The people known to history as the Phoenicians occupied a narrow tract of land along the coast of modern Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. They are famed for their commercial and maritime prowess and are recognised as having established harbours, trading posts and settlements throughout the Mediterranean basin. However, the Phoenicians’ lack of recognisable territory, homogeneous language or shared cultural heritage means that, despite being one of the most influential Mediterranean peoples of the first millennium BC, their identity has long remained shrouded in mystery.

In Search of the Phoenicians takes the reader on an exhilarating quest to reveal more about these enigmatic people. Using a dazzling array of evidence, this engaging book investigates the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians from the Middle East to Ireland, from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity and beyond.

The volume’s starting point is to emphasise the lack of definitive evidence to support the notion that the Phoenicians ever self-identified as a single ethnic group or acted as a stable collective. Quinn, however, argues against simply dismissing them as a historical mirage. Rather, having demonstrated that the Phoenicians were originally an invention of ancient Greek ethnographic traditions, she shows how, during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, eastern and western conceptions of ethnicity became blurred, leading some cities to identify themselves as ‘Phoenician’. Significantly, she also shows that those cities that promoted their supposedly Phoenician heritage did so because they wished to convey a political or cultural message, rather than because they endorsed the concept of a specifically Phoenician ethnicity. Carthage, for example, embraced its ‘Phoenician’ heritage as a way of enhancing its prestige and authority, consolidating its power in North Africa and encouraging other ‘Phoenician’ cities to join it in resisting Roman imperialism.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Mark Woolmer is Assistant Professor in Ancient History at Durham University.

Josephine Quinn makes her claim up front; that "the Phoenicians" didn't actually exist - at least not in the sense of being a coherent nation. And then spends the rest of the book explaining why this is probably so. There was a Phoenician language, yes. But most of the people thought of themselves as citizens of their cities, more than of any Phoenician culture. And she explores that through culture, religious practices, ethnicity and inscriptions. Interesting and definitive ( )

In a lot of ways this book is less about the "Phoenicians," an identity that the author suspects is nothing more than an anachronistic 19th-century label, than a meditation on how cultural identities are created; either as impositions by imperial powers or as a bulwark to keep said hegemonic power at bay. In fact, Quinn suggests at one point that the fragmentary nature of Levantine core cities of "Phoenicia" was a conscious strategy to make the region less digestible to aspirant hegemons! Games of identity aside, there is no shortage of examination of symbols of "Phoenician" culture; particularly as wielded by Carthage. ( )