Who were the ancient Phoenicians, and did they actually exist? The
Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and
Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of
navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long
remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the
startling claim that the "Phoenicians" never actually existed.
Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental
book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people
with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern
nationalist ideologies--and a notion very much at odds with the
ancient sources. Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this
historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and
communities these people really constructed for themselves in the
ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on
cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices. She traces
how the idea of "being Phoenician" first emerged in support of the
imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized
as a component of modern national identities in contexts as
far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon. In Search of the Phoenicians
delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and
artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the
Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the
Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly
achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays,
painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in
nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to
twenty-first century Tunisia.
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