Wednesday, August 16, 2023

Partying With the Phonecians

Utica, Tunisia is believed to have been founded by Phoenicians, and there is both textual and archaeological evidence for this. A new twist comes in in a 2016 paper showing that right around the time of its founding in the 9th C BC a whole lot of plates and bowls, drinking vessels, storage containers that usually contained wine, and a ton of animal bones of various species were all piled up in what had previously been a well. That combination usually means a great celebration of some sort.  Okay, so the Phoenicians came in and either before or after putting up docks and buildings and walls they had a celebration about it. So what?

Well, it seems that lots of indigenous people were probably at this party as well. About half of the pottery, etc came from Libya and other local groups. So probably locals, and lots of them, were present at this feast. It's not a question of pushing the old group out. Start with the animal bones. There has to be a lot of local knowledge for that. You can't easily steal all of it. It is likely purchased, or brought by guests.  If you are raising or hunting these creatures yourself, you have to have been there awhile and your relationship with groups even a few miles away is going to be significant. So if the animals and the pottery have local connects in big numbers, these are likely people who are getting along at at least a trade and not-in-open-conflict level. 

20% of the local stuff imitated Phoenician forms. That means those indigenous groups had already traded with someone who had access to those designs, and had for some time, as they had developed their own version.  They might have been well traveled themselves. There may have been more than one tribe of locals involved in the founding of Utica as well.

25% of the pottery was actually Phoenician. 10% was a kind of Sardinian indigenous pottery that was often traded.  5% was Greek, 1% was Italian in the Villanovan style, the group that had preceded the Etruscans. 1/2% was from SW Spain..  The Villanovan was considered high-class stuff throughout the Mediterranean, brought out for banquets and used as luxury trading goods.

But don't let that trick you into thinking that 10% of the people present were Sardinians or 5% Greeks.  They could have been goods acquired by the Phoenicians when they traded...or when they had lived there, 3rd-generation away from Sidon in the Levant. But, talking out of the other side of my mouth, they could have been. The Greeks also traveled and traded widely - in fact, they have the greater popular reputation for it - and could have been present. Amount of pottery does not in any way equal amount of national group. The Greeks who were there might have been from a group long-established in Sardinia.

Nor should you think that when I say "Phoenicians" that was a group of people ultimately descended from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.  It included everyone they had picked up along the way in their trading travels, from Cyprus, from Malta, from Greece, from Sardinia. We have no idea at present what the percentage was.  Some groups maintained a strict separate identity, others intermarried, and the farther the kite string is let out, the more uncertainty we have. Nowadays when we can track the DNA of a site we can find villages (or battles, or religious sites) we find both: individuals who are descended from two or three groups, others that show a single genetic identity.

Let me make it all even worse. Greeks, Phoenicians, Cypriots, or Sardinians showing up at any of these ports and colonies were likely not at all representative of the homeland they left behind. They could have been largely drawn from a few trading families.  In fact, this is historically the most likely model, all the way to India and China, and all the way up to colonial times. Tyre and Sidon had whole separate networks for trading with the interior of their own country, at least early on. "The English" or "The Dutch" did not so much settle the New World as a few traders drawn from a narrow class, with the permission and cooperation of the government, did the work.

So who was at this party? I figure there had to be at least some real Phoenicians in the group bearing that name, likely a majority. Though some of those may not have ever seen Tyre in their lives. They were supplemented by individuals from all over the Mediterranean. The locals were drawn from at least two groups, according to the pottery.  No one made two types of pottery at the time. If you were to go around interviewing all these drunks about their ancestry, you could probably have to start taking notes quickly.


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