Phoenician & Punic Epigraphy Research Papers (original) (raw)

and Keywords Phoenician polytheism-its structure and rites-is not completely unknown to us. There were mythological traditions common to the area, as well as a structure common to the pantheons of the Phoenician cities. At the top there is a divine couple consisting of a male god and a goddess, his spouse, and a divine assembly. The same basic structure is detectable in the Punic world, Carthage and elsewhere, although with differences and innovations. In turn, every Phoenician city had its own tutelary deities: the diversification of gods and cults was a powerful means of cultural identity and identification. As for Phoenician mythology, a theme emerges from available sources, which ultimately dates back to the Late Bronze Age, as exemplified by Ugaritic Baal: Among the ceremonies, particularly important was a solemn feast, called egersis ("awakening") in Greek sources, which commemorated annually Milqart's death and return to life. The chapter also discusses the tophet and its rites, both bloody and not, related to the fulfilment of vows concerning severe individual or collective crises, which in some cases involved the sacrifice of children to the gods. OWING TO THE type of sources, an overview of Phoenician religion (e.g., Xella 2008: 50ff.; Bonnet 2010) encounters the same difficulties as any general study of this civilization. As other ancient Mediterranean peoples, the Phoenicians had their own worldview, which did not distinguish between religious and other spheres of culture in the way we do. In particular, concepts such as exclusive faith in the gods are inapplicable to this type of society. Instead of a codified and detectable "religion," they possessed complex traditions shaped by their own conceptual categories and a cosmological vision, in which what we see as religious, political, and economical spheres were differently articulated. This has an immediate consequence for our approach: there are no sources that are particularly "religious," but almost all evidence must be taken into consideration in order to reconstruct their "religion" according to our parameters. Of course, sources such as dedicatory inscriptions, cultic prescriptions, or mythological tales are closer to our concept of religion, but iconographic evidence, onomastic material, and administrative documents can also make a useful contribution to our research (Bonnet and Xella 1995). Like every polytheistic system, Phoenician religion is based on the belief in a multiplicity of superhuman agents, each with specific functions, organized in a particular hierarchy and a network of mutual relationships (Xella 1986). This symbolic system manifests itself at two different levels: ideological and practical. The first level is that of differently codified traditions, which