# In Search of the Phoenicians ## Highlights ### L211 > For most of Friel’s characters, being Irish is a sentiment based more on present circumstance than nature or conviction, when it is felt at all. Whatever the contingent reasons in this particular colonial context for their specific self-conceptions, they remind us of the dangers of stamping ethnic labels on people who may themselves have felt ambivalent about or simply uninterested in them, people whose own collective identities came, went, and in some cases never rose above the level of their own towns or even families. The Phoenicians, I will suggest in this book, constitute just such a case. - [Location 211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=211) ### L216 > sailors, traders, and settlers from the narrow strip of coast below Mount Lebanon that the Greeks labeled Phoenicia had a disproportionate impact on the ancient Mediterranean. Their heyday came after the collapse of the great powers of Hittite Anatolia, Kassite Babylonia, and Mycenaean Greece around 1200 BCE: merchants from Levantine ports including Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Beirut (fig. I.1) seized a new set of opportunities, trading cedar from Mount Lebanon, along with exquisite items crafted from metal, ivory, and glass, for raw metals from the west. In the process they refined the art of navigation and—so it was said—taught the Greeks another of their inventions, the alphabet.5 They traveled the length of the Mediterranean and beyond (fig. I.2), and from at least the ninth century BCE established new settlements from Cyprus on their doorstep to the Atlantic coast of Spain, long before the Greeks began to migrate west. - [Location 216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=216) ### L288 > The fundamental difficulty with labels like “Phoenician” is that they offer answers to questions about historical explanation before they have even been asked. They assume an underlying commonality between the people they designate that cannot easily be demonstrated; they produce new identities where they did not to our knowledge exist; and they freeze in time particular identities that were in fact in a constant process of construction, from inside and out. As Paul Gilroy has argued, “ethnic absolutism” can homogenize what are in reality significant differences. These labels also encourage historical explanation on a very large and abstract scale, focusing attention on the role of the putative generic identity at the expense of more concrete, conscious, and interesting communities and their stories, obscuring in this case the importance of the family, the city, and the region, not to mention the marking of other social identities such as gender, class, and status. Relates to my point about ethnic groups in the Anthony v. Taylor piece. - [Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=288) ### L305 > They have described, for instance, the emergence of new ethnic groups such as the Moabites and Israelites in the Near East in the aftermath of the collapse of the Bronze Age empires and the “crystallisation of commonalities” among Greeks in the Archaic period. They have also traced subsequent changes in the ethnic content and formulation of these identifications: in relation to “Hellenicity,” for example, scholars have delineated a shift in the fifth century BCE from an “aggregative” conception of Greek identity founded largely on shared history and traditions to a somewhat more oppositional approach based on distinction from non-Greeks, especially Persians, and then another in the fourth century BCE, when Greek intellectuals themselves debated whether Greekness should be based on a shared past or on shared culture and values in the contemporary world.27 By the Hellenistic period, at least in Egypt, the term “Hellene” (Greek) was in official documents simply an indication of a privileged tax status, and those so labeled could be Jews, Thracians—or, indeed, Egyptians. Could be useful for a classical wisdom piece about ethnicity. - [Location 305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=305) ### L321 > in practice, the evidence suggests that collective identities throughout the ancient Mediterranean were indeed largely articulated at the level of city-states and that notions of common descent or historical association were rarely the relevant criterion for constructing “groupness” in these communities: in Greek cities, for instance, mutual identification tended to be based on political, legal, and, to a limited extent, cultural criteria, while the Romans famously emphasized their mixed origins in their foundation legends and regularly manumitted their foreign slaves, whose descendants then became full Roman citizens. City state stuff is relevant for Nahria. Rome stuff is relevant for melting pot classical wisdom piece. - [Location 321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=321) ### L327 > Recent studies have shown that such familiar groups as the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland and the Minoans of ancient Crete were essentially invented in the modern period by the archaeologists who first studied or “discovered” them, and even the collective identity of the Greeks can be called into question. I'm remarkably shaky on the the implication of this. Is it a bit like saying that America doesn't exist as an ethnicity because there are so many differences between New England and Texas and the Mid-Atlantic region and the south? - Used for [[Ancient Identities]] - [Location 327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=327) ### L566 > Much recent scholarship has emphasized that nations are not a “natural” form of social organization, but a constructed one; in the words of Caspar Hirschi, they are “not formed by ‘objective’ criteria like common territory, language, habits, ancestry, fate, etc. but by the common belief in such criteria.” Even when geographical, linguistic, or biological links between people do persist over time, it is the communal choice to recognize and value them (or some of them) that creates a national identity. Nahria would not think of itself as such. That's one of the struggles of this. Might relate to the Jewel Cities of the Black Company books. - [Location 566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=566) ### L575 > “is a historical fable that projects the nation and its dominant people backward, obscuring discontinuity, contingency, and fluid identities. Such accounts serve, as Walter Benjamin reminded us, to naturalize the progression and necessity of the state in general and the nation-state in particular.”24 This is what i was talking about with egypy and china not being as "continuous" as they like to claim. - [Location 575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=575) ### L914 > nothing did in fact unite the Phoenicians in their own eyes or those of their neighbors, and that his Phoenician people, or civilization, or nation, is not actually a real historical object, but rather a product of the scholarly and political ideologies I have discussed in this chapter. What about language? - [Location 914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=914) ### L922 > how can we define a particular sociocultural group as “ethnic”? There is general agreement that the notion of shared ancestry is a core aspect, often associated with an idea of shared territory: “blood and soil.”1 In addition, shared attributes, including language, religion, or particular physical characteristics, may accompany and bolster the sense or impression of groupness attached to any particular ethnic identity, although they are not by themselves enough to diagnose it: the focus of ethnic claims is on historical connections between people as opposed to their contemporary links. Useful definition. - [Location 922](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=922) ### L931 > there are six different criteria by which we can recognize an ancient ethnic group—a collective name, a common myth of descent, a shared history, a sense of solidarity, an association with a specific territory, and a distinctive shared culture—and that such groups should fulfill all of these criteria at least to some degree.4 I would argue that on the available evidence the Phoenicians fulfilled none of them. Interesting that language isn't included here. - [Location 931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=931) ### L940 > there is no evidence for the use of any other communal self-designation either, despite the common claim that our Phoenicians described themselves as “Canaanites.” Instead, a survey of the limited available evidence suggests that Phoenician-speakers defined themselves, at least in their inscriptions, in terms of their cities and, even more, their families. I'm assuming the rural suburbs that feed into the individual cities counted here, or would they have possessed a different self identity? - [Location 940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=940) ### L944 > scratched his name in Etruscan on a tessera hospitalis or hospitality token in the second half of the sixth century BCE.6 This small ivory plaquette, found in a grave in the Santa Monica necropolis at Carthage, would have been one of a matching pair that could be reunited to prove the existence of a relationship of mutual friendship and hospitality between two individuals and their descendants. It has a wild boar carved on one side and an inscription on the other that begins Useful for the guest host relationship stuff #pkm/synthesize - [Location 944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=944) ### L1162 > While the Greeks’ “Phoenicia” was always a coastal strip, the “Canaan” of the Near Eastern sources, including the Hebrew Bible, was considerably larger, including the coastal cities but often extending as far inland as the River Jordan if not beyond.49 These regions were also of course seen from different perspectives: Canaan from inland, where a whole series of interconnected cities and states housed people speaking very similar languages; and Phoenicia from the sea, where the coastal cities were all that most Greek-speakers saw. And as has often been pointed out, the Canaan and Canaanites of the Hebrew Bible were largely ideological constructs representing the enemies of Israel, rather than historical references to a real social group. - [Location 1162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1162) ### L1302 > For Phoenician-speakers, it seems, cities were places more than communities. This may relate to different political cultures: the fourth-century inscription recording the diplomatic relations between Athens and Sidon names the partners in the agreement as on the one hand the “Athenians,” and on the other the “king of Sidon” and his descendants.102 Fifth- and fourth-century coinage from the “Phoenician” cities also suggests that civic identity was seen and valued rather differently there than among their Greek neighbors: unlike contemporary Greek examples, almost all these coins name the king rather than his city. - [Location 1302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1302) ### L1351 > Near Eastern sources are unhelpful here, as they do not have a concept of Phoenicia. Usually they simply identify people as belonging to one of the coastal cities, even in contexts where others are given larger regional designations: the Ahiqar, for instance, a fifth-century BCE Aramaic document from Elephantine in Egypt, contrasts the “Sidonian” who is familiar with the sea with the “Arabian” who is more comfortable inland. If a larger geographical region is identified, it is much larger than our “Phoenicia.” In addition to the broad and vague concept of “Canaan” found in the Hebrew Bible that I discussed briefly in the previous chapter, the Assyrians, whose rise to power began in the tenth century BCE, labeled the whole of the Levant “Amorite” or “Hittite” (the former a geographical term, the latter a cultural one). In the later eighth century, Sargon could call a region stretching from Cyprus to the Euphrates “the wide land of Amurru, the Hittite-land in its entirety,”6 and by the late seventh century, “Hittite” seems to have become the standard regional description for an area much larger than Phoenicia.7 It is only Greek and then Roman authors who delineate a smaller region called Phoenicia, describe as Phoenicians those who come from that area, and constitute the sole source of our own concept of the “Phoenicians.” In I need to make a chart lol - [Location 1351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1351) ### L1433 > the whole passage is indebted to euhemerism, the atheist fashion of the Hellenistic period in which supposed gods were rationalized as historical persons.29 Oh cool this phenomenon has a name - [Location 1433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1433) ### L1445 > The Phoenicians’ debut in Greek literature is in Homer’s Iliad, I could probably dp a review of this section for classical wisdom. - [Location 1445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1445) ### L1456 > At the funeral games for Patroklos in the Iliad, the first prize in the footrace is the most beautiful silver mixing bowl in the world, made by “Sidonians [Sidones], well skilled in handicrafts,” but brought across the “murky sea” by Phoenician men (phoinikes andres).35 The people making bowls on land are identified according to their city, but the people transporting and trading the same bowls are generic “Phoenicians.”36 This point is reiterated in a later scholium or marginal comment on a manuscript copy of this passage, which declares that “to a supreme degree the Phoenicians were the first to plow the seas.”37 A similar notion is found in the Odyssey; when Odysseus pretends to Athena that he is a fugitive from Crete, he tells her that he was carried to Ithaca as a paying passenger by “lordly Phoenicians” who have allegedly now returned to “well-peopled Sidonia”: here Phoenicians at sea are again associated with the city of Sidon on land. Interesting linguistic implication here, that "Phoenician" might mean "sailor from the coastal cities" or something closer to "merchant" than a political entity or ethnic group. Sort of like the East India Company or a Pinkerton. There's an argument for using the Pinkertons and EIC as a sorr of wild west / steampunk shadowrun corporate states instead of nation states worldbuilding idea. Could riff of the Minoan "guilds" for a "everything new could be old again" "retro scifi" theme thing. - [Location 1456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1456) ### L1472 > Herodotus is clearer on the geography: Phoenicia is the northern part of the seacoast of Syria, including the cities of Tyre and Sidon, with Palestine to the south separating it from Egypt.However, he never directly locates “Phoenicians” in “Phoenicia.”43 Furthermore, although their maritime and mercantile associations continue to be emphasized, Theodore Mavrogiannis has pointed out that despite more than forty references to Phoenicians, Herodotus gives “no organised description of the Phoenicians with their customs and traditions, as we have in the case of the Egyptians, Ethiopians, Persians, and Scythians.” - [Location 1472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1472) ### L1519 > why did Greek authors recognize some sailors from other Mediterranean city-states as fellow-Greeks and others as something else? One thing that would have clearly distinguished “Phoenicians” from Greeks for Greeks was their language. The role of the Greek language as a criterion for Greekness itself is disputed: Jonathan Hall has argued that despite a great deal of evidence for mutual comprehension across dialects, there is little for the “awareness of a common Hellenic language” before the fifth century, and that even then the relative linguistic homogeneity of the epigraphical evidence from the Classical period might conceal a great “diversity of oral idioms.”57 Nonetheless, it would not be necessary for a Greek to be able to understand every other form of spoken Greek to note319 that Phoenician is very different from all of them: one can imagine a Londoner baffled by a Glaswegian, but still readily able to distinguish the language being spoken from Arabic. Language did matter - [Location 1519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1519) ### L1549 > Signs of a hardening of the boundaries between Greek and Phoenician were already emerging at the end of the fifth century, when Thucydides could call the Phoenicians barbarians in the passage mentioned above. His report of the arrival of the Phoenicians in Sicily also seems to generalize contemporary frictions, in that it “implies resistance and conflict right from the start between two ethnicities, Phoenicians and Greeks, whereas in fact the initial situation in Sicily had been more fluid, reciprocal, and transitory.” Cross-ref with Tyrants of Syracuse. - [Location 1549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1549) ### L1596 > And it is easy to overemphasize the Greek, or Athenian, “invention of the barbarian” even in the fifth century, when “Hellenic” identity was already increasingly defined in terms of culture and education rather than kinship and descent, a change commented on by the fourth-century orator Isocrates when he says that Athens brought it about that “the name of ‘Hellenes’ no longer evokes a descent-group [genos] but a way of thinking [dianoia] and that people are called ‘Hellenes’ who share in our education [paideia] rather than our origin [phusis].” Interesting parallels for what it means to be "A true American" with patritoism and the GOP and WASP stuff and all. - [Location 1596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1596) ### L1634 > Even in the Roman period there was still a pretty vague idea of what, and where, Phoenicia actually was: for Strabo in the early first century CE, it was the coastal part of Coele Syria, extending from Orthosias south of the Eleutheros River all the way down to Pelusium, while for Pomponius Mela, writing just a little later in c. 45 CE, the Syrian coast is divided into Palestine, Phoenicia, and Antiochia. A decade or two later again, Pliny the Elder says that Phoenicia is an earlier name for part of what he simply calls Syria; those who insist on dividing the region further, he says, would call the middle part of the coast Phoenicia, with Syria to both the north and south; elsewhere however he traces Phoenicia from a former town called Crocodilion, south of Dor, up to Arados.84 The Latin vocabulary used in reference to the Phoenicians embodies this rather vague and even contradictory picture. Geography of Phoenicia is hard. - [Location 1634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1634) ### L1706 > the Phoenicians were not identified by their neighbors as a specific people attached to a specific place, culture, or history. The Phoenicians were first perceived as having a more distinct character in the late fifth century BCE, in the context of tensions between Carthage and Greek-speaking cities in Sicily. In the Roman period a stronger and sometimes more negative stereotype emerged, but there was still confusion over the appropriate vocabulary: phoenix, poenus, and punicus were used to designate a variety of Phoenician-speaking groups, and there was in particular a distinct tendency to use the adjective punicus in relation to North Africa as a whole, not just its Levantine inhabitants or settlements, and to the Phoenician language. - [Location 1706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1706) ### L1755 > The existence of such identities among an intellectual elite then meant that they were also available to a wider group of people at times of pressure, such as the Persian invasion of Greece or the Babylonian exile of the Israelites, as one way of dealing with a difficult situation: this is, after all, the traditional catalyst for the emergence of ethnic identity. Might be useful as a classical wisdom article - [Location 1755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1755) ### L1773 > The most vivid stories of collaboration, diplomacy, and cultural exchange in the Iron Age Levant are the tales told in the Hebrew Bible of the dealings between Tyre and the Israelite kingdoms to its south, first during the tenth century BCE, when Tyre and the United Monarchy supposedly operated a joint trading fleet and collaborated on the building of the temple in Jerusalem, and then in the ninth century when Ahab, ruler of the Northern Kingdom, married Jezebel, daughter of Ittobaal of Tyre. However unreliable the details of these stories may be, there is also epigraphic evidence for linguistic similarities throughout the Levant in this period, as well as archaeological evidence for shared architectural tastes, including a striking mutual interest in volute (so-called Aeolic) capitals. Fergus Millar has pointed out that in Jerusalem “to the very end Tyrian shekels were the standard currency in which the Temple dues were to be paid.” I read some really interesting stuff about Jezebel once that I should track down again. The experience of her going from having power as a priestess and having an important diplomatic role to the patriarchy of Israel must have been hard. - [Location 1773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1773) ### L1785 > the modern notion of a “Punic world” can obscure the extent of collaboration between different groups of migrants. - [Location 1785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1785) ### L1795 > it is well known that the “Phoenician” cities never formed a political unit and rarely even co-operated with each other. - [Location 1795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1795) ### L1848 > The “Phoenician” cities of the Levant operated largely as autonomous political units, coming together at times in larger regional groups, but only as a whole, it seems, for what may well have been a brief period in the fourth century BCE. - [Location 1848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1848) ### L1854 > Understanding the ancient world as divided into a series of “peoples,” each with what Anthony Smith called “a distinctive shared culture,” depends on an implausible idea of how culture works. It's a spectrum! Makes sense to me. Borders are an arbitrary modern construct, realistically, right? - [Location 1854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1854) ### L1870 > In principle, one could argue that ancient or “vernacular” conceptions of collective identity, whether perceived from the inside or the outside, shouldn’t matter all that much to an ancient historian. There’s no obvious reason, after all, to privilege the notions held in the worlds we study—they were conceived and used to manage living in those worlds, not to aid the interpretation of them in an exhaustive scholarly fashion. That said, there is very good reason to resist applying modern ethnic labels that carry a preexisting assumption of a communal identity before it has actually been demonstrated—especially when the material evidence also contradicts an idea of narrow and homogenous identity. - [Location 1870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1870) ### L1907 > Language is especially interesting, since it can be a powerful signifier of identity, but it does not have to be: Gaelic, for instance, has floundered in postcolonial Ireland, where the economic pressures to shift to English have had more impact than local “pride and prestige.” And in northern New Guinea, a relatively unified region in terms of social relations and material culture, more than sixty languages in several different families are spoken. - [Location 1907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1907) ### L1945 > the “relational” understanding of identity most famously articulated by Fredrik Barth can be useful. This approach focuses not so much on the experiences and characteristics that “we” share, but on the things that keep people apart, the differences between “us” and “them,” and the importance of marking boundaries between groups. This approach is based on the plausible conviction that identity of any kind, personal or corporate, needs an “other” to make any sense, and that it is contact between groups—friendly or unfriendly—that leads to the formation of self-identity within groups. - [Location 1945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1945) ### L1957 > hippies, whose distinctiveness “in terms of dress, coiffure, music, diet, vehicular transport and even to a certain extent nomenclature . . . will be archaeologically identifiable in the material record of the future” and might therefore be mistaken for an ethnic group. And Naoíse Mac Sweeney has noted that having established a case for the marking of group identity in archaeological evidence, scholars too often then simply assume that this is an ethnic identity, whereas - [Location 1957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1957) ### L1982 > The basic urban model found at Iron Age Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Arados, with upper towns and their public buildings separate from lower towns, is repeated throughout the Syro-Palestinian area, but these ports also looked rather different from each other. The visual culture of Arados, for instance, made particular use of Syrian models, and Byblos of Egyptian ones. Indeed, the most striking feature of civic art and architecture in the periods of Assyrian and Persian domination is its eclectic cosmopolitanism. - [Location 1982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=1982) ### L2002 > economic and political connectivity is often more important to the ruling class than ethnic difference. - [Location 2002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2002) ### L2065 > One way to understand cultural relations between ancient Mediterranean city-states is in terms of “peer polity interaction.” This is the idea that in an environment in which significant power differences between communities do not exist, change within them can often be explained by contact, collaboration, and competition rather than by purely internal developments or active external imposition. - [Location 2065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2065) ### L2069 > The different “Phoenician” cities worshipped different groups of deities, but in similar patterns, in which one is usually recognizable as the primary or civic deity, often accompanied by a consort: the Lady and Lord of Byblos, Melqart and Ashtart at Tyre, Ashtart and Eshmun at Sidon. - [Location 2069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2069) ### L2083 > other ritual practices now commonly considered “Phoenician,” including child sacrifice, sacred prostitution, and necromancy, are also attested over a larger region. - [Location 2083](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2083) ### L2142 > One example of this is the regularity with which military alliances were made between “Phoenician” and “foreign” cities. The ones we hear of in the sixth century tend to be joint expeditions with the local population against attempts by Greek-speakers to found colonies in the region: Pausanias tells us that around 580 BCE, “Phoenicians and Elymians” prevented Pentathlos founding a colony in western Sicily,96 and that Carthage allied with the Etruscans to defeat Greek colonists at Alalia in 535,97 as well as with the Libyans and the Macae to defeat the Spartan Dorieus’s attempt to found a colony in Tripolitania c. 515.98 According to Herodotus, Dorieus’s attempt to found another colony in western Sicily about five years later was foiled by the “Phoenicians and Segestans.”99 In the fifth century, even Greek cities joined forces with the Carthaginians against other Greeks. Herodotus reports that at Himera in 480 Carthage fought with other Phoenicians, Libyans, Iberians, Ligyes, Elisyci, Sardinians, and Cyrnians, who had all been invited by the local Greek despot to help him regain his city from Theron of Agrigentum; Diodorus claims that the Selinuntian Greeks were also allied with Carthage during this campaign.100 Thucydides tells us that during the Sicilian Expedition of 415–413, the Athenian generals sent to Carthage for aid against Syracuse, and that the Syracusans considered doing the same against Athens.101 And such notices continue in the fourth century: Diodorus says that in 397, Greeks were ready to support Motya against Dionysius I of Syracuse and that Cyrene allied with Carthage in 322.102 Less convincingly, the Roman poet Silius Italicus lists the Greek communities of Cyrene, Berenike, and Barke among Carthage’s African allies in the third-century BCE Hannibalic War.103 The accuracy of these individual notices matters less here than the overall impression we get that military alliances across what would seem to be ethnic lines were considered plausible, indeed normal.104 Cross reference with [[The Tyrants of Syracuse by Jeff Champion]]. - [Location 2142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2142) ### L2173 Phoenicians were culturally open > As in the Levant, openness to external models and cultural ideologies was in itself a distinguishing feature of western Phoenician-speaking settlements. Honestly they sound very cosmopolitan and awesome. - [Location 2173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2173) ### L2179 > the study of animal bones shows that the consumption of pork increased dramatically from the fifth to second centuries, although we are told by ancient authors that contact with pigs was forbidden by Phoenician tradition. I love it when archaeological record proves authors wrong - Used for [[dietary practices are more cultural than logical]] - [Location 2179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2179) ### L2195 > In 396, in one famous example, Carthage established an official state sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, staffed by members of the city’s Greek community, in an attempt to appease these gods after the Carthaginian general Himilco and his army pillaged their shrine in Syracuse. This shows that there was no prohibition on establishing foreign religious shrines, although as Corinne Bonnet has underlined, it is not in itself an instance of cultural “Hellenization,” but the appropriate solution to a specific problem the Carthaginians faced at the time. That does not, however, explain the considerable number of informal, rural sanctuaries in North Africa and on the Mediterranean islands that adapted the imagery associated with the worship of Demeter and Kore in Greek contexts, and perhaps even adopted those goddesses themselves—no names have been found—for their own local purposes. - [Location 2195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2195) ### L2232 > To the extent that such choices reflect identity at all, it is—again—the identity of civic elites as part of a wider Mediterranean aristocracy. It's more than a little agitating how long it seems to have taken scholars to figure out that their evidence isn't about a whole culture but rather a subset. It's like trying to understand America using only cell phone records from 1995. - [Location 2232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2232) ### L2269 > This maps onto a change in the nature of Carthaginian imperialism, especially in Sicily. C. R. Whittaker argued in a classic article published in 1978 that until the fourth or even third century BCE, Carthage’s expansionary strategies primarily involved the control of ports of trade rather than “direct territorial conquest and annexation, a system of provincial administration, the levying of tribute, a method of exploiting land, unequal alliances and . . . trade monopolies and controls.”142 Scholars now quibble about some of the details, but no one has succeeded in disproving Whittaker’s basic hypothesis for the sixth and most of the fifth centuries. #pkm/synthesize with [[The Tyrants of Syracuse by Jeff Champion]] - [Location 2269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2269) ### L2288 > While the precise arrangements on the island changed often over the fourth century, Carthaginian hegemony in the west of the island was regularly recognized by treaty. I'm getting the sense that Carthage had a relationship with Tyre that is kind of similar to that of America & Britain. - [Location 2288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2288) ### L2292 > There are also indications that Carthage maintained relatively strong control over Sardinia in the fourth century,150 held a significant territory and a significant number of the coastal cities in North Africa,151 and had extensive interests in Spain as well.152 By the third century, we have no real reason to doubt the substance of Rome’s claim, as reported by Polybius, that just before the First Punic War started in 264 BCE, “Carthaginian aggrandisement was not confined to Libya, but had embraced many districts in Iberia as well; and that Carthage was, besides, mistress of all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian seas [and] lords of nearly the whole of the rest of Sicily.” Carthaginian imperialism begins. - [Location 2292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2292) ### L2309 > These coins put the phoinix into purses throughout the area that Carthage controlled, a good choice for a burgeoning imperial power looking to draw together a broad group of its own subjects around an idea bigger than the imperial city itself: the bronze type with a horse standing before a palm tree, produced from around 300  BCE, outnumbered all other coin types in western Sicily in the third century (fig. 4.8).157 Just as Carthage borrowed Greek technology for this coinage, and without a preexisting corporate identity in their own language to exploit, they also borrowed a Greek label to construct a new corporate identity that emphasized links between their Phoenician-speaking subjects, whatever their origins may really have been. Imperial identity making is an interesting deliberate process. - [Location 2309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2309) ### L2318 > This appeal to common Phoenician identity made by a rising imperial power in and about its new domains is a striking example of the way that identity claims, and in particular ethnic identity claims, can be a tool of control rather than self-empowerment. Creating new identities, emphasizing existing ones, or adopting them from external sources has always been a useful way for political leaders to define and, where necessary, motivate their subjects, whether or not they subscribe to them themselves: the classic example from the ancient world is of course Alexander the Great’s appeal to Panhellenic sentiment in his crusade against Persia, despite the weakness of his own claims to Hellenic identity. - [Location 2318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2318) ## child sacrifice in the Punic world ### L2358 > The phenomenon of child sacrifice at Carthage and its neighboring colonial settlements has generated much scholarly discussion, but that has largely focused on the nature of the rituals, and in particular on whether the infants were actually killed or had already died of natural causes. By contrast, what I want to investigate here is what the cult can tell us about the construction of colonial communities. - [Location 2358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2358) ### L2419 > Child sacrifice, or at least its monumental commemoration, was not characteristic of the “Phoenician” diaspora as a whole, nor was it a marker of Phoenician or Punic identity. The group of central Mediterranean settlements with tophets constituted only a small subset of the wider Levantine diaspora in the west. The relative scarcity of this cult means that the users of the tophets must have formed a self-conscious group: this was a rare and highly distinctive ritual choice, and we see evidence for the same basic practices at all the surviving sites, practices that identified the worshippers with each other in a way that also served to differentiate them from their neighbors—including other Levantine migrants in the western Mediterranean. - [Location 2419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2419) ### L2453 > Rufus in the first century CE describes an intriguing attempt during Alexander’s siege of Tyre in 332 BCE to revive the custom of sacrificing a free-born boy to “Saturn.” This evidence problematizes attempts to explain the function of child sacrifice purely in terms of the western colonial context, in relation, for instance, to the demographic requirements of a new settlement. - [Location 2453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2453) ### L2458 > it was only in the colonial world that the practice became fully institutionalized and ritualized with special sanctuaries. - [Location 2458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2458) ### L2500 > Although Greek literary sources tended to report the custom relatively neutrally, foreign politicians picked the custom out for particular disapproval: Justin records an edict of the Persian king Darius c. 491 BCE that banned the Carthaginians from sacrificing humans and eating dog meat; Plutarch tells us that Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse who defeated the Carthaginians in 480 at Himera, inserted a clause in the peace treaty that the Carthaginians should stop sacrificing their children; and Porphyry has one Iphikrates forbidding human sacrifice to the Carthaginians at an unknown date.44 The reliability of these specific reports is less important than their plausibility to their readers. In this context, it is particularly striking that a study of an admittedly rather small sample of 130 urns from the Carthage tophet has suggested that child sacrifice became more rather than less popular at Carthage as the city increasingly came into conflict with Greek-speaking states of Sicily: the proportion of urns containing human bones to those with only animal remains increased from 70 percent in the seventh to sixth centuries to 90 percent in the fourth.45 If this finding is reliable, the tophet was not only something that made the Carthaginians and their allies different in their enemies’ eyes, and often wrong, but it seems that the Carthaginians may have embraced that. - [Location 2500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2500) ### L2535 > This practice may well have been unusual in the east as well the west. Discussions in the Hebrew Bible claim that it aroused anger and disgust among some at least of the Israelites, and that it was banned in Jerusalem by King Josiah in the late seventh century;51 it seems reasonable to suppose that it might also have been controversial among the Israelites’ northern neighbors on the Levantine coast. There is no more evidence for the practice in the east after the sixth century, and it is described as something that used to happen in Phoenicia in the past by Philo of Byblos, or his Hellenistic sources.52 According to Curtius Rufus, the attempt at Tyre in 332 BCE to revive the tradition was successfully opposed by the city elders, suggesting that there were reservations about the custom there by that date: one wonders about the circumstances in which it had originally died out—or was, as in Jerusalem, banned. It seems a plausible hypothesis, then, that the western settlers who practiced this particular and unusual form of cult came not from a different place or political faction in the homeland from other Levantine migrants, but from a different religious tradition, and so had a preexisting connection with each other that led them to settle in close proximity in the west. Perhaps the central Mediterranean settlers even left, at least in part, because of local disapproval of their religious customs. We have no evidence that Carthage was an official colony of Tyre, and the foundation myth preserved by Roman authors, which I will argue in the next chapter has a core going back to Carthaginian sources, suggests quite the opposite: the story involves personal betrayal, religious irregularity, and finally the flight from Tyre of refugees under the command of Princess Elissa.53 Like the exodus of the Puritans to the New World, the formation of the “circle of the tophet” could have been a reaction both to new opportunities in the west and new religious restrictions in the east.54 Informal or even involuntary migration would make sense of these migrants’ ambivalent treatment of Levantine traditions. The analogy to puritans was my first thought as well. Funny how we see history though the lens of what we're sure of. - [Location 2535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2535) ## Other Stuff ### L2557 > This notion of a trading network of religious extremists may seem counterintuitive, but social and religious connections are standard facilitators of commercial trust and cooperation, and there would be interesting parallels with later and better-documented groups with both religious and commercial interconnections. The M’zabites are a case in point. This isolated group of Ibadite Muslims have traded since the Middle Ages from the M’zab valley in Algeria, 350 miles south of Algiers, and today still run a widespread network of small shops throughout the Maghreb as well as in France.56 Religion is literally at the center of the seven towns that make up the M’zabite community, of which the best known is Ghardaia. They are all constructed around a hilltop mosque, with the houses arranged around it in concentric circles or semicircles, although the roads converge on the market outside the ramparts. The ten thousand or so inhabitants of the valley are famous for their deeply conservative religious practices, This reminds me of Jewish traders in north Africa as well. - [Location 2557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2557) ### L2567 > M’zabite men are traditionally expected to travel outside the valley for years at a time to serve the commercial interests of their families and wider communities. The economic dynamism and success of the cities has always been based in great part on their religious principles, including sobriety and a strong work ethic, as well as their close links of kinship and religious practice. Similar to Mormons? - [Location 2567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2567) ### L2583 > the evidence from the tophets themselves suggests that these ritual communities developed and worked together as peers rather than operating under Carthaginian control. - [Location 2583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2583) ### L2659 > Concepts from social network theory can be helpful here. The normal experience in networks of all kinds, from friendship circles to the Internet, is that in choosing which connections to make, “nodes” (in this case the people attached to the individual sanctuaries or settlements) prefer to link with other nodes that already have a lot of links, which would explain the significant role played by Carthage as a visual model without requiring either imperial imposition or craven imitation. At the same time, the varied and cross-cutting visual identifications within the circle of the tophet suggest a continuing proliferation of what social network theorists call “weak links” within and across the group as a whole, adding up to a coherent, dynamic, and noncentralized system, or “small world.” In this system, peer polity interaction and competition, as well as sociocultural links, prove stronger than imperialism or political relationships. - [Location 2659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2659) ### L2757 > We have seen here that tophet sanctuaries are not a “Phoenician” or even “Punic” phenomenon. Instead, ritualized child sacrifice and tophet cult was a geographically and culturally restricted phenomenon, practiced among a small group of Phoenician-speaking migrant communities in the central Mediterranean, a community based on a potent combination of commerce and religion that marked itself off from other Levantine settlers in the west, as well as from the homeland in the east. The cultural identifications marked visually between the sanctuaries, and their cities, reached their height in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, not as a series of cultural alliances with Carthage, but as an interconnected crisscrossing network of sites in which the different sanctuaries could also underline their difference and distance from each other in their visual cultures—distances that then increased with increasing Carthaginian power. By this time, however, a bigger religious network of larger Mediterranean centers had eclipsed the collective identification with the circle of the tophet, and it too was closely associated with Carthaginian imperialism. Useful for an article comparing Aztec sacrifice with Punic sacrifice. Also the [[suttee]] article. - [Location 2757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2757) ### L2773 > Melqart’s temple cult, unlike that of Baal Hammon, created a broad and open network that linked its adherents not only to each other, but also to other migrants as well as local populations across the Mediterranean. I will also suggest that this was a relatively new phenomenon in the fourth century BCE, knitting together what had until then been rather separate western regions, and perhaps even connecting Tyre’s central Mediterranean “colonies” to their mother city for the first time. Religion as federal government idea. - [Location 2773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2773) ## Founding of Carthage ### L2814 > it was common for Greek colonies to depict founders on their coinage, “which makes it perfectly possible and plausible for the same usage to be envisaged in the case of the Carthaginian coins in question.” - [Location 2814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2814) ### L2830 > These foundation legends connect Tyre and Carthage from at least the fourth century, even if Melqart himself appears in the story only in Justin’s late account, and in a minor role: Dido’s husband Acherbas was the high priest of Melqart, and after his death, Dido fled Tyre with the god’s sacra, the symbols or objects associated with his cult. It is impossible to say for certain whether this element of the story also goes back to the original version, but it does seem to involve local knowledge—the best candidates for these mysterious sacra are the dual pillars and perhaps also the olive that famously adorned Melqart’s sanctuaries at both Tyre and Gadir. - [Location 2830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2830) ### L2848 > Tyre was supposed to have founded abroad, The sense I'm getting here is that Elissa fled her shitty brother, but took rhe symbols of the fod her husband was high priest for, and Carthage viewed itself as very much part of the Tyrian tradition in the sense that the "city god" was the same god, which was fairly unusual for Phoenician cities at least in earlier periods because Phoenician cities tended to have their own city god and unique Identity. I imagine that Elissa taking the sacred symbols plays a large role in this, but without knowing more about what was normal for colonies it's hard to say more. - [Location 2848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2848) ### L2852 > according to Strabo, the Gaditani said that the Tyrians founded their city on the orders of an oracle from Herakles, but Posidonius dismissed this as a “Phoenician lie,” suggesting that both Posidonius in the early first century BCE and Strabo a couple of generations later considered this story to come from local sources. I'll totally believe than an oracle, in the position of trying to keep the peace in her city, suggested that it might be a good idea for a colony expedition to get formed, so troublemakers could have somewhere to go without totally wrecking the relationship... In much the same way that an advice columnist might suggest moving out of your parent's house in order to preserve a relationship with your parents. - [Location 2852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2852) ### L2865 > A new reading of a colonial foundation discussed in Justin’s epitome of Trogus now reveals the extent to which these mutual identifications with Melqart and Tyre created a web of relationships between these powerful western Levantine settlements, as well as a set of mutual identifications and obligations. In a passage recounting the succession of imperial powers in Spain, Justin explains how the foundation of a colony led to the imposition of Carthaginian rule on local kingdoms: - [Location 2865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2865) ## Not Founding of Carthage ### L2887 > Carteia, on the Spanish coast, near the Rock of Gibraltar, which can be dated archaeologically to the mid-fourth century. This is a period when Gadir was increasingly active within Iberia, and when Carthaginian imperial intervention in Spain is realistic. It - [Location 2887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2887) ### L2894 > this reinterpretation of Justin’s anecdote tells us a great deal about the functions of the Melqart cult. For one thing, it creates further vertical sets of ties between Tyre, its colonies, and those colonies’ own colonies: according to Justin, the Tyrians allow the Gaditani to take sacred objects (again, sacra) from the metropolitan sanctuary of Melqart for the foundation of their new colony, just as—in his story of Elissa—he claims had happened more informally in the case of Carthage. For another, it creates a new set of horizontal connections: the relationships that Gadir and Carthage both have with Tyre create a bond between them, which was conceptualized at least by Trogus as based on blood. This bond obliged Carthage to send military support to Gadir, just as the Tyrians expected Carthaginian help in 332 BCE. The notion of kinship between these cities is also known to Silius Italicus in the first century CE, who calls the Carthaginians “Tyrians” and describes Gadir as “cognate” with them.33 And in his account of the foundation of Carthage, Justin brings Utica into this network as well, saying that when Carthage was founded, ambassadors arrived from Utica to bring gifts to their kinsmen (consanguinei) and encourage them to found a city.34 Álvarez Martí-Aguilar describes this community as “a network of cities whose inhabitants recognised Tyre as their motherland and the source of the political and religious legitimacy of their own communities, tied together by kinship through the figure of Melqart . . . a kinship that implies inherent obligations of help and support.” - [Location 2894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2894) ### L2907 > Carthage, Gadir, Utica, Lixus, and another city that I shall call here for the sake of simplicity Carteia all then shared an interest in Tyre and its principal god, expressed in terms of kinship. They also shared a related group of foundation stories—the only foundation legends attached to Phoenician-speaking settlements, in contrast to standard Greek practice—all of which directly involve Tyrians, one way or another; in the cases of Gadir, Carteia, and Carthage, they also record the transfer of cult objects from the Tyrian temple of Melqart. For Gadir and Lixus, these accounts claim that a temple of Melqart was established in the new settlement, and for Gadir and Carteia, they involve an oracle from Melqart, which in itself recalls the strange story found in the late antique author Nonnus of the foundation of Tyre itself on two wandering “ambrosial” rocks on the instructions of the same god.36 These myths align these cities with each other.37 Melqart’s cultic network, however, spread well beyond the self-proclaimed ancient colonies of Tyre. The best evidence for this is from Sardinia, where an inscription found at Tharros, dated from the third- to second-century BCE, records the construction of a temple, described in some detail, and dedicates it “to the lord, to the holy god Melqart on [or “over” or “above”] the rock . . .”. This is a reference to the rock on which the city of Tyre was built, and that gave the city its name. Lots to unpack here, but it might be worth asking for a chart of the cities heh. - [Location 2907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2907) ### L2919 > The words “to the lord, to Melqart on the rock [ʿL HṢR],” also appear on two other fourth- or third-century inscriptions from Sardinia, a stone column found at Karales, and a bronze plaquette commemorating building activity at the great sanctuary of Sardos at Antas, as well as on a third-century statue base from Ibiza.39 The phrase emphasizes the connection between the god and his city, and therefore a connection through the god to Tyre,… This jives with my understanding of what would make sense. I can imagine it being rather similar to "Christendom" actually. - [Location 2919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2919) ### L2939 > But Melqart did not simply bind Levantine migrants to each other: his cult also tied them to Greek colonial populations and traditions, and in particular to the Greek god Herakles. Religion and ethnicity and origin do not have a simple 1:1 relationship, which makes sense if you for example consider the Methodist relationship with the African churches, or Ethiopian Christianity. - [Location 2939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2939) ### L2950 > it must have been particularly easy to make a connection between Melqart and Herakles. As Richard Miles has pointed out, they were both figures who straddle the divide between god and human: “Herakles, the son of Zeus and a human mother, had to earn the right to become a god himself through his heroic feats; Melqart, although a god, was also the first mythical king of Tyre and ancestor of its royal lineage.”51 Both were said to have been reborn through fire.52 And both were closely associated with colonization: as we have seen, Melqart is at the heart of several of the Phoenician foundation stories preserved in Greco-Latin texts—these are in fact the only myths associated with him—while Herakles prepares the way for Greek settlement by conquering large territories and founding the dynasties that found colonies, guaranteeing in both cases the new arrivals’ right to the land they seize.53 Indeed, it seems that the relationship between these two figures in the Greek imagination might have evolved in relation to the geography of migration west: Colette Jourdain-Annequin has argued very plausibly that some of Greek Herakles’s exploits, in particular stealing the cattle of Geryon and the apples from the Gardens of the Hesperides, acquired a more specific geography for Archaic and Classical Greek authors from centers of Melqart worship—Geryon was localized at Gadir, for instance, and the Gardens of the Hesperides at Lixus.54 Irad Malkin suggests furthermore that the particular association of Melqart with Tyrian colonies such as Carthage and Gadir “probably heightened Greek awareness of Herakles, whom they identified with Melqart, as a hero associated with, or even justifying, colonisation.” This is an interpretation that is totally new to me. It's a rabbit hole for sure, but interesting enough that I should follow up on it sometime. Maybe for Classical Wisdom? - [Location 2950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=2950) ### L3032 > in particular, depictions of Herakles and his attributes became very popular on coinage throughout the Phoenician-speaking regions of Iberia and North Africa, minted at real or supposed Levantine settlements, but also considerably beyond. It sort of reminds me of the "In god we trust" -- while it cant be taken literally because certainly not every American is deeply religious, it does say something meaningful about American culture, which is undeniably Protestant at its core. - [Location 3032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3032) ### L3045 > unlike Baal Hammon, Melqart was an easily translatable god, and he could also make connections with local precolonial populations, who on occasion adopted him as part of their own stories. Similiar to the spread of Christianity once proselytizing picked up. - [Location 3045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3045) ### L3075 > The way that both Greek and Phoenician-speaking migrants as well as local populations in the western Mediterranean could construct settlement myths involving the same legendary figure underlines again the extent to which migration created a common Mediterranean world. - [Location 3075](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3075) ### L3143 > my argument here is that there is reasonable grounds to suspect that the articulated “network of Melqart” described in this chapter, interrelated by colonization, kinship, and myth, was a later development, and one that should be associated with political shifts at Carthage. A fourth-century date for its emergence would map neatly onto to the growth of Carthaginian power across the western Mediterranean, in particular over the other western Levantine settlements involved, and the central position of Carthage within this network is striking. They make treaties with third parties on behalf of the other cities while picking and choosing between their own obligations to them: unavailable to aid Tyre under siege, for instance, they do manage to send help to Gadir—perhaps unasked, and, it seems, to their own much greater benefit. - [Location 3143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3143) ### L3240 > the maintenance of local differences is, after all, a traditional tool of imperial hegemony—but Wait really? What? - [Location 3240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3240) ### L3378 > also the Tyrian dog who bit a murex shell and thereby discovered the secret of the famous murex dye. Origin myth for tyrian purple dye, #pkm/synthesize [[dyes]]. Also related to the types of myths article, [[Article & Blog Idea]] to do something on obscure myths, maybe riff off the German guy too. - [Location 3378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3378) ### L3466 > his elevation to the purple, This reminds me of the "of the green" in the Michelle Sagara West books. - [Location 3466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3466) ### L3475 > More subtly, Cassius Dio, another contemporary, says that Elagabalus secretly slaughtered young boys to offer them to his god. useful for the suttee and sacral kingship thing: I think he was a ,Roman. Follow up! - [Location 3475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3475) ### L3478 > Fergus Millar has emphasized the “indiscriminately Oriental” associations made in Herodian and Dio’s contemporary reports of Elagabalus’s public behavior, with Herodian himself remarking that Elagabalus’s clothing was a cross between the garb of Phoenician priests and the luxurious clothing of the Medes, and Dio reporting that the young emperor acquired the nickname “the Assyrian.” - [Location 3478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3478) ### L3498 > and the mythical bird, as well as the flamingo wait the flamingo is from the Levant? - [Location 3498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3498) ### L3689 > As with Carthage, the civic gods of Lepcis were not well known in the Levant.30 There are only a couple of mentions of Shadrapa in the eastern Mediterranean, probably from the Persian period, while he is found in the west at Carthage, Sicily, and Sardinia. Milkashtart is not attested in the Levant between thirteenth century Ugarit and the Hellenistic-period temple at Umm el-‘Amed, though there are mentions of him in fourth-century Malta, third-century Carthage, and second-century Gadir. - [Location 3689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3689) ### L3694 > Furthermore, while the dual pantheon reproduced on the coinage of Lepcis fits in with the custom in most of the Phoenician-speaking coastal cities of establishing pairs of leading civic deities, this male couple might have looked a little strange in the homeland. And much more than in the case of Carthage, the colonial status of the city seems to have been celebrated more in discourse than practice. There is no evidence in our sources for sending tithes or booty home, for instance, or any other political connections between Lepcis and Tyre before the exchange of dedications with which this chapter began. - [Location 3694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3694) ### L3730 > If there is something more surprising, more disruptive of commonplace assumptions, than the practice of child sacrifice itself, it is the fact that it continued under Roman occupation. Several ! - Useful for [[child sacrifice in the Punic world]] - [Location 3730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3730) ### L3743 > although it might be tempting to associate the phenomenon with refugees from the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE, or hinterland communities who had previously used the tophet at Carthage itself, the new sanctuaries almost always date from at least a generation later, - [Location 3743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3743) ### L3746 > as Matthew McCarty has argued, the rites conducted in these new sanctuaries did not simply imitate or idealize earlier practices.45 Offerings of infants, for instance, seem to have been relatively rare in the Roman period. Although the Christian bishop Tertullian reports that children were still sacrificed in areas of Africa in the late second century CE,46 positive evidence has been found so far at only three of the new sites. - [Location 3746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3746) ### L3757 > There is evidence for change in other respects as well. One striking example is that whereas before the destruction of Carthage offerings had always been by individuals, Punic inscriptions on markers of the first century BCE and CE throughout central Tunisia record that whole groups of citizens (baalim) made communal dedications at the sanctuaries. - [Location 3757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3757) ### L3799 > The first claim that child sacrifice was banned in Africa is made by Tertullian in the late second century CE, and he seems to be referring to a specific incident in a specific place, in which some priests were crucified on trees at the behest of the local Roman proconsul. - useful for [[child sacrifice in the Punic world]] - [Location 3799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3799) ### L3808 judges in > Civic leaders known in Punic as shofetim (ŠPTM), meaning “judges,” and transcribed into Latin as sufetes, are attested in a number of Levantine city-states in the eastern and western Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE. > they continued to be appointed in the Levantine settlements long after the Roman conquest of the territories concerned: > the evidence for African sufetes outside Carthage almost all dates from after 146 BCE, with the only possible exception a bilingual Punic/Libyan inscription erected in the city of Thugga in 139 BCE, which refers to the last Numidian king, > while it is entirely possible that the origins of the African sufetate lie in Carthaginian imperial policy, it seems most judicious to adopt the working hypothesis that sufetes became more popular after the fall of Carthage and may not even have existed outside western Levantine colonies at all before that period. > The basic pattern seems to have been to appoint pairs of sufetes, imitating the arrangements at Carthage. But three sufetes appear at Althiburos in texts of the first century CE; at Mactar three sufetes also appear, but one is labeled the rab ha-shofetim, the “chief of the judges”; and a sufes maior or “senior judge” is recorded in Latin inscriptions at Thugga and Chul. In all these cases, we may be looking at the adaptation or relabeling of earlier local magistracies, or these may be entirely new developments. Either way, the choice made by these particular communities was to adopt the Punic name of an institution rather than the institution itself. - useful support [[Unusual Governments To Take Inspiration From]] & [[Female Judges as Rulers]] - #pkm/synthesize to atomize this into a note about Levantine judges and judges as civic leaders. - Used for [https://twitter.com/EleanorKonik/status/1445507109110439949] - [Location 3836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3836) ### L3911 > new evidence from statistical analyses of modern “Berber” languages used in the Maghreb suggests that they rarely relate to the dialects of these early inscriptions, but almost all descend from another ancestor language closely related to Tuareg, which only split around about the fifth century CE. This implies that a new Libyan-speaking population arrived around that time, probably from the Sahara, and revived a language that had already died out in the region. - [Location 3911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3911) ### L3917 > These different languages tended in fact to be used for different purposes in Africa: euergetistic benefactions were made in Latin from an early date; Punic was used for votive dedications and tombs; Libyan for tombs and royal monuments. And it is striking that while individual dedications in the tophet sanctuaries in central Tunisia were made variously in Punic, Greek, and Latin, the communal offerings and dedications by groups of citizens mentioned above, which were made for the first time in this period, were always in Punic. As at Lepcis, one thing Punic easily represented was a civic identity. This reminds me of how monuments in America are often engraved with Latin phrases, and some Orthodox ceremonies are conducted in Greek or Russian. - [Location 3917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=3917) ### L4051 > the language of the “nation” itself, as well as the idea of national character and of personal attachments to particular nations, goes back to medieval times in Europe. In the early modern period, an evolving sense of European “nations” as natural communities with a right to some level of self-government developed alongside widening horizons of power and culture, encompassing the rise of vernacular languages at the expense of Latin and the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, both of which allowed much swifter communication of information and ideas to a much larger group of people, as well as the sixteenth-century break with Rome as the ultimate political as well as religious power. This was the period in which kings began gradually to make states out of their subjects, eliminating the influence of the church above them and of the aristocracy below them, a process that culminated in the standing armies and state taxation of the seventeenth century. Supposedly preexisting “nations” were of course attractive to these new rulers, giving their nascent states history, legitimacy, and a ready-made territory. - [Location 4051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0746TLVNS&location=4051)