The Phoenician Cities Hellenisation brought with it a system of production based on the owner-
ship of slaves by private persons; or whether on the contrary no such change
took place, large-scale landownership, with the land being worked by de-
pendent labourers, remained the rule, and therefore the Greekpolisin Asia
bore no real resemblance to the original, as Kreissig has argued.^18 Such fun-
damental questions of social structure seem difficult to relate to Phoenicia if
only because, from what little we know, the Phoenician cities seem already
to have exhibited a market economy based on private wealth, in which trade
was at any rate a distinctive feature. That is to say, they exhibited what has
been calledVorhellenismus, namely being rather like Greekpoleisanyway.^19
Nor have we enough evidence even to illustrate the effects of entry into
the Hellenistic world on ordinary life in Phoenicia. By contrast we have Ara-
maic ostraca of the third century..from Idumaea, from Jerusalem, and
from Elath which already show extensive penetration of Greek loan-words
in economic life, even at this early date.^20 In Phoenician, so far as I know, we
have no such non-formal written documents from this period. The nearest
we have are mere scraps of evidence: an inscribed jar from near Jaffa, prob-
ably of the later fourth century;^21 or a badly damaged Phoenician papyrus
of unknown origin, now in the Cairo Museum, and thought to be of the
fourth or third century, which is in some way concerned with the delivery
of natural products.^22
There seems at the moment to be no way of reaching any idea of changes
in the structure of ordinary life from the Persian to the Hellenistic period in
Phoenicia. What can be done is perhaps three things: to look at the continued
use of Phoenician as represented on formal inscriptions put up by individual
Phoenicians abroad in the Hellenistic period; to look at the evolution of the
cities as communities; and to ask if there was anything which resembled the
continuous historical and religious tradition which is so strikingly charac-
. H. Kreissig, ‘‘Die Polis in Griechenland und im Orient in der hellenistischen
Epoche,’’ in E. C. Welskopf, ed.,Hellenische PoleisII (), .
. J. P. Weinberg, ‘‘Bemerkungen zum Problem ‘Der Vorhellenismus im Vorderen Ori-
ent,’ ’’Klio (): . For a very useful survey of the available evidence, note J. Elayi, ‘‘The
Phoenician Cities in the Persian Period,’’JournaloftheAncientNearEasternSocietyofColumbia
University (): .
. Idumaea: L. T. Geraty, ‘‘The Khirbet el-Kôm Bilingual Ostracon,’’BASOR
(): . Jerusalem: F. M. Cross, ‘‘An Aramaic Ostracon of the Third Century...from
Excavations in Jerusalem,’’EretzIsrael (): *. Elath: N. Glueck, ‘‘Ostraca from Elath,’’
BASOR (): .
. B. Peckham, ‘‘An Inscribed Jar from Bat-Yam,’’IEJ (): .
.KAI, no. .