The Phoenician Cities Phoenicia thus provides a very clear exception to Josephus’ general pic-
ture. No Greeks colonised Arados, Tyre, Sidon, or Byblos or re-named them
in ways intelligible to themselves. Did any Seleucid or Ptolemaic kinggive
any of them a new, Greek constitution? That is a question which we must
postpone for a moment.
At all events the traces of an organised, deliberate effort of Hellenisa-
tion in Phoenicia are markedly slight. But even if no Greeks intended to
‘‘Hellenise’’ Phoenicia, such a Hellenisation might still have occurred. What
is more, from the fact that (as it seems) no Greeks sought aVerschmelzung
in Droysen’s sense, it does not in the least follow that no such fusion took
place. If we take only the two most obvious criteria, language and architec-
tural forms, then we have two perfectly clear cases of mixed cultures which
evolved in the Hellenistic period on the desert fringes of the Syrian region:
in Nabataea from the early Hellenistic period onwards and in Palmyra from
the late Hellenistic period onwards.^6
The case of Phoenicia, however, has two extra dimensions which make it
quite different from any other area in the Near or Middle East. The first, and
more important, is the surviving effects of Phoenician colonisation. If I may
digress for a moment, our view of ancient Mediterranean history remains, in
spite of all our efforts, firmly Graeco-Roman. But we really could now write
a Phoenician-Punic orientated history of the Mediterranean from the eighth
century onwards, which would focus on the nature, spread, survival, and de-
cline of Phoenician-Punic culture in Phoenicia itself, in Cyprus, in North
Africa, in Sicily, in Spain, in Sardinia, and marginally in Italy.^7 We are not
talking about an insignificant or short-lived phenomenon. Let us take for in-
stance a neo-Punic inscription from Bitia in Sardinia, which deserves a spe-
cial place among the quite extensive Punic and neo-Punic inscriptions from
the western Mediterranean. This is a building inscription, dated by a ruler
whose name, written in neo-Punic letters, comes out as [’MP]R’ ṬR Q’ YSR
M’RQH ’ WRHLY ’NṬNYNH [’]WGSṬH—‘‘Imperator Caesar Marcus Au-
relius Antoninus Augustus,’’ namely Marcus Aurelius, Caracalla or Elaga-
. For Nabataea, see Schürer, Vermes, and Millar,HistoryI, app. ; Y. Meshorer,Naba-
taean Coins(Qedem III, ); M. Lindner, ed.,Petra und das Königreich der Nabatäer^2 ().
For Palmyra, see M. A. R. Colledge,The Art of Palmyra().
. For Phoenician settlement, note C. R. Whittaker, ‘‘The Western Phoenicians: Colo-
nisation and Assimilation,’’PCPS (): , and the important volume edited by H. G.
Niemeyer,Phönizier im Westen(Madrider BeiträgeVIII, ). For a sketch of the role of
Punic in the western Mediterranean in the Roman period, see W. Röllig, ‘‘Das Punische im
römischen Reich,’’ in G. Neumann and J. Untermann, eds.,Die Sprachen im römischen Reich
der Kaiserzeit(), .