Book Review: In Search of the Phoenicians by Josephine Quinn
In Search of the Phoenicians
Josephine Quinn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Pub Date: Dec 10, 2019
ISBN: 9780691195964
368 pages
Size: 6.14 x 9.25 in.
Illus: 75 b/w illus. 11 maps.
Who were the Phoenicians? Did they exist as a collective group by this name? Or is the term “Phoenician” a result of the modern notion of nationalism? Josephine Quinn’s book makes the case for such a study. An impressive scholarly work where Quinn breaks down this thesis using references from archaeology, numismatics, epigraphy, etymology, and ancient literature.
It turns out that the people whom we have learned to be known as Phoenicians did not identify themselves with that particular name. Quinn labels this “ethnic assumption” as the product of categorization of various ethnic groups who seemingly had similar cultures, trades, languages or similar dialects, or lived in and around the same geographical area to make a sense of nationalistic identities after the advent of the Industrial Age. This idea of Phoenicianism propagated as a Lebanese political movement after the Ottoman Empire broke down. But through various historical findings, the author argues that this modern notion of Phoenicians as an ethnic group sharing a common history and identity is a product of European nationalist ideologies. Throughout the first part of the book, we see how fragmentary ancient relics can be and how difficult it is to piece together the ethnic values and identities of people who are no longer present.
In fact, the term “Phoenician(phoenix)” was invented by the Greeks (Latin word Punic has the same root) which can mean a bird, a palm tree, or a person from Phoenicia in Greek. But did the people living in the ancient Levant called themselves Phoenicians? Then who are the Canaanites or ancient Sardinians? Quinn shows that in fact, people of that region identified themselves in terms of the cities they lived in like Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. These city-states often managed to keep vague identities to create a symbiosis between themselves and imperialist powers such as the Romans. This seemingly fluid ethnic identity led to the success of several Phoenician colonies in the Levant. This is one of the finest inferences made in the book which keeps even a non-Mediterranean history buff hooked in. Though apart from a paragraph or two the book lacks a study of genetic analyses of the present Levantine population. As a biologist, genealogical studies make for a good common denominator in modern conversations about “identities”. For example, Tony Joseph’s Early Indians does a fascinating coverage of both archaeological and genetic studies regarding the ancestors of Indians and how settled in the Indian subcontinent.
Quinn talks a lot about identity in this book. The self-conscious acknowledgement of belonging to a collective group of people within borders has been an active topic as seen in the rise of modern nationalist movements. And often these movements find their inspiration from their ancestral lands, their ancient roots of origins, and pride in their ancestral culture. The book ends with such an example where Irish writers like James Joyce were influenced by Phoenician history with respect to Irish nationalism. Once the reader patiently traverses the details of ancient Roman coinage and various textual references by Livy or Herodotus, there is much to discover and learn from history and use it as a lens to focus on our modern political practices and problems surrounding ethnic concerns.
