaries; and, on the other, between the use of mercenaries by the Carthaginians, by the Syracusans, or by Hellenistic kings (Trundell 2013: 339–40; cf. Dem. Or. 3.35).

  A Model Empire

  During the eighteenth century, narratives about political stability and commercially driven territorial expansion made Carthage a “model empire” for Europeans, particularly American settlers, with their fortuitous blend of trade, republicanism, and imperialism (Winterer 2010). Thomas Jefferson, for example, regretted the lack of sources written by Phoenicians themselves because Carthage’s “wealth, power, and splendor prove she must have had a very distinguished policy and government” (Winterer 2010: 14). But Roman stereotypes about corrosive trade also held sway, particularly since they had defeated Carthage. For example, John Dryden, poet laureate during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), not too subtly encouraged the English to destroy the Dutch as thoroughly as the Romans had Carthage (Amboyna, epilogue). The elite of the Netherlands he depicted as an acquisitive and venal oligarchy, like the Carthaginians, deriving the greater part of their wealth from the carrying trade. The Dutch posed a threat so near, with a reach that extended so far, that Dryden invoked Indonesian nutmegs and cloves from Ambon, just as Cato the Elder had figs from Africa (Ahmed 2011: 46–50; cf. Rubright 2014; Fleck 2000).

  European powers might alternately embrace comparisons to the positive aspects of Phoenician civilization, or might embrace instead those of the victorious Romans, or might embrace both at the same time. The Spanish, whose southern coast had been colonized by Phoenicians, controlled the Gulf of Mexico as Carthage did the Mediterranean (Winterer 2010: 10–12). The French could portray the British as essentially Phoenician (London as Tyre) and the United States as Punic (New York as Carthage), in opposition to the French and their infantry, which were essentially Roman (De Gobineau 1982: 396, 1141; cf. Bernal 1987: 350). The English at certain times welcomed comparison to the Phoenicians (Winterer 2010: 16–17), and at others associated themselves with Rome (Salas 1996: 295, 331–34, 365; cf. Rowe 1997). In the twentieth century, Portugal did not alternate between Phoenicia and Rome, but embraced both, imagining themselves as the “Phoenicia of the West” and the “New Rome,” as well as the “Rome of the East” (de Amorim Girão 1958: fig. II; cf. Garnand 2006: fig. 1).

  Nationalist narratives involving the Phoenicians could establish a nation’s antiquity and literacy. For example, the Phoenician invention of the alphabet corresponded well with Ireland’s reputation for book learning, and its struggle with England was cast as a renewed struggle between Rome and Carthage (Cullingford 1996; Garnand 2002: 68). In 1907, James Joyce spoke before an audience of Italian nationalist irredentisti in Trieste, on the topic of “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” and yet, thanks to the Phoenicians, avoided invoking the traditional sectarian Irish identity. Rather than a tale of Catholic saints and monastic scribes, he told a secular narrative of Egyptianized Druidic priests and Phoenician sages who introduced literacy and diffused civilization from the East into Ireland. But Joyce himself doubted the tangible benefits of an ancient past invoked in myths of origin because, if such claims were valid “the fellahin of Cairo would have all the right in the world to disdain to act as porters for English tourists” (Cullingford 2000: 228; cf. Quinn 2017: 193–200).

  The positive constitutional model of Phoenician Carthage, alongside Roman and Greek models, led to an abundance of ancient place names being assigned to settlements in the early years of the American republic, a trend that continued through the mid-nineteenth century. When land was plotted in upstate New York to reward war veterans (the “Military Tract”), one could find heroic Phoenician personal names (e.g., Hannibal) next to the Greek (e.g., Ulysses) and Roman (Scipio); later they added ancient Phoenician place names (Utica, Carthage) alongside Ithaca and Rome (Zelinsky 1967; Farrell 2002; Vasiliev 2005). Land was also plotted for veterans in Athens County, Ohio, where one can find the townships of Canaan, Carthage, and Hannibal alongside those of Athens, Rome, and Troy (Lewis 1928). The oldest settlements named after Carthage (North Carolina, founded in 1796, and New York, 1798) each underwent name changes, the former to Fagansville then back to Carthage, the latter from Long Falls to Carthage; such a process actually erased Carthage, Alabama (founded in 1823, renamed Moundville). Other towns were erased when annexed, like a second Carthage in Ohio (Hamilton County, founded in 1815), which had once accommodated a boat named Hannibal on its Miami & Erie Canal (History of Cincinnati 1894: 419). Although now part of Cincinnati (named after the Roman dictator), the neighborhood still retains its ancient name. Still other towns were abandoned (e.g., Carthage, New Mexico; New Carthage, Louisiana).

  Despite name change, annexation, or aban
donment, the model of the ancient New Town (QRTḤDŠT) persisted for a number of new American towns. Carthage provided not only the name but also the county seat and courthouse for Hancock (Carthage, Illinois), Jasper (Missouri), Leake (Mississippi), Moore (North Carolina), Panola (Texas), and Smith (Tennessee) counties. These new towns gave rise to newer towns, in turn—with the Carthage in Indiana named after Carthage, North Carolina (Baker 1995); the one in Texas named after Carthage, Mississippi (Blackburn 2006: 263; cf. Lagrone 1979); and the one in South Dakota named after Carthage, New York (Stennett 1908: 52). The United States had incorporated ideal ancient political models in its own Constitution, embraced Classical architectural styles, and adopted ancient Greek, Roman, and Phoenician personal names (e.g., Hannibal), but “perhaps the most persuasive evidence pleading the American’s image of himself as the reincarnated Athenian or Roman” (or Carthaginian) remains this “eccentric adherence” to naming places after ancient sites (Zelinsky 1967: 463–65; cf. Miller 2001: 39).

  Depravity

  Ancient city-states and their empires provided models not just for governance and trade but also for imperial expansion and the subjection of others. By the middle of the nineteenth century, scientific racism defined certain essential characteristics by which one might distinguish human groups from each another, with a hierarchy of the superior and the inferior. For example, Jules Michelet appropriated the “heroic genius” of art and legislation for the Indo-European race (namely Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Germans), while the spirit of industry, navigation, and commerce he attributed to their “industrious and perfidious neighbors,” the Semitic race that so loved “gold, blood, and pleasure” (namely Arabs, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians; Michelet 1847: 137; cf. Bernal 1987: 341–42, 352). These essentialist characterizations began to erase the Phoenician aptitude for good governance and shifted the narrative to their presumed Semitic acquisitiveness. Pseudo-scientific distinction of racial characteristics further entrenched these stereotypes and gave essentialist assumptions a veneer of respectability. The Semitic Tyrians and Carthaginians were said to have enshrined infant sacrifice as a political institution (for the tophet and infant sacrifice, see chapter 21, this volume). Furthermore, one could prove that these infamous state-sanctioned rites were racially determined, given that the “white race” only practiced them when they intermingled with such groups and immediately stopped these rites after “the least new infusion of its own blood” (De Gobineau 1983: 371–72). The Phoenicians were thus transformed from a political model into a moral abomination.

  The scholarly racism of de Gobineau and the nationalist history of Michelet established the foundations of their contemporaries’ research into the Phoenicians, undertaken both by scholars of the Near East (e.g., Renan 1864) and by “historical” novelists (e.g., Flaubert’s Salammbô, 1862). Edward Said saw in these enterprises a particular form of essentialist thought that he labeled “Orientalism”—on the one hand, an imaginative designation that includes elaborate accounts of its “people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on”; on the other hand, a discursive designation, that describes a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978: 2–3; cf. Bernal 1987: 233–37; Garnand 2006: 11–54). In particular, narratives about superior Romans defeating ancient Phoenicians provided a paradigm to legitimize how their Indo-European descendants (i.e., the French) should extend dominion over modern Phoenicians in the Maghreb (i.e., the Arabs of Algeria and Tunisia). These same narratives continued to have salience into the twentieth century, as the French extended their control into the Levant (Lebanon and Syria). Italy could also readily imagine themselves as Romans returning to reclaim Libya, as in the 1914 film Cabiria, with intertitles written by the irredentist Gabriele d’Annunzio (Prolo et al. 1977; Bertetto and Rondolino 1998; Celli 1998). Its Roman heroes save the eponymous young maiden from depraved Semitic civic rites of child sacrifice (Garnand 2006: 55–65).

  In addition to corrosive greed and sacrificial infanticide, innate sexual excess marked “Oriental” depravity. In the case of the Phoenicians, sexual promiscuity allegedly coincided with religious ritual, thus their society sanctioned ritual prostitution (Frazer 1925: 330–32; cf. Beard and Henderson 1997: 483–84, n. 20). Just as Cicero could attribute the defeat of Carthage and Corinth to the corrosive force of their coastal trade (Cic. Rep. 2.7–9), in the same way sailors on leave in both cities could be corrupted by the carnal delights of temple slaves devoted to Phoenician Astarte and Greek Aphrodite (Strab. 8.6.20). Even without definitive material evidence, one could presume that such religious rites would be found among the Phoenician cities of Cyprus (Paeleopaphus, Amathus; cf. Hdt.1.199), of Africa (Sicca Veneria; Val. Max. 2.6.15), of Sicily (Eryx), or of their emporia in Italy (e.g., Pyrgi; Markoe 2000: 131). With these as his inspiration, Flaubert’s depiction of extreme sensuality among the Phoenicians provided “artistic dignity” to the widespread and “almost uniform association between the Arab World and sex” (Said 1978: 188–90).

  However, narratives of depravity depended upon context for their salience. For example, at the same time that the French in North Africa promoted the narrative of Semitic inferiority, in the Levant, Maronite Christians embraced their Phoenician ancestry (Kaufman 2004; Garnand 2006: 66–88; cf. Quinn 2017: 3–22). They saw in ancient Phoenician commercial and urban expansion, across the Mediterranean and beyond, a parallel to the modern diaspora of Lebanese merchants and skilled tradesman from the Mediterranean to the Americas, to Australia, and beyond. They remarked upon the economic and political acumen of their ancestors, the Phoenicians, rather than their depraved rites, and they employed questionable racial distinctions to their own advantage, since cephalic indices might demonstrate how the Maronites and Druze of Lebanon had the “short-headed brachycephalic” skull, rather than the Arab “long-headed” type (Hitti 1957: 154, and 1967: 68).

  Narratives of civilized Phoenicians, who had supposedly explored the coast of Africa, could earn credit for the dynamic diffusion of civilization from the north. The enterprise of Phoenician explorers could better explain the Great Zimbabwe complex, for example, than the enterprise of Africans themselves. Although professional archaeologists strongly disputed this narrative, it remained useful in legitimizing control of the territory by the more civilized Europeans—so much so that the Rhodesian Inspector of Monuments was forced to resign for refusing to toe the party line (Garlake 1982; Trigger 1984; Kuklick 1993). In Brazil, a purported Phoenician inscription, miraculously found at Paraíba (modern João Pessoa, Brazil), then immediately and suspiciously lost, produced a similar narrative about Phoenician origins for Meso-American civilization (Cross 1968; Amadasi 1988).

  In the Archaic period (eighth–seventh centuries bce), Greeks, Phoenicians, and Etruscans expanded across the Mediterranean, spreading alphabetic literacy, establishing trade networks, and founding urban centers. Since the middle of the nineteenth century ce, Greek contributions have been amplified and those of the others reduced, following an academic sort of zero-sum equation. The presumed deficiencies of the Phoenicians explain Greek superiority, with their cultural contributions erased even though their alphabetic script, trade networks, and urban expansion held precedence. When standard textbooks contrast their achievements with those of the Greeks, they reduce the Phoenician alphabet to nonvocalic signs, their trade to the exchange of baubles that seldom penetrated beyond the coastline, and their settlements to trading posts lacking territorial ambition (e.g., Starr: 1991: 80, 127, 447; Cary and Scullard 1975: 16, 113–15). The presumed depravity of the Phoenicians made their dismissal as civilizers all the easier.

  “Orientalism” has a structural tendency to dichotomize into linguistic and racial subsets in nested we/they contrasts, at each stage essentializing the resultant “other” (Said 1978; Clifford 1988: 258). Some scholars resisted these tendencies and tried to rehabilitate the Phoenicians, first in response to Flaubert’s Salammbô (e.g., Froehner 1862; Sainte-Beuve 1897), then as
a general response to overreliance on inimical and tendentious Greek, Latin, and Hebrew sources (e.g., Berard 1902–1903), or in specific response to presumably misguided excavations at Motya and Carthage that had seemed to confirm Phoenician ritual infanticide (e.g., Saumagne 1922). Still the most significant shift toward their rehabilitation came in the wake of the “reflexive turn” in anthropology, which itself followed on the literary critique of Said and the historical critique of Hayden White (Clifford 1988; Marcus 1998). In particular, Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) demonstrated how scholars of Greece and Rome had systematically ignored or distorted Phoenician contributions to Mediterranean civilization.

  At the same time, within the nascent field of Phoenician Studies, two key rehabilitative works appeared, quite independent of Bernal and of each other—I Fenici (Moscati 1988) and L’Univers phénicien (Gras et al. 1989). Out of all of the broad stereotypes applied to ancient Phoenicians, the main response called for a complete (globale) and “extreme reassessment” (drastico ridimensionamento), but with a quite narrow focus on allegations of ritual infanticide (Ribichini 1988: 104–24; Garnand 2002: 12–13; cf. Gras et al. 1991; Garnand 2006: 89–104). This particular reassessment sought to erase a specific mode of depravity, even while continuing to accept ethnic stereotypes about Semitic acquisitiveness that effectively excluded Phoenician contributions to political organization and urban development. For example, even metropolitan Aradus (Arwad) and Tyre could be demoted to mere emporia (“ports of trade,” BNP) and their overseas settlements could be ingeniously categorized as non-urban enoikismoi (“dwell-abouts”; Niemeyer 1990; cf. Riis 1970: 129, 158). Carthage remained the exception that proved the rule, the lone urban settlement that developed out of their trade networks (e.g., Niemeyer 2000, 2006; Aubet 2013), even though these distinctions rest largely upon an assumed Semitic penchant for commerce to the exclusion of agriculture, and for chaotic irregularity to the exclusion of an ordered urban grid (Fumadó Ortega 2013). After the 1980s reassessment, scholars have also continued to accept “Oriental” stereotypes about ritual prostitution (e.g., Markoe 2000: 131), which depend primarily upon an assumed proclivity toward sensuality for their salience (Budin 2008).