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The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean
The Phoenicians created the Mediterranean world as we know it-yet they remain a shadowy and poorly understood group. The academic study of the Phoenicians has come to an important crossroads; the field has grown in sheer content, sophistication of analysis, and diversity of interpretation, and we now need a current overview of where the study of these ancient seafarers and craftsman stands and where it is going. Moreover, the field of Phoenician studies is particularly fragmented and scattered. While there is growing interest in all things Phoenician and Punic, the latest advances are mostly published in specialized journals and conference volumes in a plethora of languages. This Handbook is the first of its type to appear in over two decades, and the first ever to appear in English. In these chapters, written by a wide range of prominent and promising scholars from across Europe, North America, Australia, and the Mediterranean world, readers will find summary studies on key historical moments (such as the history of Carthage), areas of culture (organized around language, religion, and material culture), regional studies and areas of contact (spanning from the Levant and the Aegean to Iberia and North Africa), and the reception of the Phoenicians as an idea, entangled with the formation of other cultural identities, both ancient and modern.
786 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 29, 2019
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September 11, 2024
48 chapters by 48 contributors, which is a lot even for this genre of semi-comprehensive survey of a field. This large number of contributors isn't because so many people are working specifically on Phoenicians—quite the contrary: it's precisely because there are so few dedicated "punicologists" that the editors had to gather this motley crew of academics whose fields overlap with only a small part of Phoenician studies to contribute what they can.
The advantage of this is that the conversation isn't dominated by a handful of big names, living or recently dead, the way e.g. Assyriology and Egyptology often can be, to the detriment of alternative voices; the obvious downside is that there is no shared body of expertise to draw on to the point that most of the contributors don't even have any experience with Phoenician as a language (and a good number of them don't even seem to speak Greek!). This leads to one or two embarrassing errors (e.g. the claim at one point that the attested name knrsn bn bʿlšlk is evidence of Hellenic influence on Phoenician/Punic names, because knrsn is a form of the Greek name Kinyras, the father of Adonis; Adonis, of course, was originally a Phoenician god (ʾdn 'lord'), and Κινύρας is from an unattested Phoenician word equivalent to Hebrew כִּנּוֹר kinnôr 'cither' and not a Greek name at all), but mostly manifests itself in ḥ, ṭ, and ṣ being rendered as h, t, and s as if they're the same thing—I got very excited about a Byblian king named Yehimilk until I realised it's actually yḥmlk. (Not that the OUP can handle the actual letters anyway; on the occasions the authors get them right they're in an obvious fallback font.)
And you actually still sometimes get doyen-like tendentiousness, because often nobody feels qualified to contest anyone else's claims: e.g. the idea that Carthage adopted the cult of Kore (that is, Persephone) after a plague and a rebellion in 396 BCE seems to be based entirely on one grave inscription that starts qbr ḥnbʾl hkhnt škrwʾ 'grave of Hannibal, the priestess of krwʾ', in which krwʾ was suggested by J.G. Février in 1956 to reflect Greek *Κόρϝᾱ, on the basis that he asked some unnamed héllenistes he knew and they allowed that it was possible (emphasis his) the Doric of Syracuse still had a digamma at the time. Février was appropriately hesitant about this idea, but nobody else knew enough to confirm or refute the matter and it just became communis opinio by default, shaping our understanding of hellenisation in Carthage ever since.
All of that reflects the state of the field, however, and not the state of this book specifically, which covers all of the ground you could reasonably expect it to cover in as much detail as you'd want in this type of work. If you want to get serious about Phoenician studies, though, you're going to have to learn Hebrew.
The advantage of this is that the conversation isn't dominated by a handful of big names, living or recently dead, the way e.g. Assyriology and Egyptology often can be, to the detriment of alternative voices; the obvious downside is that there is no shared body of expertise to draw on to the point that most of the contributors don't even have any experience with Phoenician as a language (and a good number of them don't even seem to speak Greek!). This leads to one or two embarrassing errors (e.g. the claim at one point that the attested name knrsn bn bʿlšlk is evidence of Hellenic influence on Phoenician/Punic names, because knrsn is a form of the Greek name Kinyras, the father of Adonis; Adonis, of course, was originally a Phoenician god (ʾdn 'lord'), and Κινύρας is from an unattested Phoenician word equivalent to Hebrew כִּנּוֹר kinnôr 'cither' and not a Greek name at all), but mostly manifests itself in ḥ, ṭ, and ṣ being rendered as h, t, and s as if they're the same thing—I got very excited about a Byblian king named Yehimilk until I realised it's actually yḥmlk. (Not that the OUP can handle the actual letters anyway; on the occasions the authors get them right they're in an obvious fallback font.)
And you actually still sometimes get doyen-like tendentiousness, because often nobody feels qualified to contest anyone else's claims: e.g. the idea that Carthage adopted the cult of Kore (that is, Persephone) after a plague and a rebellion in 396 BCE seems to be based entirely on one grave inscription that starts qbr ḥnbʾl hkhnt škrwʾ 'grave of Hannibal, the priestess of krwʾ', in which krwʾ was suggested by J.G. Février in 1956 to reflect Greek *Κόρϝᾱ, on the basis that he asked some unnamed héllenistes he knew and they allowed that it was possible (emphasis his) the Doric of Syracuse still had a digamma at the time. Février was appropriately hesitant about this idea, but nobody else knew enough to confirm or refute the matter and it just became communis opinio by default, shaping our understanding of hellenisation in Carthage ever since.
All of that reflects the state of the field, however, and not the state of this book specifically, which covers all of the ground you could reasonably expect it to cover in as much detail as you'd want in this type of work. If you want to get serious about Phoenician studies, though, you're going to have to learn Hebrew.
Displaying 1 of 1 review