WHO WERE THE PHOENICIANS? OR THE IDENTITY CRISIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY ACADEMY (original) (raw)
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Who were the Phoenicians? Or the identity crisis on the 21st century Academy
Hélade, 2019
The Phoenicians live a revival: exhibitions, congresses and publica- tions of major compilations in English have fueled interest in this mysterious people. In this article we address an issue that has been hotly debated over the past ten years, the very Phoenician essence. Did they exist or are they a historiographical invention?
Journal of Roman Archaeology 32, pp. 584-591, 2019
“The phantom Phoenicians are back” would perhaps be an apt alternative title for J. Crawley Quinn’s In search of the Phoenicians, reflecting the book’s brilliant and ironic spirit. Thanks to the success it has enjoyed internationally, the British scholar’s book has given a significant boost, especially in the English-speaking world, to the revival of interest in the Phoenicians — the “invisible people” — and has brought the long-standing question of Phoenician identity to the attention of non-specialists as well as specialists in Classical antiquity. The book’s leading thesis is to demonstrate, through the analysis of ancient documentation ranging from Near Eastern texts written in Ugaritic, Neo-Assyrian and Hebrew to those of ancient authors who wrote in Greek and Latin, that the Phoenicians never regarded themselves as a group. As the author frankly acknowledges (xxiv), “the suggestion that the Phoenicians were not a self-conscious collective, or even a clearly delineated historical civilization, is not new”. The never-ending debate about the identity of the peoples is not new either, nor is it limited to the Phoenicians. It must be understood — in the interests of methodological rigour — to apply also, and not exclusively, to all the other peoples of antiquity (even the Egyptians and Greeks), who never defined themselves in the way we define them, according to our current perspectives as interpreters of the past. The revival of these issues could be connected to the use of anthropological theories in various Phoenician and Punic studies and, at a more general level, to the contemporary problems of Mediterranean migrations that have made ‘obsession about identity’ such a sensitive topic. The book, composed of 9 chapters, is divided into three parts each of 3 chapters, with a brief introduction and conclusion. This arrangement reflects the origin of the book in three Balmuth Lectures delivered at Tufts University (Medford, MA) in 2012. In a narrative that has almost the structure of a hypertext, the titles play an important rôle, often referring, in appealing journalistic style, to burning issues in the political (“There are no camels in Lebanon” and “Lebanon first”) or academic spheres. The introduction is beautifully and passionately written. Beginning almost like a novel, it takes us to a schoolroom in Ireland in 1833 which is the setting of Brian Friel’s 1980 play “Translations”. In this context, the description of “noble” Carthage is connected to Ireland, while Rome is associated with the British occupation of the island. Irish Phoenicianism is the narrative escamotage with which Quinn illustrates the guiding principle of her work, which is above all (xiv-xv) to avoid 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. Quinn introduces us to the theme of identity in a rigorous manner, providing some astute statements (xviii: “identities are variable across both time and space”) and some illuminating examples from recent African history that attest to the sheer breadth of the reading that forms the basis of her book.
"Phoenician versus Phoenicianism: Scholarly Categories and Collective Identities."
Transformations and Crisis in the Mediterranean, Volume III, “Identity” and Interculturality in the Levant and Phoenician West During the 5th-2nd Centuries BCE, edited by G. Garbati and T. Pedrazzi, 2021
Even as research on ancient Mediterranean identities proliferates, agreement about the definition of “Phoenician” remains elusive – with the undesirable result that scholars are continuing to speak past one another. There are many practical difficulties of studying the subject, such as the limited (if improving) publication of key archaeological sites and very limited record of emic written sources. But there are pressing methodological challenges, as well. We must continue to address the extent to which it is reasonable to associate “Phoenician” with an ethnic group or civilization and how to distinguish between “Phoenician” as a scholarly category and an ancient collective identity. As the TCM project so ably demonstrates, the more precise our approach to how identity worked in the ancient Mediterranean, the better our grasp of how people reacted to change. In this paper, I consider how the field is continuing to disentangle the study of places, objects, and people we call “Phoenician” from the study of Phoenician collective identity – of Phoenicianism. I then offer a short case study of a sub-type of Persian period anthropoid sarcophagi. The purpose of the case study is to illustrate the value in taking alternative, scalar approaches to identity in the archaeological record. My main goals are, first, to show why we must care about the differences between “Phoenician” as a scholarly category and “Phoenicianism” as a modern way to describe an ancient feeling of collective identity; and, second, to suggest that we should not attempt to reconcile these methodologically different and theoretically disconnected ideas about belonging.
The Phoenicians are often forgotten in histories of the ancient Mediterranean that focus on Greece and Rome, but long before the Greeks and Romans these sailors and traders built the first city-states, invented the alphabet, discovered the pole star and colonised the west. They still remain mysterious, however, and there is a serious question over whether they even existed as a self-conscious political, ethnic or cultural group. Yet since their own time, ‘being Phoenician’ has been a powerful political and cultural tool in the hands of politicians and writers from Roman emperors to Irish-Enlightenment scholars to Lebanese nationalists in the 20th century, playing a particularly important and interesting role in the invention of new pasts for new nation-states. This public lecture looks both at the Phoenicians in their own terms and at their different reinventions over time.