Blog Post #73: Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean: An Interview with Dr. Carolina López-Ruiz

Our blogs posts this month explore the modern constructions of “East” and “West”: how these influenced the study of the ancient Mediterranean, and how the ancient Mediterranean was used in turn to further entrench these constructs. Authors take a range of approaches for evaluating how we deal with the persistence of “East” and “West”, interrogating the ways in which we study and understand the materials, motifs, and people who moved around this ancient world.

What pushed you to take on this monumental project? 

I have been “chasing the Phoenicians” ever since I was a graduate student. The questions that set in motion the type of enquiry that led to this book emerged as I was working on my dissertation, which was about the adaptation of Northwest Semitic motifs in Greek cosmogonies/theogonies (this became my first book, When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East, 2010). As I wrote in my introduction there, we still needed to find a historical and cultural frame that accounts for the adaptations of Near Eastern myth I saw in the literature of archaic Greece. How, where, and through whom did those stories travel? The more I looked into the archaeological data about Phoenician settlement and activity all over the Mediterranean, and the acknowledgement of Phoenician cultural “debt” in Greek sources, the more I became convinced that the Phoenicians were key players in this scenario of cultural exchange. The main challenge is the lack of literary heritage from this group, which also made the puzzle particularly interesting. I was set on pushing a view that champions them as cultural agents while forcing us to break away from the stereotypes of Phoenicians as merely traders and leave aside the Hellenocentrism that we have inherited precisely because we do have Greek literature.

The timing of the book and my effort to bring it to a close was also spurred by the increasing interest in the Phoenicians, and the need, I though, of bringing closer the advances from various disciplines, Classics, western Mediterranean archaeology, Near Eastern archaeology, Hebrew Bible, etc. I felt I could bring a unique perspective in the sense that I have a rare background in both classics and Northwest Semitic studies, and I have worked on western Mediterranean contexts (Tartessos in Iberia) as well on Greek-Near eastern literature. 

In your opinion, what were some of the main forces at play in modern scholarship that succeeded in marginalizing the Phoenicians, such that they now need to be “rehabilitated” in their role as one of the major drivers of ancient Mediterranean history? 

As westerners educated on a Greco-Roman view of the European heritage, we have inherited the biases against other cultures, especially not Indo-European ones. This doesn’t mean every scholar who does not talk about Phoenicians or other non-Greeks and Romans is explicitly or consciously biased. There are dark tendencies behind this Euro-centric, Classico-centric education to begin with, of course (anti-Semitism has been a well-known part of it in certain periods). But in practice, the major force is inertia, or the tendency to follow the rut set by those disciplinary and institutional divisions, which in turn create and reinforce certain research niches and teaching cultures and habits. An inescapable fact is that the major disciplines (Classics, biblical, Near Eastern, e.g., Assyriology, Egyptology) were formed around corpora of texts. And that Phoenician culture lacks a comparable textual heritage, for historical reasons that are inseparable from the advancement of Greek and Roman literature and culture (it’s all a vicious circle). The bottom line is that Phoenician culture can never become a “classic” in the sense that those other cultures are. The main challenge is to demonstrate their role through painstaking reconstruction of the traces a lost heritage. For this, an essential avenue of progress is the dialogue between historiography and archaeology, the one main source of new information for the Phoenicians, including epigraphical textual evidence.  

You state on p. 81 that “Phoenicians. . . were the first and most frequent Near Eastern interlocutors these local groups [in the western Mediterranean] ever met, and the first and only Levantine group to actually permanently settle in their midst.” Can we understand why it was the Phoenicians, and not other coastal groups along the Levant (or elsewhere) that ended up taking on these long-distance ventures at such an early date? 

That’s the big question. A combination of factors must have aligned to make the Phoenicians willing and capable of setting out in these long-distance travels leading to their progressive settlement so far out from the Levant. For one thing, it is hard to think of other groups in the eastern Mediterranean who after the Bronze Age had maintained the political and economic stability that the Phoenician cities did; moreover, not every group had a maritime outlook and the technological “know-how,” while the coastal Canaanite states of the Phoenician shores, such as Byblos, had cultivated and exploited their naval expertise since the Bronze Age when they became timber suppliers for Egypt. Greater powers like Assyria or the Aramaean states were more inland looking and so were the Israelites. The Philistines, who seem to have had an Aegean origin, and were “recent” migrants themselves into Palestine, and seemingly had no interest or capability for these ventures.  

In some ways you defend the term “Orientalizing” in your book, specifically in Chapter 3. You note that we should redefine it, like other nineteenth-century terms, “according to current theoretical models” (p. 66). Your work is very conscious and thorough in its use of this term. Do you nonetheless worry that “Orientalizing” will continue to perpetuate an east-west divide in scholarship on the ancient Mediterranean along the lines of modern notions of Orientalism? 

It was not an easy decision. I debated a lot with myself which way to go with this, whether to scrap the term altogether or to work with it, extracting a revised meaning and function for it that might conform to the current interpretive paradigm. I ultimately decided in favor of or the second option, mostly because it is an entrenched term in art history and archaeology, not only in English-speaking scholarship but especially in Europe, in the countries where most of Phoenician archaeology is happening, such as Italy and Spain, as well as Greece. I agree, though, that it is hard to shake the Euro-centric colonialist layer implicit in the very lexeme “Orient” on which “orientalizing” is formed. In a time when institutions are renaming themselves to avoid the word “Orient” altogether, perhaps it is time to scrap it. On Cyprus, for instance, the type art we would call “orientalizing” by period and style is simply called “archaeo-Cypriot” which is an elegant and neutral term. So perhaps we will end up with more neutral chronological and local referents (Tartessic, archaic Etruscan, or whatever). But the category “orientalizing” is very much alive in other countries and in the discipline, not the least in Etruscan and Greek art. It is also difficult to find a substitute for this generalized trend. Others and I have proposed “Phoenicianizing” as a more accurate term, but of course not every referent in this type of art and culture of the archaic Mediterranean is Phoenician. If my take on the Phoenicians’ role is correct, however, this is still a more accurate concept, since it points to a specific historical agent, not a vague “Orient.” Even if the argument might be is well received (we will see) it might take decades for any change in terminology for artifacts in museums and publications, and I doubt Phoenicianizing will be the substitute. And, of course, the Phoenicians were not the exclusive referent in this phenomenon. That is why in my argument I insisted that the “-izing” ending is the key that allows us to rehabilitate the terms, if we want, as a vague emulation of Near Eastern things, not necessarily tied to a specific “origin.” In other words, there was a certain “reverse orientalism” in the sense that Iron Age elites and artisans were emulating both Phoenician art and technology and broader Near Eastern and Egyptian models largely mediated by Phoenicians.  

Where do you think the biggest contributions to Phoenician studies will come from in the next decade (e.g., traditional archaeological approaches, art history, scientific dating, genetics, etc.)? 

All of the above. Archaeology will bring most of the new information, no doubt. For instance, survey archaeology is informing us about the organization of the territory vis-à-vis resources and local interaction, while traditional archaeology continues to offer answers about trade networks, domestic architecture and social organization, ritual life, etc., while new findings are helping us fine tune the dates and conditions of the early stages of settlement abroad (not necessarily know the causes, as we were saying earlier!). Moreover, archaeological work in Lebanon and northern Israel, and in Tunisia too, is filling in the many gaps in information about early Iron Age Phoenicians in these homelands, which brings opportunity to draw east-west connections that can feed into the discussion about colonies as well. But everything contributes, and the analytical, lab work that accompanies every excavation now a days is fundamental too; it provides priceless data about daily life, trade, pottery production, etc. Finally, DNA studies are fascinating in their own right, although the data is always tricky to interpret culturally and does not easily map onto historical, lived identities (a topic for another time). 

If you could choose one artifact that encapsulates the type of interconnected world the Phoenicians helped to generate through their cultural and economic activities, what would it be? 

In my book I used the sphinx to trace the impact of Phoenician culture across the Mediterranean, as it appears in every art form and is a most successful motif, adapted by Greeks, Etruscans, Tartessians, Cypriots, and others. The use of sphinxes or griffins in funerary, votive, and mythological contexts shows this hybrid creature maintained a fairly consistent symbolic meaning not divorced from its use among Phoenicians and others (Egyptians, Canaanites, Hittites, Minoans-Mycenaeans) even earlier in the eastern Mediterranean. But it was the Phoenician version of the sphinx, very clearly, the one that was exported further afield in the Iron Age, through its representation in portable objects, such as ivories, terracottas, or engraved metalwork. There are countless materials that represent the interconnected Mediterranean in other ways, and even industries, such as the cultivation and consumption of wine and olive oil, which apparently was a product of this interaction as well, or the adaptation of alphabetic writing, but I will stick with the winged sphinx as the “face” of the Phoenician trail.