Intended as an easily accessible and authoritative introductory text, which is how all volumes in I.B. Tauris’ Short Histories series are promoted, this book is situated at the heart of what I suggest may be called the ‘Phoenician paradox’. The back-cover text of the book spells out quite clearly what is at stake: although Phoenicians, including Carthaginians and so-called ‘Western Phoenicians’, are well known throughout Classical literature from Homer to Plutarch, we do not have any substantial literary or historical writing from the Phoenicians themselves. Given that the majority of Greek and Latin texts provide stereotypical cameos and anecdotes, if they are not outright hostile and pejorative accounts, as is often the case in later writings about Carthage, it is surely problematic, to say the least, to write a history of the Phoenicians on the basis of textual evidence alone. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to claim that archaeologists have done the heavy lifting to sketch Phoenician histories across the first millennium bce and to flesh out their whereabouts across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. (This paradox is by no means unique to the Phoenicians, as similar arguments can easily be made for Iberians, Parthians, Illyrians and many other ancient societies.) Thanks to the revival of interest in Phoenician archaeology since the 1980s in especially the western Mediterranean, a wealth of evidence has been brought to light, and a steady stream of publications, mostly in Spanish and Italian, has increased our understanding of where Phoenician communities lived, how they went about their lives, worshipped, and mourned and buried their loved ones.
As Classicists are increasingly turning to how and what information may be gleaned from the sources to add to our understanding of Phoenician engagements with the Classical world and vice versa, the ‘Phoenician paradox’ is necessarily centre stage in their endeavours. This has eloquently been spelled out by D. Feeney in his introduction to a recent collection of papers on Carthage and Rome (‘Carthage and Rome: introduction’, Classical Philology 112 [2017], 301–11), while J. Quinn (In Search of the Phoenicians [2018]) has taken it a step further, concluding that ‘the Phoenicians’ never existed. W.’s introductory book would thus seem to be timely and welcome.
It is, however, precisely in the ‘Phoenician paradox’ that W.’s book runs into trouble. Despite the prominent back-cover text, and notwithstanding a competent discussion of ‘sources for the study of ancient Phoenicia’ (pp. 12–21), which begins by acknowledging the dearth of textual evidence, W. has ignored the shortcomings of textual evidence for a Phoenician history and has set up his book as if it were a conventional historical discussion of, say, Ionia, that may rely on plentiful first-hand accounts and learned treatises about society, politics and religion. This is most readily evident from the organisation of the book into conventional categories: ‘Historical Overview’, ‘Government and Society’, ‘Religion’ and ‘Art and Material Culture’. The result is, in my view, a jarring mismatch between set-up and content or rather between asking historical questions and having (mostly) archaeological answers to work with.
The consequences are obvious in Chapter 2, which begins by examining kings and kingship, councils and assemblies, social structures and hierarchies, and the women of ancient Phoenicia, which are all topics that typically require substantial historical sources. While Aristotle's discussion of the Carthaginian constitution gives us some insight into the political organisation of that city in the fourth century bce, we have to rely on sketchy information from biblical sources to learn how Tyre, Sidon and Byblos were governed, even if the documentary information barely goes beyond listing royal names. The second half of the same chapter is by contrast dedicated to language and script, economy and cities of Phoenicia, for which plentiful epigraphic and archaeological evidence is available, and these pages are accordingly much more informative.
The strength of the archaeological evidence is similarly underplayed by Chapter 4, ‘Art and Material Culture’, because it separates objects from their contexts and treats them as if they were isolated museum pieces in old-fashioned antiquities collections. A case in point is the cursory discussion of stelai as part of a section on stonework (pp. 148–53), which offers all kinds of details on sizes and shapes of the stones, but glosses over their significance in ritual contexts, tophets in particular. The emphasis of the chapter on ivory and silverware production, moreover, not only reproduces Classical stereotypes of Phoenicians as specialised craftsmen, but also ignores to what extent both the production and the distribution of these items were part and parcel of the Phoenician overseas connections.
The Phoenician diaspora, or colonisation, is the topic of the final substantial chapter (5) that stands out from the rest of the book in more than one way. It is first of all not a conventional or generic subject, but on the contrary a specific topic that is a major aspect of Phoenician history. It is also primarily based on archaeological evidence and, presumably in the absence of conventional categories, it is organised regionally. The result is a much more engaging chapter that first considers the broad background and possible reasons of overseas expansion before turning to a series of regional descriptions. It is unfortunately not up to date, as there is no reference to recent Spanish and Italian research that has brought to light a much more widespread and earlier Phoenician presence throughout the western Mediterranean – the absence of any reference to key sites such as the Teatro Cómico in Cádiz, Althiburos and Utica in Tunisia, and nuraghi Sant'Imbenia and Sirai in Sardinia says enough.
The book ends with a one-page outline of Hellenistic Phoenicia after Alexander the Great. There is no conclusion or even an attempt to outline historical developments and connections. This was perhaps inevitable, given the conventional set-up, which has resulted in more or less lengthy descriptions of generic categories and topics that are arbitrarily imposed on the evidence at hand. What is lacking is a sense of narrative or development over time, or indeed of regional connectivity: while the section on cities and the chapter on overseas expansion do give a sense of spatial variability through the urban and regional descriptions of archaeological remains, there is no consideration of how or indeed whether the inhabitants of these urban settlements were related or even interacted. The contrast with M.E. Aubet's (1993) classic The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade is striking.
W. has written a book that lists much evidence, but does little to analyse it. The end result is, unfortunately, a very conventional and uninspiring book that does little to advance our understanding of ‘the Phoenicians’, and, in my view, poorly serves those who are looking for a comprehensive introduction. Even though Aubet's book may be more than two decades old, and in places overtaken by new evidence, she has still written what remains the best Phoenician handbook for Anglophone readers, while Quinn offers far more compelling arguments for understanding the people conventionally labelled as Phoenicians – regardless of whether that is a misnomer or not.
