Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean

The past two decades have seen a marked increase in the number of monographs relating specifically to Phoenician identity and material culture. Even in such a context, the work under review stands apart for its ambitious, comprehensive scope that advances both a critique of persistent disciplinary Hellenocentrism and a synthesis of archaeological data. Together those objectives prompt a revision of persistent narratives about Phoenician colonial presence, influence, and agency in the first-millennium-BCE Mediterranean.The volume is divided into two parts, with an introduction that lays out the study’s approach, which is (part 1) a critical examination and diagnosis of the historiographic problems confronting the study of Phoenician identity and (part 2) a comprehensive Mediterranean survey of mainly archaeological evidence for Phoenician presence and activity. In chapters 1 and 2, López-Ruiz shows how the study of the Phoenicians both falls between historical disciplinary boundaries and has also been distorted by historiographic tendencies that focus on identities (such as Greek) that survive into the modern period, or on networks that collapse individual agency. This asymmetry between Greeks and Semites can be seen in the ways evidence has been interpreted in light of their later histories: colonies established by Phoenician city-states are dismissed as haphazard and eclectic, while Greek city-states are seen somehow to advance a coherent, overarching pan-Hellenic identity. Yet recent evidence collapses what was once asserted to be the distance between Phoenician versus Greek colonial activity: Phoenicians were the earliest colonists and built on their inheritance of Bronze Age technology and tradition; they were not solely maritime merchants but engaged in agriculture, metallurgy, and urban planning.López-Ruiz develops an approach in chapter 3 to remedy these disciplinary and historical obstacles by attending to a cluster of mainly material remains (e.g., pottery, architecture, visual motifs, metalwork, burial forms) that she calls an “orientalizing kit.” This allows one to account for transmission, variation, and hybridity, since the cluster was adaptable to local contexts and tastes. She extends and reframes well-established areas of inquiry, such as the “orientalizing” trend in early Greek art, to describe the active adaptation and marketing of prestige cultural items and markers far beyond the Aegean. She argues that it is only Phoenician agency that can explain the rapid and thorough spread of these sorts of pan-Mediterranean cultural remains.Part 2, “Follow the Sphinx,” is a detailed scan and analysis of the Mediterranean and the (mostly) archaeological evidence for Phoenician presence and agency. Innovative here is the choice to move from West to East, a strategy that fronts the new archaeological evidence less affected by the distortions cataloged in part 1. Chapter 4 deals with recent archaeological evidence from southwest Spain, as well as with western North Africa, noting the differences between Iberia and North Africa in local willingness to hybridize. Chapter 5 surveys Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, and the Italian Peninsula, noting the complexity of disentangling local culture from Phoenician and Greek. Chapter 6 focuses on the Aegean, especially on the crucial notion of orientalizing artistic adaptations in pottery, stone sculpture, and the Sphinx motif. Of particular interest here is the problem of Phoenician Egyptianizing traditions, which blur the vectors of borrowing so that the Phoenicians often have been elided in discussions of Greek artistic development. López-Ruiz makes the case that some Aegean forms (kouroi, sphinxes) customarily understood to derive from Egypt might instead be more properly attributed to Phoenicians.Chapter 7 interrupts the directional flow to investigate “intangible legacies,” mainly writing and the literary arts, from the adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet to what we can tell of Phoenician influence in myth, history, and even philosophy. She understands this as a written counterpart to the orientalizing phenomenon of the visual arts. Chapter 8 is entirely focused on the study of Cyprus, which López-Ruiz characterizes as having been “generally Hellenocentric,” owing especially to the modern politics of the island. She points to more recent studies that reject the preeminence of Greek identity, and she traces strong Phoenician influence through pottery, sculpture, minor arts, architecture, cultic expression, and inscriptions.Chapter 9 brings the study home to the Levant, where Phoenician interactions with peoples on the mainland can be seen in light of their relations overseas. López-Ruiz presents Phoenicians as Iron Age agents of the Bronze Age koiné, and therefore creators of a shared elite material culture in the early first millennium. She defends Phoenicia’s role as a prime mover in this shared culture against those who interpret the material as a more amorphous, pan-Levantine project. A short epilogue distills ways to continue to correct for the imbalance identified in the book and clarifies that López-Ruiz has not attempted to credit the Phoenicians as the only actors who “made” the Mediterranean, “although it was they who first knitted it all together” (p. 316).In any monograph so ambitious as this, there are many relevant studies that could not feasibly be incorporated and likely as many objections to particulars as there are readers. I am convinced by López-Ruiz’s analysis, however, that Phoenicians played a much more agentive role than has been recognized by the several fields that their presence touches, and I think that she galvanizes the issue in a way that should shift the disciplinary conversations and allow for refinements and extensions.Two such avenues for extension come to mind for this reader. The first is the identification of further disciplinary and cultural obstacles to an accurate assessment of Phoenician legacies, including vacillating biblical perceptions and antisemitism. López-Ruiz treats the biblical material fairly lightly, generally using it to validate Phoenician identity as agents of elite material culture. But the literature produced in the southern Levant might be engaged both to understand ancient perceptions of the Phoenicians and to identify the modern cultural forces that tilt the table away from positive evaluations of their role. The study of the Hebrew Bible has historically been the most robust field for producing scholars with the linguistic and archaeological skills to understand Phoenicians in the Levant, but it also contains a significant pejorative view of Israelites’ northern neighbors (e.g., Jezebel; the King of Tyre), and it might be argued that Second Temple literature (including the New Testament) perpetuates it. Another obstacle, more difficult and controversial to identify, is the role of modern antisemitism lurking behind the asymmetrical views of Phoenicians and Mediterranean others. The heat the word generates in the current political climate makes the avoidance of the topic understandable, but I found myself anticipating at least a brief discussion of why it might play a role and why that role is difficult to identify—especially when other factors (national narratives, teleology of Classical survival) are repeatedly invoked to diagnose the problem.The second extension that I hope this work engenders is a deeper engagement with the thorny question of “pots and peoples.” While López-Ruiz is right to use the ethnic indeterminacy of material culture as a way of foregrounding the different standards applied to Greek versus Phoenician material evidence, the volume might serve as an invitation to reconsider ethnic identification through archaeological remains, especially given the notions of hybridity highlighted throughout the study.In sum, I see the strength of López-Ruiz’s study to lie in her synthesis of vast archaeological data and in her efforts to identify and correct the lopsidedness in the way the first-millennium-BCE Mediterranean is understood as a whole. She paves the way for new conversations and reactions, for returning to old materials with fresh eyes. It would serve as an excellent textbook for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course on Iron Age Mediterranean material culture and identity, perhaps with a rearrangement of the chapters of part 2 (where reverse order might be more effective for newcomers to Phoenician studies). Because of the obstacles described in the introduction, this synthesis is a most welcome and important contribution to several fields, especially to the growing interdisciplinary study of the ancient Mediterranean.