Josephine Crawley Quinn & Nicholas C. Vella (ed.). The Punic Mediterranean: identities and identification from Phoenician settlement to Roman rule.

Marti-Aguilar, Manuel Alvarez

JOSEPHINE CRAWLEY QUINN & NICHOLAS C. VELLA (ed.). The Punic Mediterranean: identities and identification from Phoenician settlement to Roman rule. 2014. xxvii+376 pages, 124 colour and b&w illustrations, and 4 tables. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-1-107-05527-8 hardback 80 [pounds sterling].

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Research on 'Phoenicians' and 'Punics' has progressed tremendously over the last four decades; it has, however, been characterised by the use of highly ambiguous ethnic and cultural labels. The contributors to this volume have assumed the much needed task of updating knowledge on the Phoenician-Punic world, addressing questions such as: what does 'Punic' actually mean? How does it relate to 'Phoenician'? How has Punic identity been constructed by both ancients and moderns? Was there a 'Punic world'? And how coherent was Punic culture? Such questions were the starting point for the conference 'Identifying the Punic Mediterranean', held at the British School of Rome in 2008, from which the papers in this volume--with some additional contributions--derive. The collection, edited by Josephine Crawley Quinn and Nicholas Vella, is divided into two sections: the first explores general themes and the second focuses on specific case studies.

In their introduction, the editors present a very useful synthesis, and challenging discussion, of the various definitions of the term 'Punic', as used by the book's contributors. The first of these contributions, by Prag, addresses the use of the terms Phoinix and Poenus in antiquity. He shows how, until the late Republic, these terms were synonymous and used to define Phoenicians generically, and therefore bear no relation to the modern meaning of 'Punic', which signifies a specific relationship to Carthage or to the western Phoenicians from the sixth century BC onwards. Vella's inspiring contribution documents the 'invention'--led by Sabatino Moscati--of the Phoenicians in modern scholarship, and questions the construction of its artificially homogenous image, articulated through a systematic decontextualisation of 'Phoenician' objects. Van Dommelen presents a critical analysis of contemporary images of 'Punic' identity in Tunisia and Sardinia, exposing their dependency on the 'modern anxieties' of specific groups and institutions in three particular areas: 'state representations', 'heritage and tourism' and 'local representations'.

Bondi defends a basic cultural homogeneity during the 'Phoenician' period, followed, in the subsequent period during which Carthage was, in his opinion, dominant over the Phoenician colonies of the western Mediterranean, by a series of diverse 'punicities'. Gomez Bellard, on the other hand, comes to a different conclusion by reviewing funerary practices amongst Punic communities. He detects a basic homogeneity in the way the dead were treated across the Punic world and a common evolution in this ritual community from the sixth century BC onwards, suggesting "the existence of a cultural identity that it is possible to call 'Punic'" (p. 75). Similarly, Frey-Kupper's study of coins and their use in the Punic Mediterranean argues that the widespread use of standardised types not only facilitated exchange but also expressed some form of cultural homogeneity--even 'punicity' in some cases.

In the second part of the book, as remarked by the editors, it seems that "the smaller the scale of the analysis, the larger the variation that looms" (p. 4). Maraoui Telmini and her colleagues analyse attitudes towards material culture in Carthage, and identify internal changes in the urban fabric of the city in the sixth century BC, coeval with its rise as a power in the central and western Mediterranean. Ben Younes and Krandel-Ben Younes also address issues of identities in funerary practices using two case studies: the first, based on the Libyo-Phoenician area of Byzacium, again stresses the "multiple characters in which punicity developed in varying ways across time and space" (p. 157), while the second case study, on the 'Numidian' Tell, shows a strong Libyan component.

Quinn brilliantly challenges stereotypes of 'purely Greek' vs 'purely Punic' myths. She convincingly proposes a Carthaginian origin for the tradition relating to the Altars of the Philaeni, which were supposedly erected over the place where two Carthaginians, the Philaeni brothers, chose to be buried alive at the conclusion of a competition to establish the border between the territories of Carthage and Cyrene. She contextualises the development of this tradition in the early second century BC, as a partial response to the nascent negative Greco-Roman stereotypes of Carthaginians. Based on pottery data, Bridoux studies connections between Numidia and the 'Punic world', understood as a "cultural and commercial koine" (p. 200), with its centre at Carthage and characterised by a common material culture with a high degree of regional variation. Papi reviews the archaeological evidence from pre-Roman Morocco, seriously questioning the existence of a 'Punic Mauritania'. Although acknowledging relationships between the Punic sphere and the local elites, he rejects the possibility of a Carthaginian military occupation and the foundation of colonies in the area.

Jimenez offers a fine synthesis on the complex issue of the so-called 'Libyphoenician' coins of southern Iberia. As with Bridoux, she also identifies different versions of 'Punic' culture, depending on local factors, but also a layer of regional identity in connection with North African communities. She defends hybridism as the key factor in the process of "constructing Punic identities after Punic times" (p. 242). Aranegui and Vives-Ferrandiz use coastal settlements of southeastern Iberia as case studies to analyse the fluid Iberian and Punic relations, which were dominated by "cultural flows within spaces of interaction" (p. 256). Roppa questions the traditional image of 'Punic Sardinia' and reiterates a double reality: the variability of local identities, developed from their interaction with the landscape and their vernacular roots, and the island's integration into a network led by Carthage, which acted more as its articulator than an imperialistic power with a colonial agenda. Bonnet reviews the seminal ideas of Fergus Millar on the Hellenisation of Phoenicia, emphasising the plurality of responses before and after Alexander. Taking the Phoenician communities as a reference, she stresses the need for a new conceptual framework to understand Hellenisation, dealing with "strategy and negotiation, social fluidity and cultural creativity" (p. 297).

In the afterword, Wallace-Hadrill provides a good summary of the ideas developed in the book, concluding that "we must settle for diverse Punic identities, not a single identity" (p. 303), while stressing the value of networks as a concept to understand their interactions.

The issues raised in the editors' introduction find some very productive answers through the various papers of this volume. If Moscati 'invented' the Phoenicians (and Punics) in the second half of the twentieth century, the work coordinated by Quinn and Vella contributes brilliantly to the deconstruction and reformulation of 'Punic' (and 'Phoenician') identities through concepts--heterogeneity, connectivity, fluidity, negotiation, local agency and hybridism--that better fit the twenty-first century.

MANUEL ALVAREZ MARTI-AGUILAR

Department of Historical Sciences

University of Malaga, Spain

(Email: m_alvarez@uma.es)

doi: 10.15184/aqy.2015.161