In search of the Phoenicians

Rather than an overview of Phoenician history, this is a learned and carefully written scholarly work on identity in the city-states commonly lumped together as Phoenician, theoretically informed by current ideas of ethnicity's constructed nature. Quinn (ancient history, Oxford) argues against Greek and Roman attribution of a collective identity for the inhabitants of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Byblos, and Carthage. She pushes this argument quite far in dismissing anything that can be interpreted as evidence of an ancient Phoenician united ethnicity. For example, persons from "Phoenician" cities on Delos honored their city, not Phoenicia in general, in contrast to persons from Italy, Syria, and Israel. Along the way occur learned discussions of Lebanese "Phoenicianism" in the early 20th century in the context of other postcolonial Middle Eastern nationalist movements, Semitic dialect continuums, Irish Phoenicianism, the imagined communities of Phoenician colonies, the evidence for Phoenician child sacrifice and its connection with the Phoenician homeland, and Phoenicians under Roman rule. Throughout, Quinn asks what ethnicity is: a stimulating question. Her careful arguments asserting a Phoenician non-ethnicity might not convince everyone, but the questions asked about ethnicity and identity are thought provoking. Illustrated throughout in black and white. Summing Up: Recommended. General collections; graduate students, faculty, and specialists. --Timothy Donald Doran, California State University - Los Angeles

In this scholarly work, Quinn (The Punic Mediterranean), associate professor of ancient history at Oxford, finds surprising echoes through the centuries of the ways in which Phoenician cultural identity and nationhood were created. She argues that the Phoenicians, widespread temporally and geographically throughout the Mediterranean in antiquity, never formed a cohesive society and "did not even exist as a self-conscious collective." Instead, their perceived character as indomitable explorers and inventors who were proficient in trade and warfare has been repeatedly co-opted by latter-day nationalists from Lebanon to Tunisia to Ireland seeking prestigious forebears for their own nations. The real Phoenician city-states defy easy categorization; inhabitants of each newly-settled location reworked the traditions of the homeland with which they had broken. Of great interest to specialists, Quinn's precise and detailed investigations will reward patient students with a wealth of information on artifacts and practices, including coinage and child sacrifice, from throughout the Phoenician linguistic and religious continuum. Quinn couples her systematic history of the Phoenicians with an examination of their use in service of national and political mythmaking. Though dry prose and lengthy analyses of funerary inscriptions may intimidate casual readers, Quinn's ambitious study ties history and political science together to reveal the ways that antiquity remains relevant today. Maps & illus. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.