The ships can be reconstructed from carved bas-reliefs erected in the Assyrian palaces at Nineveh and elsewhere. Marine archaeologists have begun to expose the remains of Phoenician ships: there are some very late examples of Carthaginian vessels from western Sicily, of the third century BC; rather more fragmentary are two early Phoenician wrecks found thirty-three nautical miles west of the ancient Philistine port of Ashkelon, carrying pottery of the late eighth century.31 The overall impression is that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians favoured heavier ships than those that were developed by the Greeks. There is a strong impression of continuity from the days when the ships of Byblos and Ugarit plied the eastern Mediterranean; and yet the Phoenicians have also been credited with important innovations. There were the sharp beak-like rams which were such fearful weapons in the naval warfare of the classical period, having been copied by the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans. By developing the keel the Phoenicians weighted their boats skilfully and made it possible to carry large cargoes in reasonably stable conditions across the open sea. The art of caulking ships with pitch is also supposedly a Phoenician invention, of obvious importance in making ships watertight during long voyages.
All this points to a real increase in carrying capacity in the trade of the Mediterranean at this period. The vessels themselves were not significantly larger than those of ancient Byblos: some ships of Ugarit, around 1200 BC, could carry forty-five tons of cargo, and the maximum capacity of Phoenician ships was only a little more.32 What improved was the stability of the ships. It was this that made voyages as far as Atlantic ports such as Cádiz and Mogador realistic, and perhaps even enabled the circumnavigation of Africa, attributed by Herodotos to the sixth century BC. The rounded ships used for long- and medium-distance trade were three or four times as long as they were broad, and could achieve a length of as much as 30 metres, though the Ashkelon wrecks were about half that length.33 Portrayed on the Balawat gates, they have high prows, decorated with the image of a horse’s head (perhaps in homage to a god of the sea similar to Poseidon, who was also a horse-lover);34 eyes might be painted on the bows, while at the stern, beyond the quarterdeck, the planking was gathered together in what looks like a fish-tail. A square sail was raised on a mast which, the biblical prophets say, was often made of cedarwood from Lebanon; some ships also made use of oar power. The rudder consisted of a broad oar attached to the port side. The impression is of sturdy boats with good carrying capacity, well suited to the trade in grain, wine and oil, and not simply fast flyers carrying small quantities of exotic luxury items. This is confirmed by the two early wrecks, which, between them, carried nearly 800 wine amphorae, making a cargo (if the amphorae were full) that weighed twenty-two tons. There were also smaller vessels, not greatly dissimilar, which serviced the short trade routes between the scattered ports of the Phoenician trading network; examples of these small vessels, about half the size of the Ashkelon ships, have been found in the waters of southern Spain, carrying lead ingots, wickerwork and local southern Spanish pottery.35 These were the tramp steamers of the very early Mediterranean. Trade networks were dedicated as much to primary products such as foodstuffs as to high-value goods such as the ivory objects and silver bowls found in princely tombs in southern Spain and Etruria.36 A different type of vessel evolved for use in warfare, characterized by the sharp bronze spike with which Phoenician captains tried to ram their opponents’ ships. These ships were about seven times as long as they were wide, and they had a foremast as well. The warships also differed from the round cargo boats by making use of oar power for manoeuvring, especially at the battle scene.37
The earliest Phoenician object to have been found in the west is an inscribed tablet from southern Sardinia, the ‘Nora stele’, from the late ninth century; it mentions the building of a temple dedicated to the god Pumay, whose name appears in the common Phoenician name Pumayyaton (in Greek, Pygmalion). The inscription was made be-shardan, ‘in Sardinia’, so the island already possessed its name. Since the south of Sardinia offered a great medley of fine metals, including iron and silver, it is no surprise that Phoenicians appeared there. Possibly those who erected the inscription were pioneers, but the fact that they built a temple suggests they intended to stay in the area; building a temple was often one of the first acts of Phoenician settlers. And it was in the area of the Mediterranean due south of Nora that the Phoenicians were beginning to create substantial settlements of lasting importance.
III
Outstanding among these settlements was Carthage. Virgil happily backdated its foundation to the period of the Trojan War, when Aeneas visited its queen, Dido (also known as Elissa); but Virgil’s Aeneid was a meditation on the past and future of Rome, and it is not surprising that he found in his book a role for the most potent enemy republican Rome had ever faced. Other classical writers, including the Jewish historian Josephus, provided alternative accounts of the birth of Carthage, in which once again Dido-Elissa appeared, fleeing from her tyrannical brother Pygmalion, who had assassinated her husband, the high priest of Herakles (the Greeks assimilated Herakles to the Canaanite god Melqart, Melk-Qart, that is, ‘king of the city’). Her first port of call was Kition in Cyprus, another Qart Hadasht or ‘New City’; then she decided to head westwards and gathered together eighty young women who were to serve as sacred prostitutes and ensure the continuation of the Phoenician cult in the lands the refugees would settle.38 They made straight for North Africa, landing at the site of Carthage; they were not the first Phoenicians to arrive in the region, however, and the men of nearby Utica were on hand to greet them. They were also warmly welcomed by the Libyans who inhabited that area; it was these locals who first called Elissa Dido, meaning ‘the wanderer’. The Phoenicians were not prevented from settling, but when it came to purchasing land, the Libyan king was less generous. He said that Dido-Elissa could buy as much land as could be covered by an ox-hide. The queen astutely countered this by cutting an ox-hide into very fine ribbons, which were laid out to trace the outline of the hill of Byrsa, the acropolis of Carthage. Attractive though this foundation legend is, it was no more than an attempt by Greek writers to explain the origin of the name of the hill at the heart of Carthage, for byrsa meant ‘animal hide’ in Greek. What they actually heard was the Canaanite word brt, meaning ‘citadel’. Even after this deception, the Libyan king was still powerfully attracted by Dido. He insisted on marrying her; but she was intensely loyal to her husband’s memory, and immolated herself on a pyre to avoid marriage, whereupon the settlers began to worship her as a goddess.39 Tendentious though this account is, it has two important features. One is the persistence of the story of the self-immolating queen, which Virgil would pass into the mainstream of classical and subsequently European literature. The other feature is the apparent accuracy of some of the small details: the dating – about thirty-eight years before the first Olympiad (776+38=814) – accords with archaeological evidence that it was just at this period that the area was settled by Phoenicians. The Carthaginian elite continued to call themselves the ‘children of Tyre’, bene Tzur, or simply ‘Tyrians’, and later classical writers reported regular gifts from Carthage to the temple of Melqart in Tyre. Possibly, too, the self-sacrifice of Dido is a later attempt to portray something that was real enough in the Phoenician world, and was practised with especial fervour in Carthage: a human sacrifice, intended to secure the good grace of the god Melqart at the moment of the city’s foundation.
It is disappointing that there are no objects from Carthage that can securely be dated to the first half of the eighth century; the archaeological record begins with burials, starting around 730 BC, and fragments of pottery from about 750 BC onwards. Strikingly, the earliest objects to survive are Greek, not Phoenician, geometric wares from Euboia in the Aegean, though, as will be seen, the Euboians had recently founded a colony of their own in the Bay of Naples, so some of this material could have come from there.40 Early Carthage was not, then, sealed off from the developing world of Greek trade
and colonial settlement. Homer’s contempt for ‘Sidonian’ traders was the result of contact between the Phoenician and Greek trading spheres. Remarkably, the Greek pottery was deposited as a foundation offering underneath the shrine known as the tophet, where child sacrifices took place, of which more in a moment.
Carthage rapidly became the queen of the Phoenician colonies. The usual explanation for its rise is that the city was well placed for merchants travelling to and from southern Spain. However, objects of Spanish origin are hard to identify in the lowest levels of ancient Carthage. Other explanations would emphasize its origin as a place of refuge for Tyrian exiles, for migrants from Kition in Cyprus, and for the population overspill of the increasingly prosperous Levantine coastal cities; it also absorbed many local Berbers. But the real key to the success of Carthage lay not in Spain or in Phoenicia but at the gates of the city: the agricultural wealth of the region impressed classical writers, who described the villas and estates that surrounded the city, while a fifth- or fourth-century treatise on agriculture by the Carthaginian author Magon was translated into both Latin and Greek on the orders of the Roman Senate.41 The aristocracy of Carthage derived its wealth from grain, olive oil and vineyards, not from purple dyes, cedar forests and ivory panels, as had the people of Tyre. All this accords well with the evidence from the round ships which, as has been seen, were much better suited to the carriage of jars full of oil and wine, and sacks of grain, than to the purveyance of costly luxuries. Carthage was clearly large and flourishing well before 600, and this would have been inconceivable without good local supplies of food. Carthage emerged so strongly because it became the focal point of a network of its own. This included other Phoenician settlements in the region; Utica lay not far away on the coast of North Africa, and was older, but it never managed to compete with Carthage. Motya in Sicily, on the other hand, was in certain respects more like Tyre or Arvad than Carthage; it has been described as ‘a model of Phoenician settlement’.42 Motya was founded in the eighth century on a small island a short distance from the western tip of Sicily, near modern Marsala; the island is well sheltered, lying between a reasonably substantial ‘Isola Grande’ and the Sicilian coast.43 Another feature reminiscent of Tyre was the existence of purple dye factories, and so it was more than a trading station: it was a centre of industry, including the production of iron goods. Its boom period was the seventh century BC, and at this time child sacrifices became increasingly common, though why this should have been so is far from clear. The Motyans shared with the Tyrians the lack of an extensive hinterland under their own control. But this stimulated them to build friendly ties with the native Elymians of western Sicily, whose closest major centre was the great shrine of Eryx (Erice), standing on a peak towering above the western Sicilian coast. It was from the Elymians that they obtained the grain, oil and wine they needed, which was abundant in the west of Sicily. The Motyans also had access to the wide, white saltpans of Trapani, on the coast below Eryx; and where there was salt there was also an opportunity to preserve fish, such as the abundant tuna that appears seasonally off the coasts of Sicily. Fish was a speciality of the Carthaginians, who are credited with inventing the foul-smelling fish-sauce, garum, which the Romans so loved. But the Phoenicians did not seek to conquer their neighbours. Their settlements were centres of trade and industry; they made no attempt to establish political dominion over western Sicily.
Phoenician territorial ambitions did, however, extend beyond Sicily. In southern Sardinia a cluster of colonies emerged from 750 onwards, which aimed not just to provide safe harbours but to dominate the countryside, probably so as to guarantee basic supplies. Most of these settlements were classic Phoenician bases, built on isthmuses jutting into the sea, as at Tharros and Nora; at Sulcis the lowest excavated levels, just like those of Carthage, contained Greek pottery from Euboia.44 Heading inland, the Phoenicians occupied some of the ancient forts, or nuraghi, while to all appearances maintaining peaceful relations with the indigenous Sardinians, who welcomed the opportunity to trade their metals and cereals with wealthy merchants based at Sulcis. The hold of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians on Sardinia was confirmed in about 1540 when the Carthaginians and Etruscans chased away the Greeks of Phokaia in a great naval battle off Alalia in Corsica; this ensured that Corsica and Sardinia remained outside the Greek sphere, and, in view of the value of Sardinia as a source of all sorts of metals and agricultural goods, the victory greatly strengthened Phoenician power in the western Mediterranean. Although the Phokaian Greeks established a base at Marseilles, the far west of the Mediterranean was closed to intensive Greek penetration so long as Carthage remained a major power; it was left to the Phoenicians to exploit the potential of southern Spain and Morocco. The existence of these settlements tells us where the Phoenicians went to live but not how far they actually travelled. Evidence for the impact of the Tyrians comes from tombs in Italy, Spain and elsewhere, some containing the chased silver vessels decorated with animal designs which were greatly prized in central Italy during the sixth century. But it is unclear whether the Phoenician and Carthaginian merchants were free agents or agents of the state. Sometimes they were sent on missions by rulers and received commission for their work, as when they operated in the service of the Assyrian monarch. Out in the west, they were able to operate as their own masters. At first they were able to supply princely courts in Etruria and Carthage itself. By 500 BC they had carved out trading networks that depended on their own investment and provided them with direct profit; working for others lost its attraction.
The far west became increasingly attractive. Greek writers such as Strabo (writing early in the first century AD) insisted on the importance of southern Spain as a source of silver. There was a cluster of Phoenician bases in the Mediterranean approaches to the Straits of Gibraltar: at Montilla, Málaga, Almuñécar and other spots now buried beneath the concrete of the Costa del Sol. Some of these settlements were within a few hours’ or even a few minutes’ walking distance of one another; most were tied into the local economy and society, though finds of finely burnished early sixth-century Etruscan pottery at a site near Málaga indicate that wider connections also existed.45 An early Phoenician settlement existed on Ibiza, within distant sight of the Iberian mainland; the usual exchanges of metals for oil and wine took place, though another asset of Ibiza throughout its history has been its gleaming saltpans. On the Iberian mainland, the case of the little town of Toscanos, founded around 730 BC, is instructive. Toscanos was a community of as many as 1,500 people in the mid to late seventh century, whose artisans produced iron and copper goods, though it had been abandoned by about 550, for whatever reason. The impression is of a modest Phoenician trading station, attuned to the needs of the local Iberian population, not particularly significant in the wider Phoenician trading networks, but quite important if one wants to understand how the Iberians were transformed through their contact with peoples from the east.
In fact, the major Phoenician base in this region lay beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, at Gadir or Cádiz; but because it fed its profits into the Mediterranean networks of the Phoenicians early Cádiz is also part of the history of the Mediterranean. Like so many Phoenician settlements, Gadir was founded on an offshore island, although the traditional date of 1104 BC is over 300 years too early. A temple of Melqart was established, and Cicero later recorded that human sacrifice was carried on here – probably a spring sacrifice in honour of the annual resurrection of Melqart recorded in Canaanite myth. This was a wealthy temple which functioned as a storehouse for precious objects as well as a cult centre, something which was seen as normal in the early Mediterranean trading world. And there was plenty to store in Melqart’s shrine, for Gadir was the prime gateway to the wealth of the land known from the time of Herodotos as Tartessos. This is a place that has been argued over by scholars almost since antiquity. Some have seen Tartessos as a city, even as a river; now the name is taken to refer to a kingdom or region in southern Spain, inhabited
by the native Iberian population. Its great attraction, or rather that of the lands bordering the river Guadalquivir, was its silver deposits: ‘silver is synonymous with Tartessos’.46 If Herodotos is to be believed, the Greek trader Kolaios of Samos was blown off course, arrived in southern Spain in the mid-seventh century and brought sixty talents of silver (maybe 2,000 kilograms) back from Tartessos. The name dubiously ascribed to the local king whom Kolaios met was Arganthonios, the first letters of which mean ‘silver’.
It was the Phoenicians, not the Iberians, who transported the silver eastwards, both to Greece and Asia, according to the late testimony of Diodoros the Sicilian (first century BC). In exchange the Phoenicians brought olive oil and examples of their own craftsmanship such as jewellery, ivory objects, small perfume flasks and textiles; they taught the Tartessians how to extract, refine and process metals, beginning as far back as the eighth century. The methods used were sophisticated. This was not an exploitative ‘colonial’ relationship of ‘unfair exchange’, as one Spanish scholar has fashionably claimed.47 It was the Tartessians who enthusiastically set to work, extracting and smelting not just silver but gold and copper at mining centres across southern Spain and Portugal, and, as even those addicted to a ‘colonialist’ interpretation admit, it was the local Iberians who controlled ‘every facet of production’ and were ‘firmly in control of their own resources’, from mining to smelting; the Iberian elites profited from the trade alongside the Phoenicians. Local artists began to adopt Phoenician styles, and the wealth that the Iberian princes acquired enabled them to live in a grand style. Here, contact with the East transformed a traditional society in the West, as was happening on an even greater scale in Etruria. The Phoenicians did not simply have a long reach; their activities also had the power to lift the political and economic life of a far-off land to a new level. They were beginning to transform the entire Mediterranean.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 11
