How the Lebanese Lost their Phoenician Identity

Phoenicia was part of the Roman Empire during the early centuries when Christianity was a growing religion. Beirut was the seat of a major Roman Law School where many famous Roman jurists taught and practiced law. The Law School was destroyed by a tsunami circa 550 CE, when a quake in the Mediterranean sent a massive wave that completed covered the city. To this day, in downtown Beirut, you'll see the Roman city still buried under about 100 feet of sediments on which the modern city is built. The city of Beirut today has retained its Roman motto, "Berytus, Nutrix Legum" (Beirut, nourisher of law).

Three ways by which Lebanon lost its Christian identity:

One: The Early Christian Church* Killed Lebanon's Phoenician Identity

In 313 CE, Emperor Constantine issues the Edict of Milan, which granted Christianity legal status. Yet, traditional Roman beliefs remained dominant. 

 

In 325 CE Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea, which was a gathering of Christian leaders to determine the formal beliefs of Christianity.

 

In 380 CE, Emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. This is where the Christian establishment turned into a dictatorial theocracy that began persecuting all other religions, including most other Christian sects, as heretical. Roman gods were substituted for Christian gods, statues and temples were destroyed, prominent pagans were crucified, and properties confiscated by the Roman state.

Soon after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire (380 CE), the leadership of the Church in every corner of the Roman world adopted a radical, extremist, and brutal approach in converting the people of the Empire, not very different from what the Islamic State (ISIS, Daesh) does today: Vicious anti-paganism, persecutions, destruction of Phoenician temples or their conversion to churches, abandoning the Phoenician-Aramaic language and adopting Latin and Greek because these two languages were the official languages of the Roman Empire… One example of the brutality of the early Church is what happened to Hypatia of Alexandria, a woman scientist, philosopher and mathematician who was killed by a Christian mob in 415 CE because she defended heliocentrism (Earth orbits around the sun) against the Church's idea that the earth is the center of the world. Well into the Renaissance, the Age of Reason and up to the French Revolution, the Church was still persecuting scholars or scientists who made discoveries that ran counter to backward and primitive Church principles: Galileo in the 1600s is one example.

In other words, I blame the Christian religion and the early Church for destroying Lebanon's Phoenician identity. Instead of “bad” Phoenicians, we were forced to become “good” Christians. Our temples were destroyed or became churches, our gods became Christian saints, etc. The Lebanese landscape, from the narrow seacoast up the highlands, is dotted with abandoned Phoenician sites, temples and places of worship. More for political reasons than for dogmatic differences, the Phoenicians were despised by the old school Jews of the Empire (who rejected Christianity), as well as the new Jewish movement called "Christianity"; the Phoenicians were constantly berated for having carried out human and animal sacrifices, while the Romans were still crucifying prisoners, holding slaves, feeding  Jews to wild animals in the arena, among other "civilized" accomplishments of the Empire. Then when Islam arrived in the 7th century, things got even worse, as we were forced to adopt Arabic and abandon the use of our Phoenician language, the last shreds of which remain in a few rituals in the Maronite church. Even today, the Maronite Church pays only lip service to our original identity. It prefers that we remain only “Lebanese Christians”, because awakening the Phoenician heritage poses a threat to the Church. A re-awakened Phoenician identity might push the Christian identity to second rank, enhance civilian secular rule (at the expense of the Church’s authority and power), and possibly unify the Lebanese people, Christians and Muslims behind it, thus diminishing the role of the religious establishments (Christian and Muslim alike) in controlling their people. The Church in Ireland faces the same problem: A Celtic identity revival will unify the Irish people, weaken and potentially end the Catholic-Protestant divide, and relegate religious identity to second class, thus taking away from the Protestant and Catholic church institutions the power to control their respective herds by keeping them divided and separated.

For instance, why doesn’t the Church in Lebanon teach Syriac/Aramaic/Phoenician in its schools to promote the Phoenician identity? A simple comparison between Lebanon and Ireland shows that the Irish were made Christians by Saint Patrick in the 5th century, just as Saint Maron did with the Maronites. Yet the mostly Catholic Irish people retained their Celtic identity, their Celtic traditions, and their Celtic language for centuries, despite their later occupation and oppression by the Protestant English. Even today, the Irish teach Celtic in their schools and use it as an official language, they celebrate Celtic rituals, use Celtic names etc. while at the same time learning and using English. The Irish Catholic Church has lost a lot of ground because of this Celtic revival. The Irish kept their ancient identity alive while adapting to changing circumstances. Lebanon’s Phoenicians (and their language and culture) began disappearing the moment they became Christians, and the little bit of the Phoenician left in them was eventually completely erased by Islam. Today, Lebanon’s Christians pride themselves on learning and speaking Arabic and do not find it “useful” to learn Aramaic. Why? They can make money with the Arabs, while learning Aramaic as a part of their identity is considered a waste of time.

Two: Antisemitism. After Napoleon invaded and "re-discovered" Egypt (taking with him scientists, engineers, linguists, archaeologists, historians etc.) in the early 1800s, there was a renewed recognition by Western academia that the Near East may have been the precursor of European culture, while the Greeks and the Romans were mere recipients and transformers of Near Eastern culture. However, the wave of antisemitism that was spreading in Europe due to the rise of nationalism, made it difficult for scholars to admit to themselves that Semites (Egyptians, Jews, Phoenicians) could be the progenitors of Western civilization. Therefore, any evidence of Phoenician, Hebrew, or Egyptian contributions to European culture were denied, hidden, rejected. Two fascinating books detail this phenomenon: 1- "Black Athena" by Martin Bernal, and 2 - “Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean” by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz”.  

In this second book, the author attacks what she calls “Hellenocentrism”, i.e., the idea that Greek culture (and by extension European and western culture) spontaneously arose in the Mediterranean, without any contributions from Phoenicians and other Near Eastern civilizations, and this despite overwhelming linguistic, agricultural, genetic and historical evidence. Lopez-Ruiz promotes the idea that the Phoenicians, long before the Greeks, established themselves across the Mediterranean and laid the foundations for what later became Greek civilization. Suffice it to mention the phonetic alphabet which was developed by the Phoenicians (who in fact borrowed the idea from an early phoneticization by the Egyptians of their hieroglyphic writing), then passed on to the Greeks, and the recognition by the Greeks themselves that Europa, a Phoenician princess from Tyre abducted by Zeus and taken to Crete, gave her name to the European continent.

Three: The Silence of the Phoenicians. For a not-so-mysterious reason that is difficult for the Lebanese to admit today, our Phoenician ancestors themselves did not leave any recognizable body of literature. It is possible that they did and that those texts never came down to us. But the fact we have to deal with is that the Phoenicians, unlike all other contemporaneous civilizations, did not seem to have written about themselves or their own history; they perhaps were more busy trading and traveling. They left us no known book or books that speak to future generations. Only a few inscriptions here and there. By contrast, the Assyrians wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Jewish people wrote their own mythology in the Bible, the Greeks left us the Iliad and the Odyssey and a monumental record, and so did the Romans. The Egyptians left monuments, manuscripts, and wall writings. But the Phoenicians left very little, which does not help us, their descendants, to assert their contributions to human history and civilization. 

* By "Church" is meant the broader universal Catholic Church, but more specifically in the case of Lebanon, the Maronite Church which is an Eastern Catholic Church that is dogmatically independent of, but politically-affiliated with, the Roman Catholic Church.