Academic Anti-Semitism: Denigrating the Phoenicians

Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean
Carolina López-Ruiz
Harvard University Press, January 2022

Despite many decades of research, publications and academic activism (e.g. Martin Bernal's Black Athena), Western academe persists in adopting a Hellen0-centric view of the origins of European culture, for no other reason than a traditional residual anti-Semitism dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Somehow, out of nowhere, tell us the history texts that are taught to our young people, European culture sprung out of islands in the Eastern Mediterranean (e.g. Rhodes, Crete, etc.), as if by spontaneous generation. 

Never mind that the Greeks themselves attribute their origins to a princess who, they say, was kidnapped by Zeus disguised as white bull off of a beach in the city of Tyre, and taken across the Mediterranean to lands we know today as Europe. In fact, the Princess's name was Europa. Her brothers, notably Cadmus, Cilix, and Phoenix among others - were summoned by their father, King Agenor to go search for her and to never return if they don't find her. And so they did. Having failed to find their sister, they settled in various regions of continental Europe, thus becoming the founders of major European civilizations. A legend, granted, yet very telling. 

Never mind, again, that the city of Carthage (in today's Tunisia) was founded in the 9th century BC by another Tyrian princess, Elyssa-Dido, whose descendants the Carthaginians came very close to defeating Rome before it became an empire, which would have changed the course of history in unimaginable ways.

In her latest book, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean, Professor
Carolina López-Ruiz does justice to the contributions of the Phoenicians in creating the crucible from which all later Mediterranean civilizations emerged, including the Greek civilization. Here is the description of the book as it appears on the jacket:

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The first comprehensive history of the cultural impact of the Phoenicians, who knit together the ancient Mediterranean world long before the rise of the Greeks.

Imagine you are a traveler sailing to the major cities around the Mediterranean in 750 BC. You would notice a remarkable similarity in the dress, alphabet, consumer goods, and gods from Gibraltar to Tyre. This was not the Greek world―it was the Phoenician. Based in Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and other cities along the coast of present-day Lebanon, the Phoenicians spread out across the Mediterranean building posts, towns, and ports. Propelled by technological advancements of a kind unseen since the Neolithic revolution, Phoenicians knit together diverse Mediterranean societies, fostering a literate and sophisticated urban elite sharing common cultural, economic, and aesthetic modes.

The Phoenician imprint on the Mediterranean lasted nearly a thousand years, beginning in the Early Iron Age. Following the trail of the Phoenicians from the Levant to the Atlantic coast of Iberia, Carolina López-Ruiz offers the first comprehensive study of the cultural exchange that transformed the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Greeks, Etruscans, Sardinians, Iberians, and others adopted a Levantine-inflected way of life, as they aspired to emulate Near Eastern civilizations. López-Ruiz explores these many inheritances, from sphinxes and hieratic statues to ivories, metalwork, volute capitals, inscriptions, and Ashtart iconography.

Meticulously documented and boldly argued, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean revises the Hellenocentric model of the ancient world and restores from obscurity the true role of Near Eastern societies in the history of early civilizations.