Reconsider Phlebas

So the Phoenicians never existed. Herodotus, that unreliable old fibber, made it all up in the Histories. Is this really what Josephine Quinn is saying, or is it just a cunning ruse to stir up a fuss and infuriate the dwindling band of Herodoteans out there?

Because Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford University, declares that her mission is not so much to rescue the Phoenicians from their ‘undeserved obscurity’ so much as to argue that there were no such people. ‘It is modern nationalism that has created the Phoenicians,’ she writes, citing 19th-century French, English and German historians who spoke of the Phoenician ‘people’ and ‘nation’ in the age of the nation state.

The Phoenicians are those murkiest and most elusive of prehistorical characters, which is perhaps excusable in a community that existed from around 1,500–300 BC and left little in the way of literary or archaeological evidence. Classicists don’t tend to give them much of a look in. Last summer I joined John Julius Norwich lecturing on a ship. His talk on the history of the Mediterranean, from ancient times to the cruise-ship desecration of today, was a tour de force. Confessing to a lack of interest in the Phoenicians, he gave them just the briefest of cameos. Blink and you’d miss them. The glories of Ancient Greece and Rome still carry all before them.

And yet there they are at the heart of ancient Mediterranean history, some kind of confederation of irrepressible maritime traders and explorers based in the eastern Mediterranean with major cities in Byblos, Berytus (Beirut), Tyre, Sidon and Arwad. They make their entrance onto the literary-historical stage with a first-page mention in the Histories of Herodotus, the 5th century BC father of history.