In Search of the Phoenicians

by Josephine Crawley Quinn

However, my intention here is not simply to rescue the Phoenicians from their undeserved obscurity. Quite the opposite, in fact: I’m going to start by making the case that they did not in fact exist as a self-conscious collective or “people.” The term “Phoenician” itself is a Greek invention, and there is no good evidence in our surviving ancient sources that these Phoenicians saw themselves, or acted, in collective terms above the level of the city or in many cases simply the family.

As Ernest Gellner put it, “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist”.

In the case of the Phoenicians, I will suggest, modern nationalism invented and then sustained an ancient nation.

Identities have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years, serving as the academic marginalia to a series of crucially important political battles for equality and freedom.8 We have learned from these investigations that identities are not simple and essential truths into which we are born, but that they are constructed by the social and cultural contexts in which we live, by other people, and by ourselves—which is not to say that they are necessarily freely chosen...

Our identities are also multiple: we identify and are identified by gender, class, age, religion, and many other things, and we can be more than one of any of those things at once, whether those identities are compatible or contradictory.10 Furthermore, identities are variable across both time and space: we play—and we are assigned—different roles with different people and i...

As a result, recent scholarship tends to see ethnicity not as a timeless fact about a region or group, but as an ideology that emerges at certain times, in particular social and historical circumstances, and, especially at moments of change or crisis: at the origins of a state, for instance, or after conquest, or in the context of migration, and not always even then.

This chapter argues that the modern notion of the Phoenicians as a people with a shared history, culture, and identity—found in modern textbooks and scholarship as well as in postcolonial political rhetoric about Phoenician forebears—is the product of relatively recent European nationalist ideologies.

Central to the ideology of the young Phoenicians was the conviction that Lebanon and the Lebanese were not Arab. They emphasized instead their metaphorical, spiritual, and sometimes even literal descent from much earlier inhabitants of their distinctive geographical space, where Mount Lebanon cuts off the coastal strip from the rest of Syria, a region they always characterized as peculiarly western or Mediterranean by contrast with the Arabs farther east: “there are no camels in Lebanon,” as the slogan goes.8 They argued among other things that the language spoken in Lebanon was influenced as much by the local ancient languages of Phoenician, Aramaic, and Syriac as by colloquial Arabic, and the poet Said Akl, who died in November 2014 at the age of 103, even invented an alphabet based on Latin rather than Arabic letters in which to write this “Lebanese” language.9 This rejection of Arab heritage was a long-lived phenomenon: as late as the 1950s, the widely respected Maronite historian Philip Hitti, who taught at Princeton and Harvard, noted that “according to anthropological researches, the prevailing type among the Lebanese—Maronites and Druzes—is the short-headed brachycephalic one . . . in striking contrast to the long-headed type prevailing among the Bedouins of the Syrian Desert and the North Arabians.”10

Phoenicianism was by no means the only nationalist movement in the early-twentieth-century Middle East to identify with the great civilizations of the past, and through them with the Mediterranean and the West. Other examples include Pharaonism in Egypt, Assyrianism and Arameanism in Syria, and Canaanism in Palestine, whose adherents looked back to a “Phoenician-Hebrew” Mediterranean civilization dating to the time of King David and King Solomon that colonized the west, a model that was used both for and against Zionism.

Much recent scholarship has emphasized that nations are not a “natural” form of social organization, but a constructed one; in the words of Caspar Hirschi, they are “not formed by ‘objective’ criteria like common territory, language, habits, ancestry, fate, etc. but by the common belief in such criteria.”

Even when geographical, linguistic, or biological links between people do persist over time, it is the communal choice to recognize and value them (or some of them) that creates a national identity. And to justify a new and unfamiliar collective identity, national movements had to create new, shared myths of origin and historical memories for all their citizens.

As Eric Hobsbawm puts it, “Nations are historically novel entities pretending to have exi...

In a lecture in Paris in 1882, Renan asked, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (What is a nation?) and found his answer not in blood or descent, but in a collective will and collective memories: “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which to tell the truth are but one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is consent in the here and now, the desire to live together, the will to preserve the value of the heritage that has been collectively received.”

“The essence of a nation is that all its members have a great amount in common, and also that they have all forgotten a great deal.”

When independence from France was finally achieved in 1943 with the support of almost all Lebanese scholars and politicians whatever their declared race or religion, Lebanon was defined in its new National Pact as a country with an “Arab face,”38 and in 1944, it became one of the founding members of the Arab League. Nonetheless, neo-Phoenicianism remained a useful ideology for the new Lebanese state: the Phoenician origins of Lebanon were now what made it unique, and uniquely pluralistic, within the larger community of Arab nations.39 Phoenician stories and symbols were adopted by urban elites of various confessional and political persuasions; coins issued by the Lebanese Republic once again featured a Phoenician ship and the famous cedar of Lebanon (fig. 1.4); and from 1956, the annual International Festival of Baalbek became a major showcase for the country’s Phoenician past.40

Tunisian Phoenicianism started from an explicitly anticolonial standpoint. Bourguiba was particularly fond of Hannibal as a symbol of resistance to Roman, and therefore European, colonialism, and schoolbooks taught (not unreasonably) that Rome was the aggressor in the Punic Wars, forced Carthage to resist, and prevailed only with the help of another local hero, the Numidian king, Massinissa. As in Lebanon, this was part of a careful negotiation with European ideologies: French continued to be taught in schools, and Bourguiba was in cultural terms a liberal and cosmopolitan figure who promoted considerable social change, in particular in relation to women’s rights—a development reflected in a new focus on the role of Queen Elissa, also known as Dido, as the founder of Carthage.

This interest in Elissa, as well as a more general identification with the Phoenician past, went well beyond state propaganda: the distance between Rome and Carthage is embraced in two novels by the francophone writer Fawzi Mellah, Le conclave des pleureuses (1987) and Elissa, la reine vagabonde (1988), which treat Elissa’s story from a variety of local perspectives, including the suggestion that she has been misrepresented in the European tradition and in particular in the work of Virgil, who according to one of Mellah’s characters “disfigures” the queen by calling her Dido and ascribing to her a love affair with a Greek sailor, “a vagabond unworthy of our Elissa.”47

For Renan, the Phoenicians were a “people”80 and a “nation,”81 with a distinct art and architecture, if not a very impressive one: “In general, in their buildings, the Phoenicians seem to have had little force of character.”82 Nonetheless, he took a rather narrow view of the extent and nature of ancient Phoenicia: “Phoenicia was not a country; it was a series of ports, with a rather narrow hinterland. These towns, situated at intervals of ten or twelve kilometers, were at the center of an entirely civic life, as in the Greek towns. Phoenician civilization did not reach the mountain, and had little effect on the people of Syria.”83 However, and conveniently for those who would later see Lebanon as distinct from (or even within) the Arab world, Renan reflected at length on the atypicality of the Phoenician character within the larger category of “Semitic” peoples to which contemporary linguistics and racial science had assigned them: their famous practicality and business acumen, not to mention their political institutions and polytheistic religion, were quite at odds with the general image of the Semitic race at the time.84

Renan did not make a clear connection between the modern Maronites and the ancient Phoenicians, although he noted that “the inferiority of the Phoenicians as artists seems, furthermore, to have persisted to the present day in the country they inhabited,”85 and that “the Lebanese race, whether Christian or Muslim, is, if I may say so, iconoclastic and ignorant of art. . . . The Maronite churches are very severe and forbid statues.”86 However, he did describe the Maronites themselves as a “nation,”87 dismissing the Muslims by contrast as “half-savage or dull-witted . . . inferior races,”88 and the map of the region explored by his expedition that accompanied Renan’s publication, which covered a large area including Mount Lebanon, the cities of the coast, and the Beqaa valley (fig. 1.5), was revived by Lebanists in 1920 to support the case for Greater Lebanon.89

Back in the nineteenth century, Renan’s expedition to Phoenicia increased the material available to scholars interested in the Phoenicians, and the launch in 1867 of his Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, still the definitive collection of Phoenician inscriptions, provided another enormous boost to the field. This may help to explain why the notion of a discreet national, ethnic, and cultural identity of the Phoenicians became more explicit in later studies.

In 1889, George Rawlinson’s History of Phoenicia calls the Phoenicians a “nation,” and assigns them on similar linguistic grounds to a larger Semitic “group.”93 In the third edition, published in the 1890s, the language is stronger: Rawlinson begins the work with a declaration that the Levantine coast is “inhabited by three nations, politically and ethnographically distinct,” Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, and he devotes a chapter to “The People—Their Origin and Ethnic Character.”94 The book now concludes with a “General Estimate of the Nation” in which, after the traditional observation that the skills of the Phoenician “race” were in exploration and commerce rather than literature or art, Rawlinson awards them a “rank among the chief of the secondary powers of the earth.”

Also in 1889, Richard Pietschmann published a History of the Phoenicians (Geschichte der Phönizier) in which he too describes the Phoenicians as a “nation,” though he notes that in their case this was a rather vague concept, and he treats their own national self-consciousness as an open question.96 Concern for internal or “emic” definitions of ethnicity or nationhood was, however, unusual by this period; peoples, nations, and races were usually discussed as if they were simply natural facts, even if the precise categorization of specific examples was open to debate. And these natural nations had equally natural cultures: as Nicholas Vella has noted, all the popular nineteenth-century works on the Phoenicians from Renan’s Mission onward, “included an immense corpus of objects, integrating inscriptions, coins and seals,” and “common language and script, religion and burial practices, dress and personal ornaments, and other attributes were taken as material markers for an ethnic group with undisputed roots.” In describing and isolating so-called Phoenician culture, Vella suggests, such books and exhibitions in a sense invented it.

In 1963, Sabatino Moscati, professor of Semitic philology at the University of Rome, effectively refounded the field of Phoenician studies in a lecture that put the question of Phoenician identity center stage, asking his audience, “Who were the Phoenicians, really? What were the distinguishing features and characteristics of their civilization, what were the historical, political, religious and artistic events and qualities that defined and shaped it? Because so far it seems that the unity, the autonomy, the homogeneity of the people and culture have merely been assumed rather than investigated.”

It should come as no surprise then that the spectacular exhibition I Fenici (The Phoenicians) at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1988, organized by Moscati and sponsored by Fiat, was curated in the same way as the antiquarian corpora of the nineteenth century, with artifacts of “Phoenician” culture displayed according to their genre and geographical provenance. The joke at the time went that that “Sabatino Moscati invented the Phoenicians, Gianni Agnelli manufactured them.”

Smith explicitly sees the Phoenicians as one example of this phenomenon: “In ancient Sumer, Phoenicia and Greece, we find two kinds of sentiment side by side, a political loyalty to the individual city-state, and a cultural and emotional solidarity with one’s cultural kinsmen, as this is interpreted by current myths of origin and descent.”112 While there were “deep-seated rivalries” between individual Phoenician states, these “co-existed with strong . . . pan-Phoenician . . . sentiments based on a common heritage of religion, language, art and literature, political institutions, dress and forms of recreation.”113 Furthermore, in Phoenicia “a common Canaanite fertility religion, common language and alphabet, seafaring activities and colonies, temple construction and geographical location on peninsulas, all provided the basis for common sentiments among different strata and city-states in defence of their life-style.”114

Anthony Smith takes perhaps the broadest and most helpful view on this question, suggesting that there are six different criteria by which we can recognize an ancient ethnic group—a collective name, a common myth of descent, a shared history, a sense of solidarity, an association with a specific territory, and a distinctive shared culture—and that such groups should fulfill all of these criteria at least to some degree.4 I would argue that on the available evidence the Phoenicians fulfilled none of them.

It is well known that no one ever called her- or himself “Phoenician” in Phoenician, and this is hardly surprising, since phoinix (φοῖνιξ) is a Greek word. More surprising, perhaps, is how few people called themselves Phoenician even in other languages (including Greek), and what I will also show in this chapter is that there is no evidence for the use of any other communal self-designation either, despite the common claim that our Phoenicians described themselves as “Canaanites.” Instead, a survey of the limited available evidence suggests that Phoenician-speakers defined themselves, at least in their inscriptions, in terms of their cities and, even more, their families.

First, what evidence is there for self-declared Phoenicians? One of the most famous candidates scratched his name in Etruscan on a tessera hospitalis or hospitality token in the second half of the sixth century BCE.6 This small ivory plaquette, found in a grave in the Santa Monica necropolis at Carthage, would have been one of a matching pair that could be reunited to prove the existence of a relationship of mutual friendship and hospitality between two individuals and their descendants. It has a wild boar carved on one side and an inscription on the other that begins mi puinel karθazie. The word mi means “I am”; karθazie means “belonging to Carthage”; and some scholars have interpreted puinel as a second ethnic designation related to phoinix and/or its Latin equivalent poenus. However, as Jonathan Prag has pointed out, it would be odd—indeed unique—to identify oneself with two “ethnics” but no personal name.7 It is much more likely that “Puinel” here is simply the man’s own name: Etruscan epigraphy reveals plenty of names beginning Pui- or even Puin-.8 Puinel may be the dead person himself, and so a man of Etruscan origin or descent living in Carthage, or more likely (since it would be strange to keep one’s own half of a hospitality token) the name of an associate with origins in Carthage who has at some point acquired a local name in Etruria. The high level of contact and exchange between Carthage and Etruria in this early period renders both possibilities quite plausible.9

increasing distance from home can lead to increasing identification with it. Indeed, some Greek historians have argued that collective identities above the level of the city-state, such as Rhodian, Ionian, or indeed Greek itself, emerged in the context of large-scale migration around the Mediterranean by Greek-speakers in the first half of the first millennium BCE.10 It would not be surprising if people from the Levant also found their commonalities in foreign contexts, where the extent to which they shared a language, gods, ritual practices, and a regional origin would become more obvious to themselves as well as to others.

“I left Phoenicia” is not an identity claim by or on behalf of the dead man, but a simple fact about Antipatros’s geographical origin. The writer presumably intends to draw attention to the sadness of dying far from home in terms that would make sense to a Athenian audience, themselves familiar with the idea of “Phoenicia” as much as or perhaps more than they were with individual Levantine cities.23 This probably also explains the single reference to a Phoenician in Latin epigraphy, an imperial-period tombstone from Noricum that commemorates a “Phoenician girl” (punica virgo)—and again, this wording is unlikely to have been the girl’s own choice.

This lack of evidence for the use by Phoenicians themselves of that Greek label is not usually seen as a problem; the standard claim in modern scholarship is that the Phoenicians described themselves with a word from their own language, “Canaanite.”25 There is, however, very little evidence for this usage either, and I want to suggest that the examples that are usually given have been misconstrued. The only explicit claim ever made in Levantine cities to be part of the region of Canaan, indeed the only time that the word Canaan (KNʿN) is found written in Phoenician, is on bronze coins minted by the city of Beirut in 168 BCE and for the rest of the second century, which give the city’s name as “Laodikeia mother in Canaan” (LʾDK ʾM BKNʿN).26 This phrase is sometimes taken as evidence itself for a self-identification by Phoenician-speakers as Canaanite, but it describes the city rather than its inhabitants, and its political context means that it should not be taken as a neutral label, drawing on long-term local usage, but rather interpreted as a carefully fashioned intervention in regional rhetorics of power. It is a version of the name “Laodikeia in Phoenicia” imposed on Beirut by the Greco-Macedonian Seleucid kings, where “in Phoenicia” distinguishes this city from the Laodikea on the Sea farther north. It is not, however, a straightforward translation, but a local rewriting in political and cultural as well as linguistic terms: as well as adding to the Seleucid name the n...

The only direct claim to personal “Canaanite” identity that is regularly cited by scholars is found in a third- or second-century BCE inscription marking an offering made at the tophet sanctuary at Cirta (modern Constantine) in Algeria. The inscription in its published form reads as follows: “To Baal Hammon, this is what Abdeshmun [ʿBDʾŠMN] son of MʾDR, a Canaanite man from Carmel [ʾŠ KNʿN MQRML], citizen of ʾYʿRM, vowed. He heard his voice, he blessed him.” Here I translate the relevant phrase ʾŠ KNʿN as “Canaanite man,” following the text and translations given in the French publication of the inscriptions from the sanctuary (Cananéen) and in the standard German collection of note179worthy Phoenician inscriptions (Kanaanäer).27 One point emerges immediately: there would be no point in mentioning Canaan in this inscription unless it was to draw attention to something unusual—and so its use here would suggest that it was not common to make a connection with Canaan in a diasporic Levantine community like this one. If being “of Canaan” (or indeed “Canaanite”) was considered true of everyone making dedications in Phoenician at this sanctuary, there would be no reason to point it out in this particular case—or alternatively we would expect to see it mentioned more often. However, the text as published is not what is written on the stone: the final letter of the word concerned is not a nun but a lamed, giving not KNʿN (Canaan) but KNʿL. This was pointed out almost fifty years a...

the implication of Augustine’s description of both the woman and the peasants as punici, Phoenician, may also be a linguistic one: it is a striking fact that the standard reference of the term punicus in Augustine’s writing is not to an ethnic group but to the Phoenician language and its speakers.39

The truth is that the passage is hard to understand on either reading, but it should by now be clear that this poorly transmitted report of a hypothetical conversation cannot be used as proof of a self-conscious identification as “Canaanite” on the part of Algerian peasants in late antiquity. If not a misunderstanding of a corrupt text, is it at best Augustine’s, or more likely Valerius’s, own suggestion that the peasants they call punici would self-identify as Canaanite.

This raises a broader problem with the notion that the people the Greeks called Phoenician traditionally called themselves Canaanite: it depends on the assumption that the two words mean the same thing—or at least something fairly similar.48 But for a long time these terms were used about different places and people. While the Greeks’ “Phoenicia” was always a coastal strip, the “Canaan” of the Near Eastern sources, including the Hebrew Bible, was considerably larger, including the coastal cities but often extending as far inland as the River Jordan if not beyond.49 These regions were also of course seen from different perspectives: Canaan from inland, where a whole series of interconnected cities and states housed people speaking very similar languages; and Phoenicia from the sea, where the coastal cities were all that most Greek-speakers saw. And as has often been pointed out, the Canaan and Canaanites of the Hebrew Bible were largely ideological constructs representing the enemies of Israel, rather than historical references to a real social group.50

In the second century CE, Philo of Byblos displaces the equation from places to people, mentioning a “Chna” whose name was changed to “Phoinix”—by, he seems to imply, Greek historians who have distorted the local myths he now records.53 It is not until the third century CE that Herodian says straightforwardly that Phoenicia’s original name was Chna.54

“Sons of” particular cities are found in Phoenician inscriptions throughout the Mediterranean, including sons of Tyre at Carthage and Sabratha in North Africa, sons of Carthage in Lebanon, and a son of Arqa, north of Byblos, at Tamessos on Cyprus.62 The phrase itself is exported from the Levantine homeland: we find sons of Ugarit and sons of the land of Canaan in the thirteenth century BCE, and there are many other examples in Near Eastern texts from the Bronze Age.63 The label “Son of Tyre” or “Son of Carthage” usually comes at the end of a genealogy of two or more generations, meaning that it is unclear whether it describes the author of the inscription or an ancestor. But an unusual example from Carthage dedicated by a woman, one “GDNʾM daughter of Baalyaton son of Tyre,” reveals that the phrase must refer in that case (and therefore very likely in the others) not to the person who erected the stone, and so to that person’s own city, but to the home of the most distant ancestor listed.

In the western Mediterranean, regional identities are also visible, with about fifteen people identifying in Punic inscriptions at Carthage as “Sardinians.”65 This suggests a primary link neither to their Levantine origins, nor the larger Levantine diaspora in the west, but specifically to the island on which they resided, and which they shared with others. Furthermore, although the dating of this evidence for a Sardinian identity to the fourth century and later may reflect the loss of earlier examples, it echoes other patterns of evidence for the construction of regional identities among Greek-speakers in the same period: “Sicilian,” for example, became a standard identity claim in Greek inscriptions in Sicily from the fourth century, when the generic identity of Sikelos seems to have replaced an earlier practice of referring to Greeks (alone) in Sicily as Sikeliotes.

More detailed evidence for attitudes to identity in Levantine migrant communities comes from Greek and bilingual inscriptions, with some of the best examples found in the Aegean.67 These suggest that even overseas Phoenician-speakers identified according to their towns of origin, maintained links with them, and congregated in communities on the basis of those ties.

Although links between individuals from different Levantine cities on Delos appear comparatively weak, Phoenician-speakers did have substantial interactions with the Greek and Italian populations. They frequented the gymnasium; participated in politics, the Greek ephebate, and the Delian Games; intermarried with Italians; and dedicated at Greek sanctuaries—though apparently not at each other’s.89 The honors awarded by the Beiruti Poseidoniasts to their Roman benefactor included the right to participation in the social activities of their koinon, and their large and impressive establishment includes shrines to Ashtart, “Poseidon of Beirut,” and the goddess Roma, as well as a dedication of the famous image of Aphrodite beating off a satyr with her slipper, which could be read as a distinctly Greek joke. Perhaps the best example of a well-connected Levantine man living on Delos in this period is Philostratos, a citizen of Naples, originally from Ashkelon, who honored the “Italians” (Italikoi) on the island and was honored by them, who funded part of the “Agora of the Italians” as well as the sanctuary of the gods of Ashkelon, and whose son was an ephebe at Athens in the late 90s BCE.90

self-identification does not happen in a vacuum: not only does a sense of “us” need some “them” from which to differentiate itself, but other peoples’ opinions often affect the delineation of self.

will argue in this chapter, however, that external sources fail to reveal a sense of common identity, history, or origins on the part of the ancient Phoenicians themselves, but suggest instead that they were not seen even by their neighbors as a homogenous ethnic group or nation. Instead, the label picks out social characteristics, designating a group united by contemporary culture and practice rather than by historical links, and it tells us more about the authors who use it than about their “Phoenician” subjects.

It is only Greek and then Roman authors who delineate a smaller region called Phoenicia, describe as Phoenicians those who come from that area, and constitute the sole source of our own concept of the “Phoenicians.”

The Phoenicians’ debut in Greek literature is in Homer’s Iliad, so it dates to the eighth or seventh century BCE. The Greek word phoinix must in fact relate to the word po-ni-ki-jo found in second millennium BCE Linear B tablets from the palaces at Pylos and Knossos, which already seems to have a similar range of meanings, including “crimson” and “palm tree,” but the term is not used as a description of a group of people in these texts.31 Once they do appear, however, these Phoenicians are fundamentally a people of—and on—the sea.32 This is an idea that Homer may well have inherited from a Near Eastern tradition: the kings of Arados, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and others are called “kings of the seacoast” in ninth-century Assyrian texts.33 However that may be, very little is said about the Phoenicians as a group by any Greek author in the Archaic and Classical periods other than that, as Homer put it, they are “famous for their ships” (nausiklutoi); there is no sense of a shared Phoenician character, culture, or society, and the focus is instead on their parallels and relationships with Greeks.

Homer’s Phoenicians are already firmly associated with the sea. At the funeral games for Patroklos in the Iliad, the first prize in the footrace is the most beautiful silver mixing bowl in the world, made by “Sidonians [Sidones], well skilled in handicrafts,” but brought across the “murky sea” by Phoenician men (phoinikes andres).35 The people making bowls on land are identified according to their city, but the people transporting and trading the same bowls are generic “Phoenicians.”36 This point is reiterated in a later scholium or marginal comment on a manuscript copy of this passage, which declares that “to a supreme degree the Phoenicians were the first to plow the seas.”37 A similar notion is found in the Odyssey; when Odysseus pretends to Athena that he is a fugitive from Crete, he tells her that he was carried to Ithaca as a paying passenger by “lordly Phoenicians” who have allegedly now returned to “well-peopled Sidonia”: here Phoenicians at sea are again associated with the city of Sidon on land.

The few episodes Herodotus recounts involving Phoenicians that are not actually set at sea are still almost all connected with overseas contact of one kind or another. Kadmos and his fellow-migrants taught the alphabet and the worship of Dionysus to the Greeks,50 and in turn the Phoenicians acknowledged that they learned circumcision from the Egyptians—although Herodotus note312s that they tended to give it up through contact with the Greeks:51 by his account, they just are not very good at practicing distinctive collective behavior. At the same time, Herodotus draws attention to the connections between Greeks and Phoenicians, including the existence of Phoenician elements at the heart of Athens: the tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton, he reports, were members of the Gephyraian clan who (despite their own claims to the contrary) were Phoenicians who had come with their leader Kadmos to Greek Thebes.52

For Pseudo-Skylax, who wrote a periplus, or sailing gazetteer, of the Mediterranean in the fourth century, the Phoenicians were again “barbarians,” a subgroup of the Syrians who lived on the coast of Syria from the Thapsakos River (probably the Orontes) down to Ashkelon, as well as in colonies elsewhere.65 Unusually for him, Pseudo-Skylax does not name Phoenicia itself, a choice that continued the tradition of disassociation between the people and the place: “And past Caria is Lycia, an ethnos. . . . And past Lycia is Pamphylia, an ethnos. . . . And after Pamphylia is Cilicia, an ethnos. . . . There is after Cilicia the ethnos of the Syrians. And in Syria there live, on the coast, the Phoenicians, an ethnos.” This passage also fits in with a hardening sense of Phoenician “groupness”: Pseudo-Skylax is the first surviving Greek author to describe the Phoenicians as an ethnos. To call a group an ethnos in ancient Greek was not, to be sure, to describe it as an ethnic group in modern terms. If Greek-speakers wanted to specify a group of people who were understood to share descent, or at least to be “enlisted automatically by birth”—something closer to a modern definition of ethnicity, whether objective or subjective—they could use the term genos, from the root gignesthai, “to be born.”66 Ethnos by contrast simply meant a group of individuals—sometimes animals—who had something in common, from descent to class to gender. It was often used with a meaning similar to the vague Eng...

The Greek stereotype of the Phoenicians also develops new aspects in the fourth century, suggesting a thicker conception of them as a coherent group with a particular character. But although some authors seem to describe them as wily or even mendacious, the examples we have may implicate Greeks as well. In his Republic, for instance, Plato has Socrates call his imagined community’s origins myth a “Phoenician thing” (Phoinikikon ti), but then he explains this as the kind of story about the past that (Greek) poets tell; here the association of Greek myth with a “Phoenician” practice may in fact undermine notions of Greek virtue and superiority. The same could be true of a fragment of a comic play hesitantly attributed to Aristophanes, in which a character says, “I am becoming a true Phoenician: with one hand I give and with the other I take away,” but we do not know whether the character speaking is a Greek or a Phoenician.

The Latin vocabulary used in reference to the Phoenicians embodies this rather vague and even contradictory picture. The original Latin word for Phoenician was poenus, a simple transliteration of the Greek phoinix without the initial aspiration—a feature that Latin lacked until the second century BCE.85 With its alternative adjectival form punicus, this term was applied indiscriminately to Phoenicians in the east and west.86 Although toward the end of the Republic a new, aspirated word phoenix appeared, it was not commonly used, and the precise difference between the two Latin words poenus and phoenix was never fully clarified. Cicero makes a relatively rare distinction between eastern Phoenices and western Poeni in his speech for Scaurus delivered in 54 BCE: “All the records and histories of the past have demonstrated to us that the Phoenician people [genus . . . Phoenicum] is the most deceptive [fallacissimum]; the Poeni who arose from them have taught us through the many rebellions of the Carthaginians that they have not degenerated from their ancestors.”87 In the same year, however, he uses the term Poeni in De republica to mean Phoenicians of all kinds.88 Furthermore, it may not be as certain as translators have traditionally assumed that when, in a speech to the senate in 56 BCE, he includes the Poeni among the “peoples and nations” (gentes nationesque) that the Romans surpass in piety (though not in cunning), he is thinking specifically of the Carthaginians.89

Confusion continues in the Imperial period, although poenus remains the standard term for “Phoenician” in Latin. Phoenix is occasionally used to distinguish the eastern Phoenicians as a separate group—the opposite of the modern practice of distinguishing the western Phoenicians from the main category—but in the mid-first century CE, Pomponius Mela refers to the “Phoenicians [Phoenices] who crossed from Africa to Tingentera” in Spain; it is unclear whether he is using Phoinices here of western Phoenicians or deliberately evoking an idea of an archaic eastern migration.90 At times, the two are simply treated as synonyms: in the third or fourth century CE, the Latin prologue to the work of Dictys of Knossos refers (fantastically) to the text as being written originally in Phoenician letters (phoenices litterae), which a few lines are later called punicae litterae.91