David Schloen | In the Wake of the Phoenicians: Makers of the Mediterranean

hello thank you for joining us i'm chris woods director of the oriental institute i'd like to welcome you to this our first online members lecture of the new academic year as we adjust to the ongoing reality of working remotely and social distancing the oi is continuing to produce stimulating content for you through our youtube channel i'd like to extend special thanks to our members without whose support this program would not be possible and for those of you who are not members we certainly hope that you will consider supporting us it's my privilege to introduce our speaker my colleague and friend david shlone a professor in the oriental institute and the department of near eastern languages and civilizations here at the university of chicago where he is also an associated faculty member of the divinity school david specializes in the archaeology and history of the levant and the bronze and iron ages so roughly 3 500 to 300 bce his archaeological field work began at astagon in israel where he served as associate director and co-edited the series of excavation reports he also conducted excavations at yakush a village of the early bronze age on the northern jordan river in israel and at ala near antakya in turkey a prominent city of the middle and late bronze ages and he has ongoing excavation projects at sama in turkey and at the canaanite venetian site of tel kaisan near haifa in israel david's aim is to synthesize archaeological and textual evidence to understand the early cities and kingdoms of the eastern mediterranean and how they were organized socially and economically much of his research and teaching is concerned with canaanite phoenician and israelite culture and the structural transformations of the first millennium bce which brought fundamental changes in society and economy in the period before the classical greek and roman empires david is interested in the interaction between the mundane social practices and the shared metaphors and narratives that sustained and were sustained by those practices the need to examine the philosophical assumptions that underlie archaeological interpretations and the failure by many archaeologists to understand the important differences among competing theoretical paradigms have provoked a book he is currently writing understanding ancient societies five paradigms of social thought and their impacts in archaeology and ancient history and david has another book in progress the bible and archaeology which explores the front relationship between archaeological research and biblical interpretation in light of the most recent work in both fields with particular attention to the historical reality or not of the characters and events portrayed in biblical narratives today david will be speaking about his recent research in his presentation in the wake of the phoenicians makers of the mediterranean we certainly hope that you will enjoy this online o-i members lecture this talk uh was prepared for the members and supporters of the university's oriental institute and for anyone else who might be interested normally we would be together in breasted hall in the oi instead of putting this video online so to those of you who know me i want to say hello from cyberspace and to tell you that i do look forward to seeing you again in person at some point in the future i wish we could discuss the material that i will present in person but for now i'm glad to have this opportunity to tell you about an area of research i've been working on in recent years and to let you know about an exciting new opportunity for field work and exploration that we will pursue when the pandemic is over my current research focus is the culture and society of the phoenicians this is an ancient group of people who are known to us indirectly from the bible and from classical greek sources ironically even though the phoenicians perfected the alphabet and quite literally taught the israelites and the greeks how to read and write very few of their own writings have been preserved because they were not inscribed on clay tablets but on perishable organic materials like papyrus that have long since disintegrated in the humid climate of the phoenician cities with no chance of preservation as in the dry desert climate of egypt and with no one to copy and recopy the phoenicians vast literary output in subsequent centuries as was the case with the ancient hebrew and greek writings that we have at our disposal today so despite the enormous cultural impact of the phoenicians in their own time most of what we know about them is inferred from the gravitational pull they exerted on their mediterranean neighbors and is from the perspective of their rivals especially the israelites and the greeks who perhaps did not understand them fully and who were often actively hostile to them but we do know enough from greek and hebrew sources to say that the phoenicians were famous as seafaring merchants who accumulated great wealth and archaeological excavations have shown that they were intrepid explorers who left their homeland in what is today lebanon and northern israel and sailed throughout the mediterranean establishing colonies in cyprus sicily sardinia north africa and spain in the green areas shown on the map in this slide we now know that the phoenician colonies in the western mediterranean predated and set the pattern for the much later greek colonization efforts in the top left of this slide you can see an ancient sculpture depicting an iron age phoenician sailing vessel and in the bottom left there is a photo of a modern replica of a phoenician ship which sailed last year from the mediterranean sea and across the atlantic all the way to florida proving that these simple vessels were seaworthy and could undertake long voyages but who were the phoenicians the simplest answer is that they were the iron age descendants of the subset of bronze age canaanites who occupied the central part of the eastern shore of the mediterranean in what is today lebanon northern israel and western syria the bronze age is the name given by archaeologists to a cultural period that lasted in this region for more than two thousand years from about 3500 bc until 1200 bc or as late as 1130 bc according to some scholars who date the end of the bronze age and kanan to the final withdrawal of the military forces of the egyptian pharaohs of the new kingdom sometime around 1130 marking the end of more than three centuries of egyptian imperial rule during the late bronze age after the bronze age was the iron age from 1200 or 1130 bc depending on where you set the dividing line until about 600 bc when the babylonian army under nebuchadnezzar invaded and devastated the entire region ushering in drastic social and cultural changes in the map on this slide the phoenician heartland is shown in green it is a long narrow strip of land bounded by the sea on the west and steep mountain ranges to the east where there were dense forests in ancient times that were famous for tall cedar and pine trees trees that were highly prized as building material for palaces temples and other elite dwellings and for building ships in addition to timber the products traded by bronze age canaanites and by their iron age phoenician descendants included wine olive oil and purple dye the famous phoenician purple was a vivid and durable dye extracted from eurex seashells murex purple dye was much sought after by ancient elites and was exported far and wide by phoenician merchants it is symbolic of their skill in crafting luxury goods and symbolic of the wealth that they gained by selling these goods before we talk about the phoenicians themselves let me make a few more remarks about the bronze age canaanites from whom they were descended we know quite a bit about the canaanites in the period from 2000 bc until 1200 bc which scholars call the middle and late bronze ages there are some written records and a lot of archaeological evidence as well as depictions of canaanites in egyptian art on the left in this slide is a modern artist's depiction of a scene of canaanites coming and going in front of the monumental gate of the city of ashkelon on the southern coast of modern israel shown in purple in the map on the right i was involved in excavating the city of ashkelon and the illustration shown here is quite accurate with respect to the monumental ancient mud brick architecture and even with respect to the hairstyles of the people and their multicolored clothing reminiscent of the biblical character joseph and his coat of many colors these details are taken from ancient egyptian depictions of canaanites the black and white drawing is a copy of an egyptian relief that shows a bearded canaanite wearing a multi-colored wraparound garment who has disembarked from a ship and is delivering goods to a seated egyptian official but if the people who lived along the central coast of the levant during the iron age in the period after the egyptian imperial forces withdrew from this area around 1130 bc if these people were just the descendants of bronze age canaanites why do we give them a different name and call them phoenicians instead of canaanites indeed in the hebrew bible they are called canaanites or more commonly sidonians or tyrions using the names of the most important phoenician cities tyre and sidon there is some evidence that they thought of themselves as canaanites although their primary identification was in terms of which city they belong to whether it be tyre seiden biblos or whichever city was their home it was the greeks as non-semitic speaking outsiders who called them phoenicians going back to the previous slide we can see the location of tire marked out here on this map in what is today the southern part of lebanon not far north of the israeli-lebanese border uh and sidon north of tyre the other main city of the phoenicians although there were several others that were quite important and distinctive in their own right in any case tyre and seiden were the two most important cities and they've been continuously occupied since antiquity and still go by the same names the primary self-identification of the bronze age canaanites and of their iron age descendants whom we call phoenicians following the greeks was always with their home city rather than with the larger linguistic and cultural and regional grouping to which they belonged which was perhaps more salient to outsiders than it was to themselves on this slide is a map of the major candidate city-states of the late bronze age that had been absorbed into the egyptian empire in the 15th century bc and functioned as administrative subunits within the egyptian province of canaan and it is from egyptian records and also from the hebrew bible that we know about the political landscape of this period the geographical category of canaan and the bronze age and the geographical category of phoenicia in the iron age were not native to the region but were created by outsiders by the egyptians first and then by the israelites and greeks and since there is a woeful lack of textual records written by phoenicians themselves we are dependent on egyptian and hebrew and greek views of them having said that there were some major cultural changes in the transition from the bronze age to the iron age that affected the coastal canaanites and justifies giving them a new name as phoenicians to make it easy for scholars to distinguish them from their cultural predecessors there were many cultural continuities in the period after the egyptian empire withdrew in 1130 bc the post-imperial populists that we would now call phoenicians continued the religious traditions of their ancestors with local variations and they spoke a coastal dialect of the older canaanite language that gradually became distinct from the inland dialect which was the language of the israelites namely hebrew they also maintained some many of the same economic practices and material styles but their canaanite traditions were disrupted and altered by a major change that affected the entire region the invasion of by powerful groups from the west from the aegean sea and western turkey who were groups who were very different from the canaanites both culturally and linguistically and the movement of these groups is shown on the map in the upper right these groups are called sea peoples following the ancient egyptian designation for them and they tried to conquer egypt itself with a combined attack by land and sea in 1177 bc or thereabouts but they were repelled and were allowed to settle nearby in canaan where they took over some of the southern canaanite cities and apparently served as egyptian mercenaries until the demise of the egyptian empire a few decades later this slide shows an egyptian relief depicting the battle against the sea peoples in 1177 beside a modern artist's rendition of the battle with egyptians crowded together fighting the invaders who had arrived on ships the various groups of the sea peoples of whom the biblical philistines were one took over a large chunk of southern coastal canaan after the egyptian forces withdrew in 1130 carving out their own independent city-states in the region nearest egypt but they did not conquer tyre and sidon and other canaanite cities that were farther north in the central part of the levantine coast having said that it seems that they did have an impact on tyre and sidon and other cities to the north cities that probably absorbed some sea people's immigrants who brought with them new funerary practices involving cremation which we can see archaeologically and who would also have brought with them valuable military skills as well as expertise concerning seafaring and navigation in western regions of the mediterranean and knowledge of western regions of the mediterranean where the canaanites had not hitherto explored the incorporation of sea peoples and the withdrawal of the egyptians created new conditions in iron age canaan out of which he merged a new political configuration by the second half of the 10th century in the period from around 950 to 900 bc the patchwork of small canaanite polities that the egyptians had long divided and conquered gave way to several powerful and independent new kingdoms a sea people's kingdom of the philistines in the south led by the city of gatt home of the warrior giant goliath of biblical fame a large kingdom called israel and a smaller kingdom of judah that are well known to us from the bible an aramean kingdom centered on damascus and a kingdom ruled from tyre shown here in yellow which was for centuries the center of phoenician power the chronological chart on this slide which was provided by my collaborator gunnar lehmann as as was the map summarizes what we know from biblical and greek sources about the kings of tyre the two most important kings were hiram the first who ruled from about 950 to 917 bc and was a contemporary of both king david and king solomon of israel and ethbal or itabao the first who ruled from 879 to 848 and was a contemporary of king omri and his son king ahab of israel indeed a political alliance was formed between tyre and israel by the marriage of ahab to the infamous jezebel a phoenician princess who was the daughter of ethball this indicates the close relationship between tyre and israel two powerful kingdoms with complementary economies one land-based once oriented to sea trade and complementary interests this alliance was criticized in certain israelite circles with hatred focused on the evil foreign queen jezebel whether fairly or not as we know from the biblical stories in the book of kings concerning elijah the prophet and his harsh condemnation of jezebel for introducing phoenician religious practices such as the worship of baal an etching by gustav d'oray depicts the biblical episode of the defenestration of jezebel when she was thrown out of a window and left for the dogs to lick her blood after a military coup overthrew the dynasty of omri and ahab the point to make here is that the iron age phoenicians should not be thought of as living in a loose collection of small and militarily weak mercantile city-states to the north of israel strung out along the coast and independent of one another as some scholars imagine rather all the evidence suggests that they were the inhabitants these phoenicians of a militarily powerful and unified kingdom ruled from tyre the capital city which conquered its neighbors and dominated the other coastal cities to its north and south in the course of the late 11th and early 10th centuries even though those old canaanite cities that became part of the kingdom of tyre always retained their own identities and presumably had their own local elites although the kingdom of tyre which extended a long way along the coast from modern haifa in israel to latakia in syria off off the map here at the top although this kingdom was hemmed in by the mountains to the east and was always more of a naval power than a land power it was obviously able to defend its territory and was on a par militarily with its neighbors this kingdom was consolidated by hiram of tyre in the 10th century bc at the same time that david and solomon consolidated the kingdom of israel and it continued to be a major political and economic power for the next 200 years until the entire region was conquered by the assyrians from northern iraq with powerful neighbors to the east a land empire was never an option for tyre but the sea to the west was wide open in the 10th and 9th centuries bc there was no imperial power to block its westward expansion recent archaeological work has shown that phoenicians from tyre sailed all the way to spain and through the strait of gibraltar into the atlantic ocean well before 900 bc perhaps as early as a thousand bc it is generally agreed that they went in search of silver and other metals such as copper which are abundant in southwestern spain along the rio tinto not far from gadir or modern cadiz which is shown on this map and also in sardinia where there is early evidence of phoenician activity the initial expeditions in search of valuable metals to sardinia and spain and other places in the west eventually led to the establishment of colonies in the southern coastal region of spain in sardinia in western sicily and along the coast of north africa it is a matter of debate exactly how early these phoenician colonies were established and how long a gap there was between the initial contact with the west and the sending out of colonists recent work has shown that colonies in southern spain were certainly in place by the mid 9th century by around 850 bc uh if not earlier but the initial voyages of exploration took place uh quite a bit earlier as shown by phoenician pottery found at spanish sites along the atlantic coast it is plausible to imagine therefore that the first expeditions in search of silver were sent out by say hiram of tyre sometime after 950 bc after he had consolidated his kingdom and when his ally solomon ruled the kingdom of israel confirming the biblical tradition on this topic and then later uh tyrion fleets brought permanent colonists having been sent out in the reign of ethbal the first sometime before 8 50 at the time when his daughter jezebel was married to ahab king of israel who may well have participated in these expeditions as his forebears had done but a date as late as 850 for the phoenician settlement of spain does suggest a rather long episode or a long period of episodic venture trade in spain before actual colonization which uh does seem a bit unlikely and is worthy of further study indeed the chronology of the phoenician settlement of spain is a major topic of current research and we will return to this at the end of the lecture but it is interesting to note that in any case the earliest phoenician colonies were the ones located farther farthest west closest to the sources of silver and other metals in spain and sardinia it appears that the colonies in between that were much closer to the phoenician homeland for example carthage in what is today tunisia which became the most important daughter city of tyre in later centuries these cities were founded considerably later after 800 bc so it was not a matter of a gradual geographic expansion westward but rather a sudden leap early on to the far west to obtain a prized commodity silver and other metals followed by the filling out of the trade network by the establishment of intervening colonies in later generations the pioneering of maritime trade routes and the establishment of ports that connected the eastern and the western mediterranean which had had no systematic contacts beforehand is one of the most important achievements of the phoenicians it is not that people previously lacked sailing ships or that previously western resources such as silver were of no interest to easterners or vice versa the connection could have been made hundreds of years earlier than it was but it so happened that the rulers of tire were equipped with the knowledge and resources and motivation to make the connection in the 10th century bc with dramatic long-term effects on the economy and culture of tyre itself and of the entire mediterranean region in a real sense the phoenicians were the makers of the mediterranean as a unified economic and cultural space that was later inherited by the greeks and romans however a phoenician contribution of even greater importance to world history was the dissemination of the alphabet throughout the mediterranean world writing had been known for two thousand years before the phoenicians came on the scene but earlier writing systems such as mesopotamian cuneiform and egyptian hieroglyphs were logo-syllabic not alphabetic they made use of hundreds of written signs each of which represented an entire word or syllable rather than a single consonant or vowel logosyllabic writing systems were difficult to learn and were restricted to a small scribal elite but during the middle and late bronze age uh in the second millennium bc a new and much simpler writing system was invented by canaanite speakers as an adaptation of egyptian hieroglyphs this was the first alphabet called proto-sinaitic in which each written sign represents a single consonant rather than an entire word or even a syllable comprised of a consonant and a vowel in other words there would be a sign to represent just the consonant instead of the syllables boo bae and so on fewer than 30 signs were needed to represent all of the consonants used in canaanite and other semitic languages indeed only 22 signs for phoenician and in these languages the vowels can be inferred from the consonants due to the predictable patterns of vowels in semitic words so there was no need for vowel signs in the earliest canaanite alphabets each letter was originally a picture of something whose name started with a particular canaanite consonant thus a squiggly line depicting the surface of water was used to represent the first consonantal sound in the canaanite word for water which was mem and this squiggle is the ancestor of our latin letter m a few examples are shown in this slide corresponding to the latin letters a m and o even today our capital letter a for example betrays its origins as a rotated picture of an ox head with two horns a picture of an ox head was used to represent the first consonant in the canaanite word for ox alp although this is not the vowel ah a but rather a glottal stop which is a meaningful consonantal phoneme in semitic languages a sign for the glottal stop is not needed to write greek so the phoenician letter alp represented by an ox head and representing that glottal stop was adapted to represent the vowel a ah by the greeks who kept the phoenician name of the letter and called it alpha alp alpha the second letter of the canaanite alphabet was called bait which is the word for house thus a schematic picture of a house with an open door represents the consonant b in phoenician the sound ba and it is the ancestor of the greek letter beta and of our latin letter b so when we say the word alphabet we are saying ox house in ancient canaanite and phoenician reciting the first two words in the in the mnemonic scheme that underlies every alphabet today the phoenicians of the iron age did not invent the alphabet as i said it was invented some centuries earlier by unknown canaanites but they standardized the shapes and direction of the old canaanite letters that had been in use for hundreds of years and they disseminated their version of this rather simple and easy to learn writing system to their neighbors the israelites and aramians and eventually to the greeks the cultural prestige of the phoenicians was such that other versions of the canaanite alphabet died out and the phoenician version is the ancestor of all alphabets in use today including the hebrew arabic greek latin and cyrillic alphabets in the four centuries between the time when the egyptians withdrew from canaan in 1130 bc uh until the assyrians invaded and conquered the region in the 730s bc the phoenicians had no incentive to use the cumbersome logo syllabic writing systems of egypt or of mesopotamia the hated imperial foreigners and they had the freedom to perfect the canaanite alphabet and to make it their primary means of written communication the phoenicians took their alphabet with them and used it to write documents in their colonies in the western mediterranean almost all of which have been lost sadly with the exception of a few stone inscriptions like the norah stone from sardinia that is shown in this slide and is dated to around 800 bc armed with the alphabet and with a growing network of maritime shipping routes and colonial ports the phoenicians pioneered new methods of trade and finance that transformed the ancient economy coined money had not yet been invented so the means of payment was silver that had been chopped up into pieces of various size to make it easy to weigh out precise amounts on a balanced scale scholars use the german term huck zilber for this kind of silver and a cache of it that was found in an archaeological excavation is shown in this slide in the lower left beside a photo of a balanced scale standardized stone weights of various sizes were used in one of the balance pans to determine the amount of silver put in the other pan that would correspond to a certain number of shekels for example there is archaeological evidence for an increase in the amount of huxilbear that was in circulation during the iron age as market transactions conducted by phoenician merchants increased in number and as this practice came to be imitated by other people the remains of iron age tyrion shipwrecks on the seafloor of the mediterranean such as the one shown which dates to 750 bc these attest to regular large-scale shipments of commodities such as olive oil and wine stored in hundreds of standardized shipping containers you can see the long slender or cylindrical torpedo shaped jars very typical of tire in the latter part of the 8th century bc these were stored in the holds of ships and although nothing is left of the wooden ship itself on the sea floor the vessels there are arranged in a pattern indicating the way in which they had been stored in the hold of this ship that sank finally although we lack the commercial records of the philistines which were no doubt written on papyrus roles that have long since disintegrated there is no question that they developed sophisticated techniques for recording their transactions and for keeping track of debts and payments temporary notes would have been inscribed in wax on wooden tablets before being transferred to more permanent records written in ink on papyrus at which point the wax was smoothed to erase the notes and create a blank surface for a new notation the wooden diptych with ivory hinge that is shown in the upper right corner of this slide is evidence of this practice finally although we have said very little about phoenician religion and mythology and art a vast and important topic in itself and although we do not have time to deal with these subjects in this talk it is important to note that the phoenicians conveyed to the israelites and to the greeks not just the technique of alphabetic writing and not just luxury goods like purple dye but also the contents the intellectual contents of their own canaanite traditions concerning the cosmos the gods and the proper form of religious ritual and they transmitted these uh ideas most likely in written form or quite often no doubt in written form although the phoenician versions of these texts have been lost this phoenician cultural influence can be seen quite plainly in the hebrew bible and in early greek literature such as hesiod's theogony a good book on this topic of phoenician influence on greek culture is shown in the bottom left of this slide a book entitled when the gods were born by my collaborator carolina lopez ruiz who earned her phd at the university of chicago and is now a professor of classics at the ohio state university cultural features as basic as the traits of the chief god of the pantheon the architectural form of temples and the ritual practices entailed in animal sacrifice were clearly borrowed from phoenician sources just as the romans later borrowed from the greeks the greek god zeus for example shown in this slide in the photo on the right a famous sculpture found at smyrna izmir in the 17th century a.d this statue of the greek god zeus shows him holding his thunderbolt and this depiction is very similar to the depiction of the canaanite and phoenician storm god bale who in bronze age canaanite tradition throws a thunderbolt uh rides the clouds as his chariot and rose to kingship over the gods ultimately holding court on top of a cloud-wreathed mountain in the north like the later zeus on mount olympus phoenicians from tyre are credited in the hebrew bible uh switching now to talk about israelite culture phoenicians are credited in the hebrew bible with designing the temple of solomon in jerusalem and overseeing its construction in the bottom middle of this slide is an artist's depiction of solomon's temple based on the biblical description of it which indeed resembles canaanite examples that have been unearthed by archaeologists more fancifully to the left of the temple the artist imagines the meeting between solomon and hiram of tyre to plan the construction of the temple showing a kind of uh blueprint being examined by solomon now in the remainder of this presentation uh having finished this brief overview of of the impact and culture and and basic history of the phoenicians i want to talk briefly about the current archaeological research that i am doing on behalf of the university of chicago at a couple of phoenician sites first let me mention telkaisan a site north of haifa in what is today israel we began work there in 2015 and have had several seasons of survey and excavation telca-san is a classic middle eastern ruin mound or tel so you know tell being the arabic word for the ruin mound with many strata of ancient settlements superimposed one on top of the other the earliest occupation of this site was in the third millennium bc in the early bronze age and it was occupied by bronze age canaanites and by iron age phoenicians until it was destroyed by the babylonians under nebuchadnezzar in around 600 bc it was then reoccupied later during the persian and early hellenistic periods before its final abandonment around 150 bc my collaborators and i uh at this site are focusing on the iron age occupation from 1200 to 600 bc in order to understand the cultural and political changes its inhabitants experienced in the transition from the bronze age canaanite world under egyptian rule through the period of the sea people's invasion and into the phoenician period after tel kai-san became part of the kingdom of tyre shown here on this map to the north of khaesan which happened around 950 bc we think after which telquesan on the border with the kingdom of israel served as a gateway between these two kingdoms we have been conducting one-month summer field schools at telke-san in recent years with several dozen college students each summer from the university of chicago and elsewhere the students learn techniques of archaeological excavation and recording by digging at the site supplemented by evening lectures and weekend field trips to other archaeological sites and museums they work hard and have a lot of fun in the process and i have to say this is one of the favorite parts of my job is working with students to collect new data and to explore these ancient sites and it and although the research at telkesan in the ancient phoenician homeland will continue in future years we are now looking forward to creating another field school program at the other end of the mediterranean at a phoenician colony site in southern spain if all goes well we will follow in the wake of the phoenicians from their homeland in the east to their colonies in the west by digging at an archaeological site near the city of malaga called thera del vr this is the location of one of the earliest phoenician colonies in spain and we want to dig there to answer questions about when why and how this colony was established providing us with a new window into phoenician culture and economy we will be doing this in collaboration with the university of malaga and the ohio state university malaga is an ideal location not just to investigate the phoenicians but also to teach students archaeological field methods and expose them to the broad sweep mediterranean history that is so so well pres well represented in andalucia in southern spain history uh shown to us from pre-phoenician bronze age sites all the way through the phoenician punic roman and islamic periods and on into modern times in addition to working at the early phoenician colony side of thero del vr near malaga which i will show you in just a moment we will take the students to visit sites and museums in the wider region such as the alhambra in granada here is a map showing the location of therodel vr on the outskirts of the city of malaga close to the airport and near the mouth of the waddle horte river not far from the beach in what is today a nature preserve the yellow arrow points to the grassy low mound which is the archaeological site itself a modern elevated highway skirts the mount in ancient times this site was an island in the mouth of the river but the estuary has since been filled in the river is confined to a narrow channel a small part of the site was excavated in the 1980s revealing the foundations of phoenician buildings not far beneath the surface as shown in the photograph on the right side of this slide but there is much more to be done to reveal the entire settlement and to understand its development over time from its founding in 850 bc or thereabouts until its abandonment around 600 bc when its inhabitants moved to the mainland to found the colony of malacca a phoenician name that is still preserved in the modern name malaga but ancient malacca is buried deeply under the modern city and the earlier settlement site at therodel vr has the great advantage in comparison to other phoenician sites that it was not built over or destroyed in later times which means that it remains accessible just under the surface and quite well preserved here is a planned uh close-up plan of the site of theradlvr showing the previous excavation areas with an artist's reconstruction of what the phoenician buildings looked like they were built in the same style as buildings in the phoenician homeland in one area they faced onto a main street and were open at the front to create stalls or shops suitable for trading with local people in a market-like setting but there is no evidence that non-phoenicians lived here because the pottery is purely phoenician this map of southern spain shows the location of pharaoh delbiar the site we planned to excavate at the mouth of the waddell jorge river on the mediterranean coast very close to malacca modern malaga the phoenicians preferred to settle on islands just offshore imitating the mother city of tyre itself which was an island and therefore easy to defend from attack uh by land by the way the site of thera del vr where we plan to excavate is on the as you can see on the mediterranean side of the strait of gibraltar not too far from the somewhat earlier site of gadir the island of gadir modern cadiz where the earliest tyrion settlement that known to date uh has been found uh the atlantic coast uh as the earliest place of settlement makes sense because this is where the silver was obtained via the rio tinto and the valley of the wadalka beer that flows from seville sevilla down to the sea to the atlantic coast but back to uh from the map to the artist's reconstruction of thera del vr in the mouth of the waddell hortha river we can see that what's shown here is that the site has an island a little ship sailing toward it the river largely filled in and so you can see from the earlier picture this is what we have today but that sort of lentil shaped or oblong mound grassy mound pointed at by the yellow arrow is what is shown here as an island in the mouth of the river the phoenicians preferred to settle on islands just offshore pharao del vr at gadir at other places imitating the mother city of tyre itself which was an island and therefore easy to defend from an attack by land but what we don't yet know is when pharaoh del vr over on the mediterranean side of the strait of gibraltar was first settled and why it is not in the silver producing region so what was its purpose how did it relate to the earlier tyrion settlement at gadir and in both cases why did the phoenicians wait to establish settlements until long after they first started sailing to spain and through the strait of gibraltar in order to get silver as the current evidence suggests it seems to be as much as 100 years before this the colonies were first established after 100 years of trading for silver but we need a more extensive exposure of the houses at the site of thera del vr and especially evidence from the earliest and deepest phase of occupation at this site in order to answer these questions here is a a quick summary of the questions for which we will be seeking answers as we work to enlarge our understanding of the phoenicians who were so important in the development of the ancient mediterranean and are still so poorly known as we've said when did the phoenicians colonize spain where exactly were their earliest colonies we have a few ideas but we need to find out more why did they go so far west uh why or why were they the first to go so far west when the ability to sail that distance had been long established how were they able to explore and plant colonies so far from home when the previous peoples did not do so and ultimately what was the impact of phoenician colonization on the culture and economy of the iberian peninsula certainly but also on the politics of the levantine homeland there's some indication in my view that there was a transition from an older canaanite style of despotic monarchy toward a kind of mercantile oligarchy or decentralized rule precisely because of the establishment of these colonies by tyre and finally how are we to understand in more detail the emergence of the mediterranean as a single economic and cultural space long before the onset of greek colonization i will leave you with a portrait of the most famous phoenician of them all hannibal of carthage who marched via spain and across the alps with his elephants into italy in 218 bc and almost succeeded in conquering rome during the second punic war by the time of the punic wars when carthage and rome fought to the death for control of the mediterranean the phoenicians had built a thriving civilization in north africa spain sicily and sardinia the early phoenician expeditions in the 10th century bc and the colonies of the 9th and 8th centuries paved the way for a large-scale transplanting of the semitic speaking culture of the levant more than 2 000 miles away far to the west of the phoenician homeland phoenician society in the west developed its own distinctive features while still maintaining close relations for centuries with the mother city of tyre and the transplanting was quite literal in some respects although it is hard to think of spain as having no olive oil or wine these were unknown in iberia until the phoenician colonists introduced them into the western mediterranean bringing olive and grape cuttings with them in their ships along with livestock and other items needed to recreate the conditions in their homeland so the phoenicians clearly had an enormous cultural impact they were pioneers in knitting together the mediterranean as a single space of interaction by means of their ships and their alphabet and they were even responsible for disseminating what we think of as the mediterranean diet under hannibal's command they nearly succeeded in dominating this space entirely but ultimately rome won out and took over the mediterranean world for better or for worse and in the process destroyed not just the city of carthage but the future of phoenician culture their literature and laws and mythology were not preserved by their conquerors and all but a few distorted memories of them were lost until modern times it is indeed one of the great achievements of archaeological research to have learned as much as we have about the phoenicians but there is a lot more to do many phoenician settlements are waiting to be explored and many questions about them remain to be answered i hope i have shown why it is worth trying to find these answers for over 100 years the oi has been a leading research center for the study of ancient middle eastern civilizations join us in uncovering the past and learn about the beginnings of our lives as humans together become a member by visiting oi.uchicago.edu member

Channel: The Oriental Institute

Views: 36,347

Rating: 4.855814 out of 5

Keywords: Ancient History, Phoenicians, Mediterranean, Biblical History, Canaan, Oriental Institute, Spain, Archaeology, History, Trade, Sea Exploration

Id: fofxL3WEhZc

Length: 48min 56sec (2936 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020