(a name now reserved in archaeology for the Bronze Age archaeological
‘cultures’ of the area), and by the Egyptians as the Phut. During the Iron
Age, in theWrst millenniumbce, the Phoenicians had established colonies
throughout the Mediterranean. Those established in the north of Africa with
their centre in Carthage became known as the Carthaginians or Punic. In the
Bible the Phoenicians were condemned in various passages by Ezekiel and
Isaiah as the home of Baal and Astarte and the birthplace of Jezebel (Bikai
1990: 72).
Iron Age Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language, and had developed an
alphabetical script. Its decipherment was made possible after the discovery of
some bilingual Graeco-Phoenician inscriptions in the Mediterranean islands
of Cyprus and Malta. There, small columns of marble with inscriptions had
been discovered in 1697, one of them being sent as a gift to the king of
France. The discovery of two Palmyran inscriptions in Rome at the start of
the eighteenth century had also intrigued scholars. The decipherment of the
Phoenician script was the work of the Briton, John Swinton (1703–77), keeper
of the University of Oxford archives from 1767, and the French Jean Jacques
Barthe ́lemy (1716–95), author ofRe ́Xexions sur l’alphabet et sur la langue dont
on se servait autrefois a`Palmyre(1754). 5 Their success was helped by thirteen
new bilingual texts copied at Palmyra by Robert Wood (c. 1717–71). Wood
had travelled extensively in Europe and the Middle East between 1738 and
- In 1763 he became a member of the Society of Dilettanti (Chapter 2). As
a result of his trip to the Levant he publishedThe Ruins of Palmyra(1753), in
which he described and presented measured drawings of the Roman imperial
monuments of the ancient city located in present-day Syria, and, more
importantly for this chapter,The Ruins of Baalbek(1757), a site located in
Lebanon that had been occupied by Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, which
had been wrongly connected with the Baalgad mentioned in Joshua 11: 17.
On his trip Wood was accompanied by James Dawkins (–1757), a Jamaican-
born scholar who also set out to see the world between 1742 and 51, and
Giovanni Battista Borra (1712–86), a Piedmontese artist, architect, landscape
designer and draughtsman. A later explorer was the French artist Louis
Franc ̧ois Cassas (1756–1827), who visited Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus
and Asia Minor, drawing ancient Middle Eastern sites such as Baalbek.
During the nineteenth century Phoenician archaeology fell under the
inXuence of French archaeology, especially during the second half of the
century after the Civil War between the Muslim Druses and the Christian
5 Bernal (1987: 186) provides some light on Barthe ́lemy’s image of the Phoenicians as not
related to the route towards civilization ending with modern Europeans, and as simple in
thought and art.
156 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism