The Phoenician Cities years before the fall of Carthage, we can safely assert that the links between
mother-city and colony never were broken.
These links have in any case to be seen against the background of the
continued presence of Tyrians in the western Mediterranean; for instance,
in the third or second century..two Tyrian brothers made a dedication
in Malta to Herakles/Melqart, the inscription being bilingual in Phoenician
and Greek.^11 Nor was it ever forgotten that the Herakles whom Hellenised
Tyrians worshipped (e.g.,Inscriptions de Délos, no. , from /..)was
really Melqart; this identification, already present in the pages of Herodotus,
is clearly asserted by Lucian,dea Syra. It was also surely not unknown to
the Tyrian who in Lucian’s time, to be precise../, made a dedication
totheos hagios(the holy god) Herakles; a man by the name of Diodorus, son
of Nithumbalus. It can hardly be an accident that the Greek name of the son
has precisely the same meaning—‘‘gift of god’’—as the Phoenician name of
the father.^12
That brings me to the second dimension. Phoenician culture seems in
some sense to have spread inland as well as overseas in the Hellenistic period,
as Punic culture did also in North Africa after ..This fact brings Phoe-
nician culture into connection with the familiar phenomenon of the fusion
of Greek and non-Greek deities in Syria, or alternatively the survival of non-
Greek cults in a Hellenised environment. There is nowhere where it appears
more vividly before us than in Herodian’s description of the cult of Elagabal
at Emesa (, , –); what is significant is that Herodian thought that ‘‘Elaga-
bal’’ was a Phoenician name and that Julia Maesa was ‘‘by origin aPhoinissa’’;
it is relevant that Heliodorus, the author of theAethiopica, also describes him-
self (, , ) as a ‘‘Phoenician from Emesa.’’ Similarly, according to Jose-
phus, in the s..the Samaritans identified themselves as ‘‘Sidonians in
Shechem’’ and asked that the nameless God to whom their temple was dedi-
cated should be called ‘‘Zeus Hellenios’’ (Ant. , –). On the one hand,
this evidence provides the essential analogy on which Bickerman based the
view put forward inDer Gott den Makkabäer: that what the Maccabees were
reacting against was a conscious reform movement within Judaism, designed
to preserve the cult of the Highest God in a form acceptable to the rest of the
Hellenistic world. On the other hand, it is further evidence, like the well-
known inscriptions (in Greek) of the ‘‘Sidonians in Marissa’’ in Idumaea,^13
. Guzzo Amadasi (n. ), no. .
. See M. Chéhab, ‘‘Tyr à l’époque romaine,’’Mél.Univ. St. Joseph (): , on p. .
.OGIS. Note the re-examination of the extent of Hellenisation in Marisa by
G. Horowitz, ‘‘Town Planning of Hellenistic Marisa,’’PEQ– (–): .