The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

  Finally, the same type of material culture can be identified in all the Phoenician settlements, the most characteristic find being the pottery which presents the same general characteristics in all the Phoenician settlements of the Levant (see chapter 22, this volume). Imported pottery from Cyprus, Greece, and Asia Minor indicate the trade network of these sites, while Egyptian amulets and figurines, as well as architectural elements and motifs, indicate the strong influence of Egyptian culture on Phoenician religion. Petrographic studies of the ceramics from Tell el-Burak, as well as the analysis of the amphorae content and of the botanical remains, will provide evidence from Lebanon for the economy and diet of the Phoenician cities (see Appendix 2 to Kamlah et al. 2016: 122–30).

  While some general characteristics of the Phoenician urban settlements can be reconstructed, we possess no information available about the smaller towns or rural settlements scattered on the coast and in the hinterland. Although their existence is assumed and sometimes attested in the written sources, no archaeological evidence is so far available. The excavation of the promising mountain site of Yanuh was interrupted before exposing substantial parts of the Iron Age settlement. Chhim, in the mountains northeast of Sidon, has also yielded evidence for an Iron Age settlement but more investigation is needed to expose the Phoenician town.

  Phoenician Architecture: General Characteristics

  These mentioned excavations have exposed several monuments and buildings of the Iron Age, which contribute to a better understanding of Phoenician architecture and building techniques. Some distinctive traits of the latter can be identified, such as the particular use of stone ashlars in all types of constructions, whether domestic or public.

  While there is hardly any evidence for architecture in Iron Age I, a few sites have yielded examples of fortifications, domestic, and religious architecture dating to Iron Age II and III.

  In Iron Age II, walls were built of fieldstones, but doorjambs and corners were built with ashlars laid as headers and stretchers in various patterns. This building technique is clearly attested in Tell el-Burak and in Sarepta, where it is a constant and characteristic feature of all the buildings exposed.

  In the late Iron Age, ashlars were used in the wall structure itself as a pier placed in the middle of the fieldstone wall, as is the case in Tell el-Burak, but sometimes also as two piers placed in the same wall, as is the case in Beirut and Dor. The ashlars could be laid in various patterns and the different combinations were described by Elayi and Sayegh (2000: 200–203 and figs. 43–46). This new building technique is known as the “pier and rubble” wall. It was not restricted to domestic buildings but was used also for enclosure or fortification walls, as shown by the eighth century bce city wall found in Tell el-Burak (Kamlah et al. 2016) (see figure 10. 1). This eighth–seventh century bce wall is the only example known so far of an Iron Age II city wall built in the “pier-and-rubble” technique.

  Figure 10.1 Tell el-Burak: eighth century bce enclosure wall seen from the south. The wall presents the only example of pier-and-rubble structure used for city walls.

  Source: Tell el-Burak Archaeological Project.

  Mudbrick architecture, in turn, is attested at Tell Keisan. The unavailability of stone in its immediate neighborhood led the Iron Age inhabitants to use sun-dried mudbricks with stone foundations (Briend and Humbert 1980: 27–28).

  Domestic Architecture

  In his book on the Iron Age domestic architecture of the Levant (1982), Frank Braemer claimed that there is no such thing as a “Phoenician house plan.” The available evidence proved him both right and wrong. He was right in that no characteristic and uniform Phoenician house plan, such as the Israelite four-room house, for example, could be identified. He was wrong because several plans of Phoenician houses have been exposed in the last decades, even though they do not conform to a single pattern (on domestic architecture, see also chapter 27, this volume).

  In Tell el-Burak, two seventh century bce houses were exposed, and they present the same tripartite plan: a front room covering the entire width of the building and two back rooms (figure 10.2). The house was accessed through a door placed in the middle of the front room wall. Only one of the back rooms was accessed from the front room through a door. Another door enabled communication between the two backrooms. The backroom with no access to the front room opened to the outside through a door. Except for the entrance door, doors inside the building were placed at the corners of the rooms. The floors were of two kinds: either covered with white plaster or paved with cobble stones. There was no decisive evidence for the existence of a second story.

  Figure 10.2 Tell el-Burak: Phoenician seventh-century bce House 1 (back left) and House 3 (center of photo), and sixth-century bce House 2 (front left) seen from the west. Note the ashlar masonry at the room corners and doors, and the pier-and-rubble wall in House 2.

  Source: Tell el-Burak Archaeological Project.

  A third structure in Tell el-Burak was built a century later and consists of two rooms with cobble paved floors, which do not communicate with each other but communicate with the open space outside. An almost identical parallel to this house was found in Ḥorbat Rosh Zayit (Gal and Alexandre 2000: 180, plan 10). In fact, one could speak of two individual, monocellular structures. What is surprising in the Tell el-Burak buildings is that none of them had domestic installations such as clay bread ovens (tannurs), storage bins, or fireplaces, which suggests that they may have been part of a larger administrative unit.

  The same tripartite plan observed in Tell el-Burak is found in Houses 44 and 45 at Tell Abu Hawam (Braemer 1982: 162–63). At this latter site, four different house plans from the Iron Age were exposed (Braemer 1982: 160–64). They are all built with fieldstones and the doors are placed at the wall corners. A close but not entirely identical parallel to this house plan was found also in Ḥorbat Rosh Zayit (Gal and Alexandre 2000: 180, plan 10). In Beirut, nine different house plans from the Late Iron Age were identified, but none of them is identical to the Tell el-Burak houses. The Beirut houses had fairly large sizes and consisted of three to ten variously organized rooms of different shapes and sizes (Elayi and Sayegh 2000: 157–224 and figs. 36–37). The “domestic” character of these buildings is indicated by the presence in some of them of installations such as tannurs. No decisive evidence for the existence of upper stories was found. All houses had well preserved doors up to a height of 1.40 m and they were generally located at a room angle that required only one door jamb. Doors giving access to the street were wider than internal communication doors and could reach a width of 2.10 m. The floors were either lime plastered, or covered with flagstones or pebble stones mixed with sand and earth or made of beaten earth. Some of the larger houses had storage rooms filled with amphorae.

  Religious Architecture

  Regarding Phoenician sacred architecture, several temples and shrines were exposed on the Lebanese coast: the Eshmun temple in Bustan esh-Sheikh near Sidon; the Sarepta shrine; and the Amrit, Tell Arqa, Beirut, and Tyre temples. Of the Eshmun temple, only remains of a massive stone podium survived (for a reconstruction, see Stucky 2005). Crenellations and Egyptian cornice fragments, Persian-type column bases, and an altar, all belonging to the decayed temple(s), were found not in situ. The Sarepta shrine displayed two main and successive building phases labeled Shrine I and II. The best preserved of the two is the older Shrine I dated to the eighth–seventh centuries bce (Pritchard 1975: 14 and fig. 2). It is a ca. 15 m2 rectangle, and its walls were built with ashlar blocks placed as headers and stretchers, a rare example of “pure” ashlar walls from Lebanon. Along the walls were remains of benches built of fieldstones and covered with cement. At the west end was the altar or offering table. This altar was badly preserved, as its stones had been robbed, leaving only the fill in the middle. A depression in the floor in front of the altar was most probably a socket for a stone baetyl or an incense altar (Pritchard 1975: 18).

  In Tell Arqa, the only example known so fa
r of an eighth century bce double sanctuary was excavated, but it still awaits publication (Thalmann 1998: 132; cf. Badre et al. 2007). Its plan is unfortunately incomplete. In Beirut, a small shrine was identified in building U16 (Elayi and Sayegh 2000: 153, 264, and fig. 32; Wightman 2008). In room 16.8, a favissa containing fragments of terracotta figurines with extended arms was found, as well as pits full of jar fragments.

  Recently a Persian period temple was exposed also in Tyre (Badre 2015). It is a rectangular building oriented west–east. It is built with neatly cut ashlars laid as headers and stretchers in the “pure” ashlar technique. An Egyptian cornice runs on the outer face of its back wall. Against the latter is a podium, southeast of which stands a furnace filled with charred animal bones, a feature attested for the first time in a Phoenician temple. A stone altar consisting of a large monolithic square slab was also found. The ashlar foundation of what has been tentatively interpreted as a square tower, as well as several wells, was also part of the temple.

  In North Syria, several temples were exposed. The best example of Phoenician sacred architecture came from the Persian period temple of Amrith (Dunand and Saliby 1985; cf. Al-Maqdisi 2007b: 60–61). It consists of a large basin cut in the rock in the midst of which stood a naos. The 46.7 m long, 38.5 m wide, and 3.5 m deep basin is fed by a spring that seeps through its eastern sidewall. On three sides of the basin are quays with porticoes. The temple’s main entrance was on the north side and was protected by two towers. The naos consisted of a small enclosure, partly built out of the bedrock. Two tiers of crenellations on Egyptian-style cornices, one crowning its top and the other halfway through its height, decorated its outer facade.

  Old and recent work in the Syrian Jablé Plain, mainly at Tell Sianu, Tell Toueini, and Tell Sukas, have exposed other religious buildings of the Phoenician period (Al-Maqdissi 2007b: 62–63). They seem to share the following characteristics: A temenos wall; a main entrance leading to an inner open courtyard paved with pebbles, where cultic installations such as an altar and ablution basins stood; and the temple proper or maabed. The temple is raised on a platform and its entrance is reached by a couple of stairs. It consists of an ante-cella and a cella, where offering tables and cultic basins were found. Little is known about the building technique, given the bad preservation of the structures. There is also evidence that the top of the walls was decorated with crenellations. Finally, the site of Tell Kazel, south of Tartus, has also yielded an Iron Age temple (Badre et al. 2007: 58–59; Badre and Gubel 1999–2000: 192 and fig. 45).

  This evidence shows that, as is the case with domestic buildings, there is no common plan for Phoenician religious architecture. Some monuments share similar cultic installations such as basins and altars while others offer examples of Egyptian cornices and crenellations. This evidence has also corrected a long-lived tradition that considered the temple in antis with two columns at the entrance and a tripartite division to represent the typical Phoenician temple plan. This tradition was based on Herodotus’s description of the Tyrian Melqart temple and on the biblical description of the Solomonic temple, allegedly built by Hiram’s masons (cf. chapter 43, this volume). The temple in antis is, in fact, known today to be of Syrian origin and has not been attested so far in Phoenicia. The only probable attestation of the existence of wooden pillars at the temple entrance was found at Tell Sukas, but being the northernmost Phoenician temple it is not surprising to see north Syrian influence on the religious building.

  Phoenician Funerary Architecture and Practices

  The archaeological evidence has clearly demonstrated that in Phoenicia two funerary practices coexisted: inhumation and cremation (Sader 1995, 2014). Cremation was introduced in Phoenicia only in Iron Age II, and there is no scholarly consensus as to its origin. It appears suddenly in Iron Age II and disappears in the same sudden way in Iron Age III (for funerary ritual, see also chapter 20, this volume).

  The dead were usually buried in cemeteries located outside the settlement. The only evidence for intramural interment comes from Tell Arqa and Tell Rashidiyye. Tombs range from simple earth pits, to rock-cut, shaft, and cist tombs. Earth pits are best represented in the Khalde and Beirut cemetery (Stuart 2001–2002: 88). Pit graves were also used for cremation burials as attested in Tyre Al-Bass (Aubet 2004; Aubet et al. 2014a). The tombs are pits dug in the dune, in which urns containing the cremated remains of the dead or the skeleton were placed.

  Cist tombs built with neatly cut slabs are known from Khalde (Saidah 1967: 166–67) and from the site of Sidon-Dakerman (Saidah 1969: 122; see also Saidah 1983: 215–16 and pl. LII: 3). They were built with cut stones placed without any mortar. The tomb was roofed with long slabs held together by a coarse limestone mortar. Cist tombs seem to have been in use since the beginning of Iron Age III.

  A large number of Iron Age rock-cut tombs were found in Lebanon. Rectangular tombs cut in the rock are known from Tell Rashidiyye (Macridy 1904) and Beirut (Stuart 2001–2002) where they are described as narrow shafts without a rock-cut chamber. Shaft tombs with one or more rock-cut chambers at the bottom are attested in Tell Rashidiyye (Chéhab 1983), Beirut (Stuart 2001–2002: 90), and Byblos (Salles 1980, 1994), for example. The use of natural or rock-cut caves as tombs is also attested in Byblos (Culican 1970: 10) and in several looted tombs in the hinterland of Tyre (Sader 1995: 23–25). Some of them may have been entered from the ceiling. The most beautiful examples of rock-cut and shaft tombs come from the Persian period royal necropolis of Sidon, which extended southeast and northeast of the settlement (Frede 2000, maps 2 and 3; Lembke 2001: map 1). In 1963–1964, the archaeologists of the Lebanese Department of Antiquities discovered southeast of the city, in the area of Mgharet Ablun, several shaft tombs containing marble anthropoid sarcophagi and thecae, as well as wooden coffins which had disintegrated (Ghadban 1998). In the early 2000s, other shaft tombs with beautiful marble anthropoid sarcophagi were found southeast of Sidon during infrastructure works in the area known as Dakerman, but this important find was not published. Built tombs with nicely cut ashlars and slanting roofs were found at Akhziv, where a crematorium was also exposed (Mazar 2004, 2013).

  Inhumed bodies were deposited with no specific orientation directly on the floor, on stone or wooden benches, in jars, or in coffins (Stuart 2001–2002: 88–90); the presence of iron nails in the Beirut tombs suggests the use of wooden coffins. In the royal necropolis of Sidon, the widespread use of marble sarcophagi of the anthropoid, theca, and architectural type is attested in the Persian period (Elayi 1989: 262). The Sidonian anthropoid sarcophagi are an imitation of Egyptian prototypes. They are a typical Phoenician production of the fifth and fourth centuries bce and they stop being used after the invasion of Alexander the Great. At the beginning, the local Sidonian sarcophagi imitated the Egyptian prototypes, but they progressively fell under Greek influence. It is even suggested that at some point Greek masters were brought to Sidon to produce them and later local sculptors were introduced to this art by their Greek colleagues (Elayi 1989: 262). Regarding incineration practices, a detailed study of the Tyre Al-Bass interments is now available and presents detailed information about the cremation process and funerary rituals (Aubet 2004; Aubet et al. 2014a; Trelliso Carreño 2015).

  The presence of stone stelae inscribed with the name of the deceased and/or with religious symbols is very widely attested in Lebanon (Sader 2005) and Palestine, mainly at Akhziv (Delavault and Lemaire 1979), as is the use in of a wide variety of symbolic artifacts and amulets accompanying the deceased (Aubet 2004, 48; Saidah 1983; on religion and funerary rites, see, respectively, chapters 19 and 20, this volume).

  References

  Al-Maqdissi, M. 2007a. “Les nouvelles découvertes à Amrit.” In La Méditerrranée des Phéniciens de Tyr à Carthage, edited by V. Matoïan, 60–61. Paris: Somogy Editions d’Art.

  Al-Maqdissi, M. 2007b. “L’architecture religieuse phénicienne dans la plaine de Jablé. Recherches archéologiques récentes en Phénicie du Nord.” In La Méd
iterrranée des Phéniciens de Tyr à Carthage, edited by V. Matoïan, 62–63. Paris: Flammarion.

  Anderson, W. P. 1988. Sarepta I. The Late Bronze and Iron Age Strata of Area II, Y. Beirut: Lebanese University Publications.

  Aubet, M. E. 2004. The Phoenician Cemetery of Tyre-Al Bass. Excavations 1997–1999. Beirut: Ministère de la Culture, Direction Générale des Antiquités.

  Aubet, M. E., F. Núñez, and L. Trellisó. 2014a. The Phoenician Cemetery of Tyre-Al Bass II. Archaeological Seasons 2001–2005. Beirut: Ministère de la Culture, Direction Générale des Antiquités.

  Aubet, M. E., F. Núñez, and L. Trellisó. 2014b. “Phoenicia During the Iron Age II Period.” In The Oxford handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant c. 8000–332 BCE, edited by M. Steiner and A. Killbrew, 706–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Badre, L. E. 2015. “A Phoenician Sanctuary in Tyre.” In Cult and Ritual on the Levantine Coast and its Impact on the Eastern Mediterranean Realm. Proceedings of the International Symposium Beirut 2012, edited by A.-M. Maïla-Afeiche, 59–82. Beirut: Ministère de la Culture.

  Badre, L. E., and E. Gubel. 1999–2000. “Tell Kazel, Syria. AUB Museum Excavations 1993–1998, Third Preliminary Report.” Berytus 44: 123–203.

  Badre, L. E. Gubel, M. Al-Maqdissi, and H. Sader. 1990. “Tell Kazel, Syria. AUB Museum Excavations 1985–1987 Preliminary Reports.” Berytus 38: 10–124.

  Badre, L., Gubel, E., and J.-P. Thalmann. 2007. “Trois sanctuaires phéniciens: Sarepta, Tell Arqa, Tell Kazel.” In La Méditerrranée des Phéniciens de Tyr à Carthage, edited by V. Matoïan, 58–59. Paris: Somogy Editions d’Art.

  Bartl, K. 2002. “Archäologische Untersuchungen der südlichen Akkar-Ebene, Nordlibanon.” In Ausgrabungen und Surveys im vorderen Orient I, edited by R. Eichmann, 23–48. Rahden/Westf: Marie Leidorf.