Phoenicians beyond Greek Communities

Abstract

AbstractThe final chapter uses epigraphic texts from the fourth century bce onward to investigate the presence and experiences of Phoenician immigrants in fourth- to second-century bce Carthage, fourth- to second-century bce Egypt, and the central Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Malta in the second and first centuries bce. Phoenician immigrants in these areas employed adaptive repertoires like those used in Greek polities (name changing; religious syncretisms; hybrid customs) and they continued to construct their identities as immigrants through the persistent use of the Phoenician language and identification with their place of origin. Yet, as this chapter argues, immigrant communities behaved differently in different places at different times. In Egypt, Phoenician immigrants espoused a hybrid Phoenician-Egyptian identity, and while Phoenician remained central as a written language of that diaspora, Egyptian had dramatic effects on it. In Carthage, the epigraphic record of the tophet sanctuary reveals that Tyrian immigrant identities became particularly salient when Carthage used its ties to Tyre to claim kinship relations with other Punic states to create a hegemony in the region. In the islands of the central Mediterranean, new cosmopolitan communities emerged, in which civic or ethnic identities were less prominent and societies were more inclusive.