The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXI: The End of Migration?

Oh no, demonetisation!

 The Continental versions of Penguin Classics are allowed to have naughty covers. Ooh la la! I like the single name author credit. This is a classic, not smut!  

So, anyway, it looks as though the problems at the UBC Libraries automated retrieval hub are now confined to email alerts, and I probably had my recalls waiting for me for a week the last two times I tried to get at Aviation Week, Flight, and The Engineer. I suspect this because this time around I also recalled Fortune, The Economist, and Newsweek from the PARC offsite storage facility, and got an alert for The Economist only. The upshot is that I have now all of same and might blame the need to process Aviation Week and The Engineer for being late with postblogging this week, whereas in fact it was the 31 January number of Newsweek that bogged me down yesterday. We get to hear about fallout next week! 

The saving grace here is that I would be remiss in not covering something of a blockbuster development in the history of the Iron Age Mediterranean, notwithstanding that I heard about it on a political blog, and they heard about it from The Economist. (Otherwise I could talk about Forbes' Road and the Duke of Cumberland.)

The tagline of The Economist article is that "New research shows just how diverse the ancient city of Dido was." Which is weird because "diverse" in modern discourse means accommodative of social difference, and this is pretty clearly the opposite of what this Nature study shows. Genome-wide data for 210 individuals, including 196 from "14 sites traditionallly identified as Phoenician and Punic," show that "Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements . . . between the sixth and second centuries BC." Instead, they show signs of interrelationship and had a genetic profile similar to Sicily and the Aegean, with a minority contribution of North African ancestry across the different Punic sites in the central and western Mediterranean. So, first, these populations were fairly homogenous. Second, their cultural identity was pretty hegemonic. People at these sites became "Punic" in a collective ethnogenesis. Ha'aretz paraphrases one of the study's authors as saying that it characterises Carthage being "the first biologically cosmopolitan civilisation, essentially a cultural and religious 'franchise' that the Phoenicians passed on to people with whom they had no genetic connection." Given our ongoing discussion about how the history of Punic civilisation has been shaped by anti-semitism, this is pretty striking.

  Ha'aretz also doesn't its story behind a paywall, so we get a bit more detail. Phoenicians sampled at Beirut, Sidon, and Azhiv ("[A] Phoenician settlement on the north coast of modern-day Israel") are typically Levantine, similar to their  neighbours and previous local groups. Punic people, and note the gap in data from 500--100BC due to the prevalence of cremation, were of unclear origin because the data cannot distinguish Sicilians from "Aegeans." 

But Salammbo isn't about a religio-cultural franchise. The Carthaginians speak a West Semitic language closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic, but perhaps more significantly to Ugaritic, which plays to anti-semitic tropes. Salammbo's personal religiosity, and the plot, is tied to the city goddess, Tanit, but pretty  much all Central Mediterranean cities had city goddesses by this time. I haven't actually read Salammbo, and you can't make me, but I've been aware of it since the misty dawn of my youth because, as a cultural artefact, it is about the Tophet of Carthage. Tens of millions of people like me associate the novel with Flaubert's reported dramatic description of child sacrifice in this Carthaginian sacred cemetery. We know that the actual extent of the practice is controversial, and, above all, we know that the veil of sanctimony which was long hung over the Old Testament has been torn down to reveal a text rich with episodes of child sacrifice. Was Jerusalem's "Gehenna" the site of not just the Biblical "Tophet," but more specifically of a Tophet like Carthage's, where child sacrifice was a common practice for the Judaean elites who produced the patriarchal literature of the early parts of the Bible? The controversy is well-covered in Wikipedia, and if I may editorialise, it seems to me that social taboos make discussions of child abuse a fraught but powerful tool for the ongoing desacralisation of Christianity, and perhaps Judaism.  

Reconstructed Corinthian columns at the site of Tharros. 
By Norbert Nagel - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26067471

But here's the thing: If there is one thing that modern studies of Phoenician/Punic civilisation can agree on, tophets are archaeological signals of Punic, and not Phoenician culture. "Fields full of buried urns containing the burnt remains of human infants and lambs, covered by carved stone monuments" seem to have started, much like the signature Punic DNA signature, in Carthage, and to have spread from there. They are found mainly at the waist of the Mediterranean, at Punic sites at and around Carthage on the Tunisian Sahel, on Sardinia, Sicily, and on not-otherwise-known-to-be "Punic" Malta. They are not found at Punic sites in Iberia. The stone markers are posterior to the earliest burials and start at Carthage about 650BC, spreading from there to Motya on Sicily and Tharros on the coast of southern Sardinia two generations later. Tharros, I see from Wikipedia, is now being reclaimed by the locals for "nuraghic" civilisation, in which case it is the clearest example of which I am aware of "Punic" settlement at a "native" site in the central Mediterranean.

We are not as well informed about Carthaginian culture as we should like to be, but the tophets of the Straits are pretty clearly diagnostic, and point to a cultural practice centred on Carthage, not Tyre or any of the other maritime trading cities of the Levantine coast. We are not in doubt about the language that was adopted in Carthage, but we now know that it was not the language spoken natively by its settlers. Languages are not (necessarily) spread by migration.

 From the stand point of statebuilding, the adoption of an official language makes sense, and in the context of the central Iron Age, there were few other candidate literary languages written in alphabets. We are especially entitled to wonder, it seems to me, about whether "Aegean" means "Hellene." That no other languages survive from the Aegean, Indo-Anatolian apart, is no more surprising than that we find no evidence of the Afro-asiatic language that must have been spoken natively on the coast of Tunisia when Carthage was built. "No writing" does not mean "No talking." 

The problem we come back around to is the dynamism of the Carthaginian community. Why is a society just here so influential? What lies before and beneath the decision to adopt the Phoenician "package. Well, "Phoenician" just means "Makers of purple," and the thesis remains that these were factory towns, as much about producing dyed wool as dye and thus open to agrarian expansion even if settled to extract maritime resources in a narrows where pelagic migrations were funnelled. Perhaps our attention is once more being directed  back to the consumers of the factory product. 

If there's an anime about Suppililiuma . . . 

 Why isn't there one about Ashurbanipal?