In Search of the Phoenicians

by Josephine Crawley Quinn

Who were the ancient Phoenicians, and did they actually exist?

The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the "Phoenicians" never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies--and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.

Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and communities these people really constructed for themselves in the ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices. She traces how the idea of "being Phoenician" first emerged in support of the imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized as a component of modern national identities in contexts as far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon.

In Search of the Phoenicians delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays, painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to twenty-first century Tunisia.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient History, Middle East, Ancient, Classics, Africa

365 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Josephine Quinn is associate professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Worcester College. She is the coeditor of The Hellenistic West and The Punic Mediterranean.

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating 3.5 stars. This is the second excellent historical monograph I have read in as many months (the other is Silvia Zago’s A Journey Through the Beyond: The Development of the Concept of Duat and Related Cosmological Notions in Egyptian Funerary Literature). And both (not coincidentally?) by female historians. Josephine Quinn (° 1973, University of Oxford) can definitely be called an expert when it comes to the Phoenicians, the ‘people’ that was renowned in the first millennium BCE for its maritime trade, its cedars and its purple production. Only, as Quinn points out: that people did not actually exist. That is to say: the inhabitants of the various port cities in what is now Lebanon did not see themselves as a people at all. And so we automatically end up in the extremely interesting, but particularly complex discussion about identity(/ies). Quinn effortlessly deals with all the thorny aspects of that debate and knows how to fit in the historical facts (or the little we know of them with certainty). And unlike many of her male colleagues, she is also correct enough to point out that she is certainly not the first with her thesis of the lack of Phoenician identity. This is a historical work after my own heart: very readable, methodologically sound, and relevant! More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Sense of History]

“Phantom Phoenicians, but with vivid afterlives”
Actually, Quinn’s thesis about the Phoenicians is entirely contained in this final conclusion, which immediately opens up her case: “The truth is that although historians are constantly apprehending the dead and checking their pockets for identity, we do not know how people really thought of themselves in the past, or in how many different ways, or indeed how much. I have argued here that the case of the Phoenicians highlights the extent to which the traditional scholarly perception of a basic sense of collective identity at the level of a ‘people’, ‘culture’, or ‘nation’ in the cosmopolitan, entangled world of the ancient Mediterranean has been distorted by the traditional scholarly focus on a small number of rather unusual, and unusually literate, societies.” With the latter, Quinn of course refers to the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Hebrew cultures/civilizations, which indeed, with their rich literary tradition, appear to be rather the exception (albeit very extensive exceptions). It turns out that the Phoenician (and by extension the Carthaginian) ‘culture’ is much more problematic to interpret due to the lack of literary work. “That is strange”, you will say, “since the Phoenicians were the ‘inventors’ of the alphabet, weren’t they?” With that last statement you yourself indicate how deeply rooted this equation between literary culture-people-civilization is.

No, - and Quinn herself admits that she is absolutely not the first - the Phoenicians were not a people, not a culture, not a civilization. They only became that in the 19th century of our era, when nationalism in Lebanon constructed its own, common historic antecedent in line with the typical Western model of nationalism. In the same way, the Carthaginian nation/culture/civilization was also a construction of 19th and 20th century nationalism in Tunisia.

So, were the Phoenicians a fabrication, a phantom? No, of course not. The then (1st millennium BCE) inhabitants of what is now the Lebanese coast, while not identifying themselves as a people, did share many characteristics, and recognized this. Quinn analyses the archaeological and textual references and evidence of these in great detail, and also shows how they evolved over time. One of the striking observations is that Carthage (a Phoenician colony) in the 4th century BCE, when it embarked on a very imperialistic political course, already tried to create this “Phoenician construction”, but with only very limited success. In fact, Phoenicia only became a historical reality in the late 2nd century CE, when the Romans established a Provincia Phoenicia.

Josephine Quinn deals with all the subtleties of the modern identity debate with great intelligence. This makes this book particularly successful and relevant for many reasons. Minor drawbacks are that her evidence mainly comes from the period of the 5th to 3rd century BCE, while the most relevant historical period for the ‘Phoenicians’ was in the first half of the 1st millennium BCE. I also find her final chapter in which she suggests that the inhabitants of the Phoenician port cities consciously opted for non-authoritarian hierarchies and weak mutual ties based on a sort of anarchistic, anti-imperialistic reflex, not very convincing. It seems to me that it is more likely to look into the direction of a psychological aversion to authority among hyper-commercially oriented population groups.
Nevertheless, well done by Josephine Quinn. And now I am really looking forward to reading her: How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History(2024).

Postscript: I recently read an article by Carolina López-Ruiz, that other leading expert in Phoenician affairs, accusing Quinn of too much deconstruction. She argues that the Phoenicians indeed can be identified as a coherent people or culture, with all the caveats that have to be taken into account. Obviously, I'm not qualified to judge, but probably they are both right.

[عبدالرحمن عقاب · Rating 4 out of 5]

قرأت الكتاب مترجماً باحتراف وسلاسة من إصدار سلسلة عالم المعرفة الموقّرة.

هذا الكتاب مهم، ويمكن اعتباره "دراسة حالة" لمفهوم "الجماعات المتخيلة"، وإن كان مثالاً معكوس الاتجاه الزمني إلى حدّ ما. فهنا خيال يصنع أمّة سابقة (الفينيقيين) لننسب إليها أمة حاضرة (لبنان مثلاً) بغية التمايز والانفصال.
لم أكن مهتماً بالتفاصيل التي أوردتها المؤلفة دعما لحجتها؛ قدر اهتمامي بالفكرة الأساس في الكتاب. أقصد "اختراع أمة تاريخية". وأهل التاريخ والآثار أقدر مني على تقييم حججها.
لكن الفكرة الأسّ في الكتاب-وهي محلّ اهتمامي وتقديري للكتاب- تصلح مثالاً على عبث الإنسان بالتاريخ والأدلة الآثارية لخلق واقعه أو تبرير سلوكه السياسيين. العقل البشري يصنع الماضي كما يصنع الحاضر، وقادر على تخيل الماضي كما هو قادر على تخيل المستقبل، مدفوعاً بكل نزواته وتحيزاته ونواياه.
أضع هذا الكتاب بجانب كتاب "الجماعات المتخيّلة" لبندكت أندرسون، وكتاب "آثار استعمارية" لجوزيف مسعد.

[Brendan McKee · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this book, Quinn provides an interesting examination into the Phoenician identity and it’s impacts in both the ancient and modern worlds. Her central goal is to illustrate that the Phoenicians did not exist as a cohesive nation but that this was a later invention by people seeking to nation-build. To this end, she provides an interesting and useful exploration into the archaeology of the Levant and North Africa. However, she often over reaches in her conclusions and, despite her claims to the contrary, seems to frequently mistake the absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Moreover, her criteria for self-definition seem overly stringent and modernist. After all, though ancient Greeks certainly did not have the same cohesive sense of national identity possessed by modern Greeks, that in no way means they didn’t possess a shared sense of a Hellenic identity which formed the basis of the modern Greek nation. Why demand more from an ancient Phoenician identity? Finally, the book ends on an exploration of how the Phoenician identity was used to inform modern British and Irish ones that is interesting, but poorly connected with the rest of the work and seems out of place. The end result is a book that contains a lot of good information, but suffers from a weak structure and flawed conclusions.

[Annikky]

This is a fascinating and accomplished account about the ancient Phoenicians. It is also rather academic, in the sense that it takes a close look at the Phoenician identity through the prism of the latest theoretical thinking and detailed physical and textual evidence. If you are looking for a straightforward history of Phoenicia(ns), this is not the book. If you are looking for some fresh thinking on the topic and you don’t mind some nuanced exploration of identity, colonialism and power dynamics plus detailed analysis of texts/coins/sanctuaries, it is definitely worth reading.

It is not a spoiler to say that Quinn is skeptical of the Phoenicians ever having existed as a unified nation or people. I am not a historian nor any sort of expert on Phoenicia, but I think she makes a good case. It seems entirely plausible that we have been projecting our modern ideas into the past and overestimating how much the Phoenicians formed a coherent group. That said, I feel like she does overstate her case somewhat. One absence that I found startling was the lack of almost any mention of seafaring as the basis of potential common identity - and that after having established that this was the main thing Phoenicians were known for by their contemporaries (and probably the thing they still are most known for today, at least when we talk about Phoenician cities in Levant).

Be as it may, reading the book was a good exercise in examining how we interpret ancient cultures and the (unconscious) filters we apply when doing that. I am also looking forward to Quinn writing a book where she allows herself to be a bit more free. She clearly is a good writer and has a great sense of humour. Unfortunately, we only get glimpses of the latter and her style is often weighed down by the - understandable - need to be exceedingly rigorous in her argumentation.

[Leroy Erickson · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a mathematical proof which shows that Alexander the Great did not exist and that he rode a white horse. That proof kept running through my mind as I was reading this book.

The author seemed determined, no matter what she had to do, to prove that the Phoenicians, as a separate race, did not exist and that they burned babies as an offering. To do so she focused on how the supposed Phoenicians seemed to identify as citizens of Tyre, Sidon and other eastern Mediterranean cities instead of as Phoenicians. This is different than, say, the Greeks who identified as citizens of Athens, Sparta, Thebes, hmmm, well let's just ignore that.

She focused totally on the time period from about 600 BCE to maybe 200 CE and never mentioned the long prehistoric period in the eastern Mediterranean back to a couple of thousand years BCE. (I'm sorry, I still like BC better.)

A large part of the book covers the years after Rome had eliminated Carthage as an enemy by demolishing the city, enslaving the entire population and hauling them away. Rome now ruled the eastern Mediterranean and northern African. They installed colonies of former soldiers in all of those areas. So, the people in those areas no longer identified as Phoenician. Hmmm. I wonder why?

There are other books available now which give a totally different view of the Phoenicians. Try "Phoenician Secrets" by Sanford Holst, for example, for a different view.

[ⵎⵓⵏⵉⵔ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great read, but by no means an easy one. While its style is convenient for laypeople like myself, its information is so dense, especially for someone who had limited prior information about the subject matter, except in relation to local North African kingdoms in the ancient period, I had to give myself enough time to absorb it slowly, and sometimes rewrite some paragraphs or ideas in my own way, as I contributed to relevant pages on Wikipedia.

The subject of this book is not only Phoenicians, but also the concepts of "nation" and "identity", especially "collective identity", both "emic" and "etic" (internal and external), and its methodology has wider applicability than just the people known as "Phoenicians". Its relevance is also not limited to the field of history and archaeology, but also to culture and politics, both in the West and in the MENA region, where "Phoenicianism" has been used and exploited, at various periods, to assert certain political claims or deny them, and to lend legitimacy to particular nationalist myths in different regions, sometimes in ways diametrically opposed to each other.

The author starts and concludes the book, with the claims made by Irish and English nationalists to "Phoenician" origins, whether through ancestry or through putative cultural influence. For the English/British nationalists, France played the role of Rome, while the British were often compared to the Phoenicians, both being "nations" of traders and seafarers. In Ireland, "Rome" was oppressive Britain, and the Irish were the Carthaginians, some going as far as to claim that the Irish language had origins in the Phoenician language or that the Irish were descendants of Phoenicians. These discussions and other ones, contributed to the formation of European national identities, even though eventually the Phoenicians played no part in them, especially with the rise of anti-semitism in the 19th century. They also laid the foundation for what Josephine Quinn and other scholars today consider a misguided common perception of Phoenicians as a "nation" or a "people".

I must note here, before any misunderstanding occurs, that Quinn is by no means claiming that "Phoenicians" did not exist, that they did not have, at least partial origins in the Levant, or that they did not have the cultural and political influence attributed to them. Her statement concerns only self-identification by "Phoenicians" of themselves as such, i.e. whether they were a "nation" and a "people" in the modern sense of these words, as is often claimed. She also carefully often uses the term "Phoenician-speakers" instead of "Phoenicians", to highlight the fact that regardless of how they identified themselves and were identified by others, the only thing we can say for certain is that they spoke the language, and shared some cultural attributes. Myths about ancestral origins can after all be constructed to suit various political and personal agendas. DNA testing has also given no clear evidence of a common "race" of Phoenicians, despite several studies on the subject.

The parallels Quinn laid out in the first and last chapters of the book (between British and Irish nationalist myths), are no doubt targetted at its primary audience, that is native English speakers in Britain, Ireland and the US, who would be quite familiar, or could easily be familiarized, with the characters and events involved. A somewhat similar parallel could have been made between Phoenicianism in North Africa vs in the Levant. While "Phoenician nationalism", among some Levantine intellectuals and laypeople, is used to assert the non-Arabness of the Levant, the same ideology is instrumentalized in North Africa, especially in Tunisia and Algeria to emphasize the exact opposite, i.e. the Arabness of those who make the claim to Phoenician ancestry or even of the whole region. A phrase like "the Arab Phoenicians" to them is not an oxymoron.

The chapters in between serve to expound on Quinn's argument that the concept of "nation" and "collective identity" should not be taken for granted, especially in the ancient world. Collective identities, before the modern era, are actually the exception rather than the norm, and the fact that we live today in a world dominated by nation-states, should not mislead us into projecting this conception in ancient contexts, and dividing ancient peoples into neatly defind nations, each with self-aware common imagination and intents.

The argument here therefore is not that "Phoenicians are definitely not a nation", but rather that we cannot assume that they were a nation, based on flimsy proof, more so when available epigraphic and literary evidence tends to point to the exact opposite. Both abroad and locally, when "Phoenicians" identified themselves in their language, they never used a collective term, "Phoenician" or otherwise, but rather identified themselves by their city, their family or their trade. "Phoenician" was certainly a category and an external identity in the Greek mindspace, and the word itself "phoinix" is Greek. That, in fact, is where the misconception started, retaken by Romans, and then by Europeans who have inherited the legacy of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, when it died out elsewhere in the Mediterranean. This is also not to say that "Phoenicians" in the classical Phoenician period (up to the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC) were not aware of this Greek term and the meaning behind it, but they do not seem to have mirrored it in their culture or language or self-identity, rather exploited it for narrow political gains, which highlighted the role or power of a particular "Phoenician" city as opposed to another, rather than a collective identity shared by all "Phoenicians". An example of this is when Carthage started minting coins with palm trees on them (one of the meanings of "phoinix" in Greek is "palm tree") in the 4th century BC, in Carthage-controlled Sicily where Greek was spoken, to highlight its power in the Mediterranean. No doubt mercenaries who fought for Carthage had to be reminded which authority had paid them, and the wider the coins of Carthage circulated, the wider its might was asserted. There's no evidence of this happening at any earlier point. This habit of using the palm tree as a symbol for Phoenicity or Punicity, was retaken over many centuries until the end of Antiquity, but again, it was never used in a Levantine or North African context to represent a collective identity, but rather to assert the claim of a particular city (for example Tyre or Sidon in Lebanon) as being the "mother city" (metropolis) from which "Phoenician" settlements abroad originated, for the narrow purpose of claiming higher prestige, and receiving better status within a Roman context.

Furthermore, quite to the detriment of modern Phoenician nationalists, the terms"Phoenician" and "Punic" have evolved over time, and were often applied in different ways to different peoples, sometimes outside of the areas of "classical Phoenicia". They were also not exclusive terms, and did not preclude self-identification with a different ethnicity. Even European nationalists were mostly aware of this, and Phoenicianism in Europe was often used, to explain either partial and specific characteristics, or to highlight the multitude of peoples and nations within Europe or within a specific nation (e.g. Britain), as a consequence of the "Phoenicians" themselves being a "multitude of nations". In MENA on the other hand, Phoenicianism takes a more fanatic and rigid form, and its instrumentalization is meant to exclude rather than include. In the Levant, the purpose is to deny and exclude Arabness, in North Africa to deny and exclude Amazighness (aka Berberness). "Phoenicians" therefore are painted as an exclusive "superior race" that harbors and brings civilization, as opposed to "savage Bedouin Arabs" (in the Levant) or "savage Berbers" (in North Africa). In the later case, the Amazigh (aka Berber people) are supposed to be "grateful" to the "Arab Phoenicians" who brought them civilization not only once, but twice.

As a summary, we can trace the evolution of the meaning of "Phoenician", according to Quinn, as follows:

- Circa 1500 BC: the word "ponikijo" is attested in Mycennean Greek inscriptions, its meaning is "purple dye" or "palm tree", but it does not seem to refer to an ethnicity or a people.
- Classical Greek period (up to the 6-5th century BC): the term "Phoenician" is used by Greek authors to refer to some sea people, but its meaning is somewhat vague and does not seem to apply exclusively to some Levantine people or their descendants. The only meaning that can be agreed upon is that it refers to people whose livelihood is tied to the sea, but whose mother tongue is non-Greek.
- Carthaginian Empire (up to 146 BC): the terms "Phoenician" (phoinix, poenus) and "Punic" (punicus) are now specifically applied to Carthaginians and Phoenician speakers, who form a connected network of coastal cities, using the Phoenician language, sharing similar or overlapping traditions, rituals and gods. The connections were sometimes tight, and sometimes loose, with some "Phoenician" cities doing basically their own thing.
- Roman period: Carthage is destroyed in 146 BC, but rather than extinguish its flame, this only leads to the spread of its language and traditions to regions it had hitherto never reached. In the Levant, this was due to the new popularity of Phoenicianism, which led to some cities like Emesa (Homs, Syria) to be identified as Phoenician, even though they were never part of "classical Phoenicia". The Romans also establish the province of Syria Phoenice at some point, making "Phoenicia" an actual, rather than mere conceptual, territory for the first time. In North Africa, as a form of resistance to Romanization and Roman rule, the use of Punic language and Punic rituals and temples spreads to new areas. It is possible that by late Antiquity, Amazigh languages in the Northernmost parts of North Africa were on the brink of extinction, with the dual Latinization and Punification of tongues, though they (the Amazigh languages) were revived again with the incursions of Amazigh people from the Sahara. Most importantly, self-identification as Punic did not exclude other local identities. Saint Augustine namely identified himself as both Numidian and Punic.

There's a lot still that can be written about this book, which is rich in information, ideas and questions. I do wish Josephine Quinn had further explored the manifestations of Phoenicianism in MENA, though I imagine that would have been an extra effort, that would not have necessarily interested her main target audience.

[TG Lin · Rating 2 out of 5]

看前言介紹，原本以為本書會符合自己對於歷史知識與研究的胃口。但不知是自己的耐心變薄或者是作者的行文風格，這本書讓我啃起來相當辛苦，時斷時續，看完三分之二後直接跳到結論；然後便還回圖書館了。

本書的作者的認證重點大概有兩個︰其一是古代的當事者從來沒有「腓尼基」這種民族觀念；另一則是營造出腓尼基人認同的多是以「反抗當時統治政權的訴求」。第二點，我是同意的，而且這一種狀況從古到今從來就不曾停過，也就是創造出一種新的意識形態來塑造一個新的團結共同體、藉此來反對與排除早先的統治階層，比如用族群宗教語言習俗等，Whatever you want，任君選擇、總是可以找到一種說法。

但關於第一點，我個人倒是有些存疑的。確實，古人的民族觀念與我們今天絕不相同，而作者也舉出各種例證和評量標準，來說明「腓尼基」在古代從未成為某種共同體。然而這種處理方式顯得過於嚴苛了些。正如作者自己也有談到的「希臘民族」這種觀念，在該地的城邦政治時代也不曾存在過。只不過由於歷史進程的偶然因素（馬其頓亞歷山大大帝與其後繼者的征服、羅馬的輿起），才開始出現了希臘人的概念。而「腓尼基」是否在推羅、迦太基城邦帝國時代不存在此種概念，我覺得這個問題問錯了——至少和羅馬共和國打了兩個世代的戰爭，羅馬人是將他們的敵人明白地視為「腓尼基人」的。而作者在這個大方向上，沒有什麼真正的著墨，反倒陷入瑣碎的考證——除非歷史上的迦太基可以擊敗羅馬、漢尼拔統一地中海文化圈並成立一個超種族帝國，否則歷史上自然沒有夠的時間來蘊釀，沈澱出以迦太基城為本的「腓尼基認同」的。要照作者這種論點，我們就連印歐民族、西徐亞族、閃米特族、日耳曼的文明，用法都得要細細分辨而難以下筆了。

[Hotspur · Rating 2 out of 5]

I assume this was a thesis that found a publisher as it was well-written. However, the academic nature, overwhelmed its merits as a history for the common reader. The author makes her point, and then continues making it, until it is a dead horse. This might work fine for the academic world, but it doesnt work for the average reader. And honestly, I was not completely convinced after reading it , that there was no widespread Phoenician cultural identity. Yet, my principal complaint, is that as a general reader, I finished the book not really taking much away about the Phoenicians. As an academic work, I am sure this is first rate as it is well-written and not full of academic jargon.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating analysis of the nature of identity and the ancient Phoenicians

Quinn makes a truly fascinating argument against the existence of any such identity as "Phoenician" in antiquity, except as an artificial one externally imposed, while considering the meaning of "identity" itself and the varying uses to which "Phoenicianism" has been applied.

[Mohamed Ibrahim · Rating 4 out of 5]

"الفينيقيون اختراع أمة"

ليس الغرض من الكتاب الهجوم علي الفينيقين وإنكار وجودهم، ولكن كما تؤكد الكاتبة جوزيفين كراول كوين أستاذة التاريخ وعالمة اثار في فصول الكتاب
بأن الفينيقين بالرغم من تواصلهم مع بعضهم
الا إنهم لم يكونوا أمة واحدة أو شعب مترابط.

في الأصل لم يتصرف الفينيقيون علي أنهم أمة أو جماعة واحدة ولم ينظر إليهم الآخرون علي هذا النحو، فلا يوجد شعب أو شخص أطلق علي نفسه فينيقيا -حتي أن الكلمة اختراع يوناني- ، حتي تعاملاتهم مع الجماعات والأماكن المجاورة لم تكن تحت اسم الفينيقيون،ولم يتحالف أي منهم مع بعض ضد أي غزو أجنبي أو هجمات عليهم ولم يشكلوا وحدة سياسية قط ، وفي مصادر الأدب اليوناني والروماني لم يتعاملوا معهم علي أنهم أمة واحدة، النقوش والمشغولات التي وجدت لا ترتبط بهم ووجدت في أماكن مختلفة

وبالتالي هم ليسوا أصحاب حضارة متماسكة واضحة المعالم تتميز بين غيرها من الحضارات.

لكن تم استخدام واستدعاء اسم الفينيقيين من وقت لآخر في بعض الكتابات أو الخطب من قبل بعض المفكرين. كما حدث في لبنان وتونس والتي وجدت الدولة القومية الجديدة نفعا في استدعاء الفينيقن كأسلاف فعليين و روحيين لهما لأهداف سياسية وعقدية. وايضا ادعاءات الإنكليز والإيرلنديين بأنهم من نسل الفينيقيين.

[فاروق الفرشيشي · Rating 4 out of 5]

دراسة مهمّة تشمل بفصولِها المتنوعةِ مختلف وجوه السؤال: هل يمكن اعتبار الفينيقيّين أمّة واحدة؟ فتساءلت الكاتبة عن اسم الفينيقيين، وعن اعتبارهم شعبا بنظر أنفسهم أو بنظر الأمم الأخرى المجاورة لهم. ثم تطرّقت إلى تلك العناصر الأساسية التي تؤسس شعبا كاللغة والدين. وكان اهتمامها بالدين لافتا، من خلال اقتفاء أثر ملقرت إله صور الأوّل، في الغرب المتوسطي، وعلاقته الوطيدة بهرقل الإغريقي.
تأخذ قرطاج حيزا أكبر في الجزء الثاني من الكتاب، فتبيّن الكاتبة استغلال المدينة الإفريقية لأصولها الشرقية من أجل مشروعها الامبراطوريّ في غرب المتوسط.
ثم تعود إلى بريطانيا ابتداء من عصر النهضة لتبيين الاستغلال السياسيّ لفينيقيا في صراعات بريطانيا المختلفة (إيرلندا، هولندا، فرنسا)

الطريف أن الكاتبة تخلص إلى الاعتراف بما كان منذ البداية بديهيا: هناك فعلا كيان فينيقيّ. ليس دولة، ولا شعبا يطلق على نفسه ذلك الاسم المتداول في بلاد الإغريق، ولكن لا يمكن أن لا يوجد شيء يشار له بشكل دائم طيلة الكتاب. فالإشارة دليل وجود. لم تدحض الكاتبة وجود لغة فينيقية، أيا كان اسمها أو دم المتحدثين بها، فإن أصولها ترجع إلى منطقة جغرافية شبه محددة، تضمّ عددا من المدن الدول التي لا يضمها كيان سياسيّ واحد، ولكن اللغة تظلّها بظلّ واحد.

[Dee]

Setting aside around 50 pages in. Highly capable in so many ways, but also quite densely academic. Alas, I am a far more casual reader so this is operating at a level of detail and approach that I'm just not firing on at breakfast time every day.

[Sayani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who were the Phoenicians? Did they exist as a collective group by this name? Or is the term “Phoenician” a result of the modern notion of nationalism? Josephine Quinn’s book makes the case for such a study. An impressive scholarly work where Quinn breaks down this thesis using references from archaeology, numismatics, epigraphy, etymology, and ancient literature.

It turns out that the people whom we have learned to be known as Phoenicians did not identify themselves with that particular name. Quinn labels this “ethnic assumption” as the product of categorization of various ethnic groups who seemingly had similar cultures, trades, languages or similar dialects, or lived in and around the same geographical area to make a sense of nationalistic identities after the advent of the Industrial Age. This idea of Phoenicianism propagated as a Lebanese political movement after the Ottoman Empire broke down. But through various historical findings, the author argues that this modern notion of Phoenicians as an ethnic group sharing a common history and identity is a product of European nationalist ideologies. Throughout the first part of the book, we see how fragmentary ancient relics can be and how difficult it is to piece together the ethnic values and identities of people who are no longer present.

In fact, the term “Phoenician(phoenix)” was invented by the Greeks (Latin word Punic has the same root) which can mean a bird, a palm tree, or a person from Phoenicia in Greek. But did the people living in the ancient Levant called themselves Phoenicians? Then who are the Canaanites or ancient Sardinians? Quinn shows that in fact, people of that region identified themselves in terms of the cities they lived in like Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. These city-states often managed to keep vague identities to create a symbiosis between themselves and imperialist powers such as the Romans. This seemingly fluid ethnic identity led to the success of several Phoenician colonies in the Levant. This is one of the finest inferences made in the book which keeps even a non-Mediterranean history buff hooked in. Though apart from a paragraph or two the book lacks a study of genetic analyses of the present Levantine population. As a biologist, genealogical studies make for a good common denominator in modern conversations about "identities". For example, Tony Joseph's Early Indians does a fascinating coverage of both archaeological and genetic studies regarding the ancestors of Indians and how settled in the Indian subcontinent.

Quinn talks a lot about identity in this book. The self-conscious acknowledgement of belonging to a collective group of people within borders has been an active topic as seen in the rise of modern nationalist movements. And often these movements find their inspiration from their ancestral lands, their ancient roots of origins, and pride in their ancestral culture. The book ends with such an example where Irish writers like James Joyce were influenced by Phoenician history with respect to Irish nationalism. Once the reader patiently traverses the details of ancient Roman coinage and various textual references by Livy or Herodotus, there is much to discover and learn from history and use it as a lens to focus on our modern political practices and problems surrounding ethnic concerns.

[Hamdi Hassan · Rating 4 out of 5]

بحث شيق و جريء في إثبات فكرة اختلاق حضارة و شعب وهوية تسمي فينيقية و انما هي في الحقيقة جزء من حركة الأفراد و تأثيرهم وتاثرهم ببعضهم البعض كيان لم يطلق عليه أحد ابدا لفظ شعب و عرق وهوية إلا في القرون الحديثة ل اغراض سياسية و ثقافية بعيده كل البعد عن الأصل التاريخي حاول به الساسة إيجاد أرضية تبعدهم عن كونهم عربا او ما الي ذلك ( لا ابل في لبنان )
استقراء جيد للتاريخ في حاجة للرد عليه بمزيد من الأدلة لمن ينتمون للفينيقيين في العصر الحديث
شكرا عالم المعرفة للترجمة والنشر ل هذا العمل الممتع باللغة العربية

[History Today]

The people known to history as the Phoenicians occupied a narrow tract of land along the coast of modern Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. They are famed for their commercial and maritime prowess and are recognised as having established harbours, trading posts and settlements throughout the Mediterranean basin. However, the Phoenicians’ lack of recognisable territory, homogeneous language or shared cultural heritage means that, despite being one of the most influential Mediterranean peoples of the first millennium BC, their identity has long remained shrouded in mystery.

In Search of the Phoenicians takes the reader on an exhilarating quest to reveal more about these enigmatic people. Using a dazzling array of evidence, this engaging book investigates the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians from the Middle East to Ireland, from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity and beyond.

The volume’s starting point is to emphasise the lack of definitive evidence to support the notion that the Phoenicians ever self-identified as a single ethnic group or acted as a stable collective. Quinn, however, argues against simply dismissing them as a historical mirage. Rather, having demonstrated that the Phoenicians were originally an invention of ancient Greek ethnographic traditions, she shows how, during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, eastern and western conceptions of ethnicity became blurred, leading some cities to identify themselves as ‘Phoenician’. Significantly, she also shows that those cities that promoted their supposedly Phoenician heritage did so because they wished to convey a political or cultural message, rather than because they endorsed the concept of a specifically Phoenician ethnicity. Carthage, for example, embraced its ‘Phoenician’ heritage as a way of enhancing its prestige and authority, consolidating its power in North Africa and encouraging other ‘Phoenician’ cities to join it in resisting Roman imperialism.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Mark Woolmer is Assistant Professor in Ancient History at Durham University.

[Lene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simplified, the author's main thesis is "There was never a people who identified as Phoenician, that identity was invented later and by other people." This book makes a very good case for this thesis and it has taught me a lot, although not quite what I expected. My expectations (for which I alone am responsible) were that this book would focus on the history of the Phoenicians, while a big part of the book is devoted to the history of narratives about them, and how we came to the idea that there was a people identifying as Phoenicians at all.

[Willy Marz Thiessam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The term Phoenician is a very useful but vague term historically. After reading Josephine Quinn's masterly book, you can see why the term because its so vague has been useful to those who used the term. Its an impressive sweep of history that shows you the evidence and the differences associated with the term.

[Aldous · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating

What is a nation? Who were the Phoenicians and were there such a people? Balmuth does a wonderful job of showing how both ancients and moderns constructed the Phoenician identity and applied it to people who had no such national consciousness. I only wish that this book were longer and delved deeper into the legends of Tanit, Baal Hammon and Melqart.

[James Waugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very engaging and thorough arguments. I love to read Classicism that can cut through longstanding misconceptions like this. Quinn does a stellar job honing in on nuances as subtle as "Saint Augustine asks Africans what they are and they say 'Canaanites'" being a misprint of "quod sit" and "quod sint" because Augustine actually asked them what "it is" in reference to a dialect mentioned a paragraph above. Great fun to read and a fascinating history of Phoenicianism in politics.

Three stars for an excellent treatment of a specific topic. I will refer back to this on occasion, but it's really a specialist delight.

[Jeany Lin · Rating 5 out of 5]

想像的幽靈》、《語言與權力》、《想像的共同體》、《不受統治的藝術》一起的書，

加上《台灣族群史解謎》、《重探戰後臺灣史》也很合適！

而且很好讀！就是那種會告訴你他的論點，然後舉例123的這種寫法。最後還來個貼心的總整理，讓讀者不會迷失。

不是歐洲學者喜歡的那種繞來繞去要你跟著他的思緒漂浮徜徉在汪洋大海來來回回迷路一百遍的風格。

許久不見這種單刀直入的寫作方式，真想念💕

所以腓尼基認同的最大受益者：

第一且最大的受益者是迦太基，再來就是把迦太基給滅了的羅馬

然後再來就是16-18世紀，想要自外於歐陸另外找文化起源的不列顛，以及要自外於不列顛找文化起源的愛爾蘭，以及要追求去殖民化的20世紀黎巴嫩、突尼西亞、利比亞。

喔，還有要20世紀初要離間殖民地的分離主義者的敘利亞、大馬士革和黎巴嫩的法國殖民政府。

其實後來腓尼基認同變成蠻危險的，因爲19世紀和猶太人重疊，再來就那時候說腓尼基有殺嬰獻祭習俗不文明，所以19世紀在反猶太/反閃族的氣氛中，不列顛和愛爾蘭都不說腓尼基認同了。在黎巴嫩，新腓尼基主義後來變成極右派長槍黨的主張之一。

總之，本書就是要要說、「腓尼基人」不存在，是一個虛構的想像共同體。

而且即使是迦太基、第一個做出這樣敘事的時候，這個概念也是很鬆散的。羅馬時期進一步讓美刻爾的信仰網路、西頓和泰爾的迦太基母城概念延伸。

但是在16世紀以後，歐洲人重新發明了腓尼基民族。

我想作者認為腓尼基的現代發明，即是安德森所説的官方民族主義。由國家力量推動的民族主義 都是在壓迫人民，並不是自然形成的民族認同。

總之很有趣的一本書！推薦！

[Ian Hunter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a year to finish this, I think I had got bogged down in the middle. When I picked it up again, determined to finish, I zipped through in a matter of days, and very much enjoyed it. Strange. Can't remember why it was unfinished for so long. An interesting investigation on how the use of the collective "phoenicians" has been used over many centuries, for what ends and whether there was any actual understanding of such by the peoples it was applied to.

[Luke Cullen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is more an academic discussion in identity and ethnicity focusing on the ‘Phoenicians’ rather than what I was hoping for which was an examination or narrative history of what most refer to Phoenicians today.

For what it is it was a good read. But I wanted something much different from what it was.

[Stephen Stockwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great insights into the history of the Phoenicians: once an amorphous bunch of sea-farers, traders and artisans, mostly from the Levant, who spread across the Mediterranean and grew in ancient and moderns minds to become a nation, imaginary as most nations are, that has an influence on modern Lebanon, Ireland and England. Academic but a great investigation.

[Brent Vincent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my normal area of historical interest, but I found this to be a fascinating book. I didn't know much about the Phoenicians before I read this book, but what I did know was challenged by this book. I feel I have a much better understanding of these ancient people than I did before reading.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing survey of the study of the Phoenicians. I loved it. I wish I could write something like it.

[Avani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the connections are a little tenuous, but overall a great resource for understanding Phoenician influence across the Mediterranean.

[Jim Gise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-written, but of the claim that the Phoenicians never actually existed I can’t help feeling that “the lady dost protest too much, methinks”.

[Sergio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Los fenicios son los amigos que hicimos por el camino

[Mads Floyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating premise, but the assumptions to me constitute a bit of a reach.