The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

  2. Continuities with a Canaanite cultural substratum are present and best understood as a protracted cultural phenomenon—attardamento culturale—which the Phoenicians carry over and adapt for their own needs.

  3. The geopolitics of the Near East around this time were responsible in part for the formation of a coastal culture along the plain of Phoenicia with characteristics that are especially different from those that appeared to the north (Aramaeans) and south (Israel).

  4. A Phoenician language developed in the course of the Iron Age, separate from Hebrew and Aramaic within the Northwest Semitic group.

  5. Phoenician religion was built around triads of city gods and goddesses (this was later found to be incorrect, and that pairs in fact dominated the pantheons).

  6. The Phoenician expansion westward may have indeed happened around the tenth century bce (evidence for the first urban foundations in North Africa and Iberia goes back now to the late ninth century, and evidence for contacts is earlier; see chapter 6, this volume).

  7. The Phoenicians can be recognized by their artistic productions, especially ivory and metal bowls, often found to be inscribed in Phoenician single letters or names.

  8. That Punic cultural elements in the western Mediterranean cannot be used indiscriminately to fill out details missing from the Phoenician story in the homeland.

  At forty-one years of age, and after having been active in the field of Oriental studies, including philology, for the previous fifteen, Moscati defined the challenges of the rising field of Phoenician studies, and thus became its major and most influential protagonist until his death. The excavations in which he participated and led by his university (La Sapienza) at the fortress site of Ramat Rahel in Israel from 1960, in his own words, “avevano in germo lo sviluppo delle ricerche verso i Fenici” (“mark the beginning of the development of research about the Phoenicians”) (Moscati 1990: 37). This field experience, taken together with his publication in English of a synthetic monograph on the Phoenicians (Moscati 1968), situated his efforts directly on the Phoenicians. The year he read his paper to the Lincei, Moscati had started major excavation projects under the auspices of the Istituto di Studi per il Vicino Oriente of “La Sapienza” (1990: 40–55): in Malta and Gozo, digging commenced—with much propaganda—at the sanctuary site dedicated to Astarte at Tas-Silġ; at a Roman farmstead with Punic origins at San Pawl Milqi; and at a Late Punic maritime shrine at Ras il-Wardija on Gozo. He was on the small island of San Pantaleo (the Phoenician Motya)—owned by the Whittaker family, off Sicily’s west coast, together with Vincenzo Tusa, the superintendent of antiquities; and he was in Sardinia digging on the inland hilltop walled settlement of Monte Sirai together with the superintendent, Ferrucio Barreca. Two years later, in 1965, Moscati was active in Cap Bon, in Tunisia, with M’hmed Fantar, excavating three Punic forts perched on precipitous cliffs and an alleged temple site; excavations were also conducted on Pantelleria that same year. There were other missions, of course: in Algeria in 1969, in Sardinia at Antas in 1967 and Tharros in 1974; and again in Sicily at Grotta Regina near Palermo in 1969. It was only the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war that forced a joint Italo-Lebanese archaeological mission to be aborted in 1975. Missing from this list is the participation of Moscati and his students in the Save Carthage UNESCO campaign that saw instead another group of Italians led by Antonino di Vita active in the Tunisian capital under the field direction of Andrea Carandini between 1973 and 1977.

  Alongside the activities in the field, Moscati directed and encouraged several scavi in museo, as he called them—“excavations inside museums” (1990: 56–58). This included the study and publication of collections of artifacts that had been excavated or acquired by museums in the past but never properly inventoried and published: stone stelae, inscriptions, jewelry, terracotta statuettes and figurines, masks and protomes, metal hatchet-razors (rasoi), coins, and pottery—in brief, all those accessories of public and private daily life and ritual activity.

  Since a publication venue dedicated to Phoenician and Punic studies did not exist, in 1973 Moscati founded a journal, the Rivista di Studi Fenici, and a monograph series Collezione di Studi Fenici, to go with it (1974: 16–20). Preliminary reports of all the field activities appeared as monographs in this series (1990: 25–27). By this time, Moscati had become influential in academic circles, enjoying prestige and authority augmented by his nomination in 1970 to the presidency of the Unione Accademica Nazionale—the association that brings together all the major Italian academies of higher learning and research, responsible no less for spearheading Italian research initiatives overseas (1990: 66–69). His various positions combined with the personal relationships that must have been established between academics and influential persons in key ministries facilitated the realization of Moscati’s wish to introduce the teaching of Phoenician and Punic studies alongside the more traditional Classical studies by setting up professorial chairs at universities in Rome, Cagliari, Palermo, and Bologna (1974: 16; Gnoli 1995: xiii). To augment his international network, Moscati also initiated a series of international gatherings starting in 1969 and coming to a head ten years later with the first International Congress of Phoenician and Punic Studies hosted by Moscati’s Centro per la Civiltà Fenicia e Punica in Rome. This was to become a key meeting point for scholars and research students to keep abreast with major developments in their relatively young discipline (Leclant 1995: 3); indeed, a model was created that was adopted with profit by other research institutes (Niemeyer 1995; Gubel 1995: 516–17).

  If we were to look back at the list of field campaigns and museum-based studies led by Moscati in this period, we cannot but be impressed. There was clearly a programmed attempt on his part to find answers to the questione fenicia, and to gather as much data as possible to define the nature and character of Phoenician culture, east and west. So much is clearly stated by Moscati himself in the first chapter of a book that he finished writing in 1973, Problematica della civiltà fenicia (1974), where he also lamented the fact that much of what he had said in his paper ten years previously did not stir the debate that he had hoped for. If he had written about the questione etrusca, he wrote in the preface, matters would have certainly been different: “ne sarebbe seguita un’ampia discussione” (“a full discussion will have ensued”) (1974: 8). Behind his comment, presumably, is the fact that Etruscan studies in Italy had a longer history; they had been established by Massimo Pallottino, who set up the Rivista di studi etruschi, as well as the Institute for Etruscan Studies in 1927 (see Xella 2014).

  But the crowning achievement for Moscati came with the inauguration of the great Venice exhibition “I Fenici” in 1988. The exhibition was meant to provide a total and integrated representation of the Phoenicians through the ordered display of selected museum pieces. In Moscati’s own words:

  From the start one point was clear to me: our effort must be not to organize an exhibition on the Phoenicians, but rather the exhibition. That is, it had to provide the most complete global overview of the Phoenician civilization, in all the countries where it appeared, from East to West, and in all the periods when it flourished, from the first emergence of the maritime cities on the Levantine coast to the destruction of Carthage. So there was no choice or preference between the Phoenicians of the East and those of the West, the Carthaginians—on the contrary, our aim was to achieve a balanced integration so that the survey would be really total and organic.

  [N]on si trattava di allestire una Mostra sui Fenici, bensì la Mostra, cioè il panorama globale più possibilmente completo di quella civiltà, in tutti i Paesi nei quali è comparsa da Oriente a Occidente, in tutte le epoche che hanno visto il suo fiorire dal primo emergere delle città marinare sulle coste levantine fino alla distruzione di Cartagine. Tra Fenici d’Oriente e Cartaginesi o Punici d’Occidente non v’è stata, dunque, scelta né preferenza: v’è stata invece equilibrata integrazione, affinché il panorama fosse appunto globale e organico. (Moscati 1988b: 10, author’s e
mphasis)

  The commission for the exhibition design was awarded to the Milan-based architect Gae Aulenti, who went on to work on two blockbuster exhibitions at Palazzo Grassi (I Celti in 1991, I Greci in Occidente in 1996) (Mulazzini 1991). Aulenti structured her exhibition around three didactic principles. The first was to present archaeological artifacts in the traditional manner—that is, according to typology and geographical area (Levant/Phoenicia, Carthage, Sardinia, Sicily/Malta, Spain). The second was to have the geographical areas separated by themes that define Phoenician culture (commerce/navigation, alphabet, religious beliefs, textile production) using spectacular props to engage the visitor. And the third was to have this voyage of discovery brought to life by the use of large murals designed by Eliana Gerotto. The 800-page catalogue published by Bompiani reflects these divisions (Moscati 1988a), with its first part devoted to the same themes, a second part describing the history of Phoenician activity in different geographical areas, a third part tackling art objects according to typology, and a final, fourth part looking at Phoenician interaction with neighboring groups. Throughout both the exhibition and the catalogue, the label “Phoenician” subsumes a Punic legacy with events, themes, and objects going beyond the traditional sixth century bce date.

  I would like to argue that two factors bedeviled Moscati’s attempt to achieve in large part what was hoped for in his 1963 manifesto—that is, to help define the nature and character of Phoenician culture.

  The first factor is related to this initial phase of archaeological fieldwork. Moscati, of course, could not predict the extent and the nature of the archaeological remains that his teams would uncover, in particular on the multi-period sites investigated. In many cases, few remains uncovered could be unequivocally dated to the Phoenician or the Punic periods. Take, for instance, the remains at Tas-Silġ in Malta, excavated by Moscati’s researchers and students during annual campaigns between 1963 and 1970. Much has been written about what has been called “an international sanctuary dedicated to the goddess Astarte” in articles and books about the Phoenician diaspora. But Astarte’s name only appears inscribed on pottery and stone after the fourth century bce (Guzzo Amadasi 2000: 181) and the substantial remains on site date to the Roman Late Republican period (Bonzano 2017). We have there, in fact, the remains of the fanum Iunonis lauded by Cicero in his Verrine orations (Verr. II, 4, 103–104). No structures have been uncovered that can be dated from the eighth century bce, when the Phoenicians are said to have set foot on Malta, and little from the following two centuries (on Malta, see chapter 36, this volume). Tellingly, the same can be said of other remains discovered by Moscati’s teams elsewhere.

  Furthermore, matters are complicated by the fact that although investigations were conducted with the best of intentions, the standard of archaeological excavation and recording employed on several sites—with only minor exceptions—leaves much to be desired. It seems to have been the practice at the time to excavate with the intention of recovering the plan of a building—trenching along wall alignments, in other words. Moreover, the digging was carried out in arbitrary spits (tagli, in Italian), not stratigraphically (see Novarese 2006: 51–52). Indeed, section drawings that for all of us archaeologists are fundamental aides to represent the stratification on site, especially on complicated ones which saw rebuilding phases and spoliation, are absent in most reports. Of course, we are told that this was the way things were done back then, but in fact it was not. For instance, the standard of excavation and publication achieved by Oxford’s archaeological expedition to Motya in 1955 (led by Benedict Isserlin, assisted in the field by the Kenyon-trained Peter Parr) set a completely different precedent. And the same could be said about other expeditions of the time. The reader can, for instance, consult the twenty-sixth volume of the Papers of the British School at Rome (Isserlin et al. 1958) with what was produced in the Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità (Isserlin 1970) by the Oxford expedition team members for the campaigns that ran from 1961 to 1965.

  The prompt publication after every campaign of a preliminary report—presumably a laudable act—means that the interpretations kept changing from one volume to the next. This would not be a problem had final reports been published, but this was also not the case. Some of Moscati’s peers seem to have been aware of such shortcomings, probably caused by the wide geographic scope of his enterprise, as some advised him (e.g., Maurice Dunand and Giuseppe Lugli) to concentrate his efforts: “adesso fermati in un posto solo” (“now settle down in one place”) (Moscati 1990: 39). Moscati himself writes in his autobiography that the creation in 1969 of a Centro per la Civiltà Fenicia e Punica at the Centro Nazionale delle Ricerche, which he directed, caused him to be more focused (1990: 24, 36).

  But there was a second factor that impacted the questione fenicia. If with the exhibition at Palazzo Grassi the Phoenicians had become a household name at least in Italy, and were certainly those missing protagonists of ancient Mediterranean history that scholars could henceforth ill afford to neglect, the exhibition turned the Phoenicians into a monolithic entity. What I mean by this is that the practice of singling out objects for display in the exhibition and for publication in the catalogue implied an exercise in decontextualization. The process of classifying objects by material, following traditional categories used in cataloguing finds on an excavation (pottery, terracotta, marble, metal, ivory, glass, etc.), had two effects, as I have argued at length elsewhere (Vella 2014). On the one hand, it separated objects, often found together, making it difficult for the exhibition viewer and the catalogue reader to appreciate how object function often depended on an interpretative exercise based on context and association of finds; on the other hand, the operation of decontextualization, aided by catalogue photography whereby objects are isolated from their archaeological findspot, facilitated the construction of a narrative that in a sense created “Phoenician” culture. Or, as I have put it: “The objects and their illustrations serve to promote the affirmation of a new identity, in this case a nascent discipline and its unsung heroes of the ancient world—the Phoenicians” (Vella 2014: 39).

  Eight Ways to Move Forward, or How to Define “Phoenicianness”

  It is clear that relating clusters of similar artifacts to “cultures” or people on the assumption that style equals identity will no longer do—and several attempts have in fact been made over the last two decades to move beyond facile social reconstruction (see Quinn 2018: 68–73). I will briefly outline eight points that, from my archaeological perspective, should aid us in defining “Phoenicianness” in its various shades and manifestations. In drawing up my eight points of action, I sought inspiration from the eight-armed mollusk, the octopus—the emblem of the Oxford Centre for Phoenician and Punic Studies (http://punic.classics.ox.ac.uk/).

  Geography of Knowledge

  First, archaeologists take fragmentary remains that they or others have recovered and interpret them in a process of detection and supposition. Interpretations differ and change over time not only because new evidence is available but also because the ideas and preconceptions of scholars change; so do their interests and aims. Looking at the history of a discipline in which Moscati had a defining role will help us understand ways in which knowledge was created and disseminated, taking the cue from similar studies in other fields of archaeology (e.g., Díaz-Andreu 2012). Such an exercise should allow us to map the geography of knowledge, determine how alliances and encounters affected the production of knowledge, and how negotiations led to the powerful and long-lasting network responsible for putting forth a picture of the Phoenicians that owes a great deal to twentieth-century scholarship.

  Recognizing Difference

  Second, it is all well and good to follow the adage that pots do not equal people. Indeed, we have moved on from late nineteenth-century conceptions of race as biologically determined groups identifiable by means of common language, religion, dress, hairstyle, sets of personal ornaments, burial practices, and other observable attributes. And t
he attempts to theorize the effects of the Phoenician diaspora through the application of postcolonial theory, for example, are commendable and help us think outside the box (e.g., Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez 2005). But of course we should not forget the following: implicit in the way that we work to recognize difference in material culture is the need to define the yardstick or benchmark against which difference is measured. This is needed even for subtle differences in the reconstruction of social practices at different geographical scales, from the local to the regional and beyond. And for that we often have to go back to the archaeological record of the coastal Levant, with all the problems related to the lack of suitable Iron Age remains from many sites, including Byblos, Sidon, and Arwad. Moreover, we need to remind ourselves that that record is not static but, rather, composed of elements of material culture that are the outcome of historical vicissitudes and social practices linked to Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia.

  The Life Histories of Objects

  Following on from my second point is the realization that some aspects of material culture that have been labeled “Phoenician” by art historians in the past on the basis of iconography belong to the realm of Phoenician scholarship only indirectly. The gold-plated silver bowl discovered in 1836 in the Regolini-Galassi tomb in Cerveteri in central Italy, and others like it, has figured scenes that may reflect a social ethos that valued the heroic, including traveling and subjugating wild creatures (Vella 2010). Such a message may have been conveyed to the viewers of the bowl before it was buried alongside Etruscan aristocrats (with another 500 objects, I may add). But making sense of the context of deposition of the bowl and its history of use immediately before burial is really an Etruscan problem first and foremost, even if we were to concur, based on Homeric authority, that the ultimate origin of such bowls may have been Sidon.