Before reading this book, what I knew about Phoenicians was accumulated from ancient Egyptian, Biblical, and Classical sources with an occasional bad pun thrown in. As author Dr. Glenn Markoe shows, due to a combination of their cultural characteristics and bad archeological luck the Phoenicians are an interesting “people” that deserve more recognition than they get.

I put “people” in quotes up there because one of the first things pointed out here is that “Phoenicians” has a Greek root related to the purple (presumably from the well-known Tyrian purple dye), and that there never was a ethnic or cultural group who thought of themselves as “Phoenicians”. Instead, they considered themselves citizens of various Levantine city-states: Arwad, Byblos, Sidon and Tyre being the best known (and, of course, the Tyrian “colony” at Carthage). Although they spoke dialects of the same language, and sometimes cooperated grudgingly (and usually ineffectively) when faced with an external threat, they were normally bitter commercial rivals. Markoe compares them to Medieval and Renaissance Genoa and Venice; nominally “Italian” mercantile city-states who were just as likely to go to war as say hello if they encountered one another in the course of their commercial ventures.

Their bad luck in the archeological record has to do with a number things. For one, they typically picked out very good trading sites for their settlements - coastal islands or penninsulae occupied by territorially small but densely populated cities. Thus, if you dig deeply and thoroughly enough at just about any site on the Mediterranean littoral (and well out along the Atlantic coasts of Spain, Portugal and Morocco), you generally come across evidence of Phoenician settlement. Unfortunately these same sites were equally attractive to subsequent peoples, all the way to the present; you can’t go digging all over Beirut or Cadiz or Ibiza or Marseilles without upsetting the locals, regardless of how enthused they might be about their city’s history.

Next, Phoenician written history is practically nonexistent; ironic for the inventors of the alphabet. There was plenty of writing once; ancient authors speaks about large libraries at Tyre and Carthage. The Phoenicians, unfortunately, adopted handy but fragile Egyptian papyrus for their records, rather than cumbersome but durable Mesopotamian clay tablets. Since the Levantine climate is a lot less conducive to the preservation of papyrus than the Egyptian and since the concentrated wealth of Phoenician cities made them eminently lootable by assorted invaders, there’s nothing left but a few scraps. The Phoenician inscriptions that survive are all on stone or ostraca, and are usually tombstones or the like. Phoenician scrolls were often tied with a bit a string; the string then had a clay seal applied with a short description of the contents; thus you could tell what a scroll contained without having to unroll it. To the extreme frustration of archeologists, the same fires that destroyed the scrolls baked and preserved the clay seals. Thus excavation of Phoenician cities often reveals sad little piles of these seals, like having the card catalog to a library without any of the books.

In addition to trade, the Phoenicians appeared to be knowledgeable mineral prospectors. The first nonLevantine settlements are found on Cyprus, and were involved in exploitation of copper. Similar sites, for lead, silver, gold and iron mining, show up in Sardinia, the adjacent Italian coast, and Spain. The Phoenicians didn’t seem to do the mining themselves, instead using local labor (or, in the case of Carthage, slaves).

Phoenician religion is especially interesting. Like their Hebrew neighbors to the south, the Phoenicians were reluctant to make physical portrayals of their divinities. Instead, Phoenician temples generally have an empty throne, a wooden pillar (called an asherah in the Old Testament), or a stone pillar as the center of worship. Phoenician cities seemed to have had a male/female pair of divinities as their patrons; Eshmun and Astarte in Arwad, Baal and Baalat in Byblos, Melqart and Tanit in Carthage, Baal and Astarte in Sidon, and Melqart and Astarte in Tyre. “Baal” (lord), “Baalat” (lady) and “Melqart” (King of the City) are titles, rather than personal names; in particular, there seem to have been a lot of Baals, usually coupled with a topographic identifier. The ancient Greeks and Romans (and, of course, the Bible) comment unfavorably about Phoenician religion. The particular practices that attracted attention were temple prostitution and child sacrifice. The archeological evidence for temple prostitution is sparse; there’s one Phoenician temple from the colony at Kition in Cyprus that has a staff list which includes prostitutes. There were apparently two types of temple prostitution; one where the temple maintained full-time prostitutes on staff, and another (reported by ancient authors but with no physical evidence) where all women were required, once in their lives, to show up at a temple and prostitute themselves as an act of worship.

Paradoxically, the evidence is a lot more extensive for child sacrifice but historians and archeologists are more skeptical of the practice. This may be because temple prostitution seems a little titillating but essentially harmless, while child sacrifice is so abhorrent that scholars grasp at straws for any possibility that it didn’t really occur. Unfortunately, an extensive tophet has been excavated at Carthage, with tens of thousands (about 200 a year over the lifetime of the cemetery) of infant cremations. The skeptics note that there are very few child burials in other cemeteries and suggest this is a special site for stillborns or infants that died young, but naturally; although Markoe seems sympathetic to this point of view he also notes that there are infant burials beneath house floors (implying that natural deaths of children were treated differently from adults, thus explaining the absence of infant burials in adult cemeteries) and that the inscriptions at the tophet are pretty unequivocal in describing the burials there as human sacrifices. It keeps getting worse: the ancient authors generally describe infant sacrifices as a state-sponsored activity, with priests dragging screaming children away from struggling parents; but the stelae at the tophet suggest that almost all of the sacrifices were offered by their own parents. Finally, the practice was culturally deep; the Romans outlawed when they annihilated Carthage but archeological evidence suggests iit continued for hundreds of years afterward, up to 100 AD, and the early Christian author Tertullian claims it was still going on when he wrote in 200 AD. In fact, it seems to have been the last survival of the Phoenician religion.

Although I’m generally enthusiastic about the book, I do have some criticisms. For one thing, it badly needs one of those comparative charts that show what was going on in the Phoenician world at any given time: i.e. when X was king of Tyre, Y was king of Byblos, Z was Pharaoh of Egypt, and W ruled in Assyria. You can extract this from the text but it takes some work. Second, I would have liked to know more about Phoenician shipbuilding and seamanship. These people definitely sailed out into the Atlantic and may have reached Great Britain and circumnavigated Africa. Although Markoe mentions Phoenician shipwrecks have been discovered and sometimes discusses their cargo, he says next to nothing about how the ships were built and sailed.

Next, Markoe is much too credulous of Old Testament accounts of the Phoenicians. He says (in the Introduction): “The present author acknowledges the ongoing debate over the historical veracity of the biblical texts dealing with kings Hiram and Solomon ... he has chosen to adopt the traditional view that the narrative in its basic elements is historically correct.” Thus, whenever Markoe mentions something about the Phoenicians based on biblical accounts (such as the discussion of Phoenician traders in the Red Sea, to which they were supposedly allowed access by Solomon) the reader has to be aware that there is no archeological evidence for this. Fortunately Markoe is quite careful about identifying his sources.

Last, a minor quibble: the front cover illustration shows a view of a rugged coastline, presumably intended to emphasize the Phoenician’s seafaring ability. However, the back cover identifies this as the shore of the Persian Gulf, taken by Thor Heyerdahl’s Tigris expedition. This obviously has little or nothing to do with Phoenicians.

A worthwhile and interesting book that could have been even better.… (mehr)