Princeton University Press
In Search of the Phoenicians
Key Metrics
- Josephine Quinn
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691175270
- 9.5 X 6.5 X 1.3 inches
- 1.5 pounds
- History > Ancient - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Who were the ancient Phoenicians, and did they actually exist?
The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the Phoenicians never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies--and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.
Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and communities these people really constructed for themselves in the ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices. She traces how the idea of being Phoenician first emerged in support of the imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized as a component of modern national identities in contexts as far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon.
In Search of the Phoenicians delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays, painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to twenty-first century Tunisia.
Author Bio
Josephine Quinn is associate professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Worcester College. She is the coeditor of The Hellenistic West and The Punic Mediterranean.
Josephine Crawley Quinn works on Mediterranean history and archaeology. She has published articles on topics from Roman imperialism to Athenian sculpture to Carthaginian child sacrifice to Edwardian education, and she co-edited volumes of essays on ‘The Hellenistic West’ (with Jonathan Prag) and 'The Punic Mediterranean' (with Nicholas Vella), as well as the collected papers of Peter Derow (with Andrew Erskine).
She has a BA in Classics from Oxford, and an MA and PhD in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also taught at San Quentin prison. She was a Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome 2001-2, a Getty Scholar in 2008, and in 2009 she won the Zvi Meitar/Vice-Chancellor Oxford University Research Prize in the Humanities. She served as Editor of the Papers of the British School at Rome 2008-2011 and co-directs the excavations at Utica (Tunisia), with Andrew Wilson and Elizabeth Fentress, as well as the Oxford Centre for Phoenician and Punic Studies, with Jonathan Prag.
Her latest book, In Search of the Phoenicians, was published by Princeton University Press in 2018, and she is currently working on the true story of the origins of the Western Civilization: How the World Made the West.
Source: University of Oxford Faculty of Classics
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