In Search of the Phoenicians Quotes

“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.”
― Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians

“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.”
― Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians

“This interpretation of the Phoenicians as a people has also informed recent literature on nationalism. One of most influential recent studies of communal identity in the ancient world is Anthony D. Smith’s magisterial Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986). Smith is no “primordialist,” arguing for the timeless existence of natural nations, nor does he accept the “modernist” position that sees the construction of ethnic identity as inextricably bound up with the rise of the modern nation-states. Instead, he argues that since antiquity people have been constructing themselves as what we would now call ethnic communities, “collective cultural units and sentiments” that “form the models and groundwork for the construction of nations.”111”
― Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians

“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”
― Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians

“Mine is not, however, so much an argument from silence as an argument for silence: a silence that can open up other spaces of investigation. I cannot demonstrate that no one in the ancient Mediterranean ever thought of her- or himself as Phoenician, nor will I try to do so. But without positive evidence for such a collective identification, I will insist that we cannot arbitrarily adopt one as our working assumption. We don’t have to plaster over this gap in our knowledge by applying an arbitrary label according to our own taste: we can choose instead to attend to the evidence that we do have and to the stories it tells.”
― Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians

“A lack of evidence for collective identity is not evidence for its absence, especially when we have no surviving Phoenician literature and relatively little material evidence at all. Some would argue that the loss of the kind of literary sources in which Phoenicians would have more naturally expressed and explored larger communal identities gives us a false impression of their self-understandings, although there is no positive indication that such literature ever in fact existed in Phoenician, and I suggest in this book that a lack of shared identity may even explain why it never developed.”
― Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians

“As Ernest Gellner put it, “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist”.7”
― Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians

“Whatever the contingent reasons in this particular colonial context for their specific self-conceptions, they remind us of the dangers of stamping ethnic labels on people who may themselves have felt ambivalent about or simply uninterested in them, people whose own collective identities came, went, and in some cases never rose above the level of their own towns or even families. The Phoenicians, I will suggest in this book, constitute just such a case.”
― Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians