Social Archaeologies of Trade and Exchange by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-315-42003-5
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Literary Perceptions of Phoenicians

It is well known that the name “Phoenician,” as we know it, is an entirely Greek invention that is first encountered in this form in the Homeric epics. The people whom the historical Greeks called Phoenicians did not call themselves Phoenicians and very probably did not identify themselves collectively at all. They identified themselves as the inhabitants of individual cities (Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, Arvad, and so on; fig. 6.1), which is also predominantly how the Hebrew bible sees them. Although the word phoinikios appears on the Greek-language Linear B tablets of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC (see Aura Jorro 1985, s.v. po-ni-ki-ja and so on), there is no indication that it is thought of as an ethnonym or even that it has any particular geographical reference. This means that, even though the earlier word is probably related etymologically, the first Greek use of “Phoenician” to refer to people probably dates to somewhere between 1200 and 700 BC. In fact, the word very likely does have something to do with the word phoinix, which is used quite liberally in the epics (as well as on the Linear B tablets) to denote the color red or purple; and it may well come from an association with the murex-dyed red or purple textiles that formed such an important industry in East Mediterranean coastal cities from at least the end of the second millennium. If so, it should probably remind us that such textiles may well have formed a conspicuous (but archaeologically invisible) component of the eastern manufactured products that reached the Aegean on eastern ships, possibly as early as the twelfth century BC.

In some respects we get a relatively clear picture of the people called Phoenicians in the epics (especially in the Odyssey), particularly their range of exclusively maritime-based activities of various sorts and their areas of operation. They are presented as maritime trampers, away from home for a year or more at a time.3 On arrival in one place, they sell the goods they are carrying and then hang around until they have amassed a new cargo to take on and sell somewhere else. They act as convenient maritime taxi drivers, willing to pick up passengers; but they are also not averse to the odd act of kidnapping, slave dealing, theft, and even murder. We hear of them operating in the East Mediterranean, on the Levantine coast, in the Nile delta, and further west in Libya, as well as on Crete (where it is evidently quite easy to pick up a Phoenician ship when needed), up the west coast of Greece, and in the northeastern Aegean.

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