Greeks and Phoenicians in the Western Mediterranean 337scenario that places most emphasis on cleavage. The absence of Punic sources prevents
us from having access to the other side of the mirror, but the material culture has the
advantage of bringing a balance to our perspective on historical contexts, so that they
often appear mixed, governed by the logic of diffusion and exchange.
Greeks and Phoenicians in the Rest
of the Western Mediterranean
It has long been customary to think that the mobility of the Phoenicians in the Mediter-
ranean in no way corresponded to the same logic as applied to the Greeks in their regions.
The Greeks had a tendency to “make the land,” while the Phoenicians, with some excep-
tions (such as Carthage and Cadiz) placed themselves in locations “between land and
sea,” with maritime commerce as their major objective. That said, it would be wrong
to schematize too much, and recent studies (Van Dommelen and Gómez Bellard 2008)
show that the Phoenicians and Punic people were equally interested in rural areas and
their resources. Furthermore, as in Sicily, the question of ethnicity compels us to take into
account a number of factors. Besides the two composite ethnicities of Greek and Phoeni-
cian, there are multiple realities: Attic Greeks, Greeks from the Peloponnese, from Asia
Minor, from Euboia, and so forth, just as there Phoenicians from Tyre and elsewhere,
Phoenicians from Carthage, and so forth. And, finally, the indigenous population too
was not a single, undifferentiated reality.
Not far from Sicily, on the island of Malta, the Phoenician presence is attested early,
but it hardly competes with the Greek. One finds here an interesting overlap between
the indigenous levels and the levels of Phoenician occupation, much as in the necropolis
and sanctuaries, as is the case at Tas Silg, where the sanctuary of Ashtart lies over the
indigenous megalithic structures (Vella 1999).
On the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy, two emblematic cases deserve attention. On the island
of Ischia, not far from Cumae, at Pithekoussai, the excavations of of G. Buchner have
revealed the existence of a mixed community installed in a sort of artisanal and com-
mercial trading post founded by the Greeks a little before or after Cumae. Extremely
interesting objects have turned up in thousands of archaic tombs and some sectors of
habitation. In the tombs, inhumation and incineration both took place, and the funerary
objects include both Greek and eastern (Phoenician and Egyptian) pieces. These alone
are not enough to point to intermarriage within the population, but a healthy local indus-
try producing Phoenician amphoras (besides Greek amphoras), as well as the presence
of Semitic graffiti (Aramaean? Phoenician?) in funerary contexts invite us to think that
a minority of merchants and artisans originally from Phoenicia installed themselves at
Pithekoussai. They preserved, above all, in symbolically charged situations, such as the
passage from life to death, certain ancestral practices, even as they participated in the
blending of their communities through marriage.
The case of Pyrgi is no less interesting, as is clear from the bilingual Etruscan and Punic
inscriptions that figure on three pieces of gold foil, the so-called Pyrgi lamellae (KAI277)
found between the two principal sanctuaries of the maritime trading post of Caere. These