1880s Renan combined his work on the corpus with works of erudition,
following a trend he had started with his hugely controversial book aLife of
Jesus(1863), in which he presented an animated and accurate picture of the
New Testament’s landscape (Moorey 1991: 17). This would be theWrst of a
series of seven books, the last published in 1882, in which the history of the
Christian Church was explained in chronological order. He then started to
write aHistory of Israel(1887–91), producing three volumes.
Phoenician historiography became enmeshed in the myriad of images
developed by nineteenth-century scholars, some of which had much earlier
roots (Liverani 1998). These were in a great part connected to the growth of
anti-Semitism. Animosity against the Jews had been growing from the early
nineteenth century, and increased in its last decades. The belief in the Aryans
as the superior human race placed the others in an inferior rank. The
Phoenicians were described as a Semitic people alongside the Jews and so
considered inferior. The French historian Jules Michelet, for example, in his
Histoire romaineof 1831 had described the Phoenicians as ‘a people who were
hard and sad, sensual and greedy, and adventurous without heroism’, and
whose ‘religion was atrocious and full of frightful practices’ (in Bernal 1987:
352). The Phoenicians were known to scholars as the enemies of both the
ancient Greeks and the Romans (in the Punic Wars). They were also criticized
due to the practice of infant sacriWce described in biblical (Jeremiah 7:30–2)
and classical sources. Joseph-Arthur, count of Gobineau (1816–82), had
written on them in hisEssai sur l’ine ́galite ́des races humaines(The Inequality
of Human Races) (1853–5):
Besides the reWnements of luxury, that I have just enumerated, human sacriWces—that
sort of homage to the divinity which the white race has only ever practised by
borrowing from the habits of other human species, and which the least new infusion
of its own blood made it immediately condemn—human sacriWces dishonoured the
temples of some of the richest and most civilised cities. In Nineva, in Tyre, and later in
Carthage, these infamies were a political institution, and never ceased from being
fulWlled with the most exacting formality. They were judged necessary to the pros-
perity of the State.
Mothers oVered their infants to be disembowelled on altars. They took pride in
seeing their suckling infant moan and struggle in theXames of Baal’s hearth.
(Count of Gobineau 1983 [1853–5]: 371–2).Renan’s 1855 consideration of the Semitic peoples as inferior to the Aryans
was also popularized a few years later by writers such as Gustave Flaubert
(1821–80) in his 1862 novelSalammboˆ, which was contextualized in Carthage,
the North African colony founded by Phoenicians in the ninth centurybce.
158 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism