The Phoenician Cities zens of Phoenician cities, who were not peasants and were well enough off
to leave inscriptions, could not merely deploy both languages but could use
equivalents both for the names of deities and for their own names. They did
not have to inscribe in Phoenician as well, but chose to do so. In a small
way these inscriptions are precise examples of thatVerschmelzungwhich some
modern scholarship has tended to deny.
A similar pattern is visible if we follow the communal life of the Phoe-
nician cities through the period of transition. I will not try to rehearse the
complicated evidence for the dynasties of Phoenician kings whom Alex-
ander found. For instance, the dynasty of the kings of Sidon has been re-
constructed in two quite different ways down to Abdalonymus, who was in
power when Alexander arrived.^29 What is clear is that some kings remained
in power after Alexander, and continued to issue Phoenician coinage in their
own names, for instance in Arados, Byblos, and Tyre (where on the coinage
of King Azemilkos continues from / to /..).^30
There was thus a certain continuity through the period of Alexander’s
conquests. But a change does seem to come in the first half of the third cen-
tury. Philocles, ‘‘king of the Sidonians’’ (whose origins and career are highly
uncertain),^31 is last heard of in about ..; and the era ‘‘of the people of
Sidon’’ (above) probably starts soon after that; the era of Tyre starts from ;
and Arados appears to have lost its king by about , when a new era starts,
and the coinage makes no further reference to a king;^32 at about the same
time the inventories of Delos record offerings by the ‘‘Byblioi’’ collectively,
with no king mentioned.^33 So what happened? Are we to envisage a deposi-
tion of the kings and a grant or ‘‘charter’’ of the status of a Greekpolisto these
cities? That some such grantcouldhappen is suggested by the request to Anti-
ochus IV for the Jerusalemites to be enrolled as ‘‘Antiochenes’’ in the late s
( Macc. :). A. H. M. Jones implicitly, if not quite explicitly, identified this
mid-third-century change in Phoenicia as an administrative act carried out
from above: ‘‘a thorough reorganisation of the administrative system took
. Compare E. T. Mullen, ‘‘A New Royal Sidonian Inscription,’’BASOR ():
, and M. Dunand, ‘‘Les rois de Sidon au temps des Pérses,’’Mél.Univ. St. Joseph (–
): .
. A. Lemaire, ‘‘Le monnayage de Tyr et celui dit d’Akko dans la deuxième moitié du
quatrième siècle av. J.-C.,’’RN (): .
. See J. Seibert,Historia (): .
. J.-P. Rey-Coquais,Arados et sa pérée aux époques grecque, romaine et byzantine(),
–.
. E.g.,Ins. Délos, no. a. . See Ph. Bruneau,Recherches sur les cultes de Délos(),
.