In Search of the Phoenicians

by Josephine Crawley Quinn

By the end of the first century BCE, Latin inscriptions begin to be found, and they increasingly replaced Punic ones, just as over the first century CE, Roman Saturn was gradually adopted in place of Baal Hammon. This was not, it seems, a straightforward translation into Latin or a simple syncretism with a Roman god, since it involved not only a new name, but also a new epithet, a new image-type, and new forms of interaction with the god.52 There were also changes in the ritual itself that appear to have aligned it more closely with standard Roman practice, including a greater explicit emphasis on the moment of sacrifice rather than on the vow or the deposition, with burials entirely abandoned sometime in the second century, and monumental altars or built temples erected in several sanctuaries by the middle of the third. Links with the local past were still often preserved through, for instance, the “curation” of the earlier markers in and around the new temples.53