The Phoenicians are often forgotten in histories of the ancient Mediterranean that focus on Greece and Rome, despite their extraordinary achievements: long before the Greeks and Romans these sailors and traders built the first city states, invented the alphabet, discovered the pole star, and colonized the west.
My new book argues that they didn’t see themselves as a political, ethnic or cultural group. Instead, it explores the communities they did create in their own time, as well as the way in which ‘being Phoenician’ later became a powerful political and cultural tool for a variety of people from Roman emperors to Irish Enlightenment scholars to Lebanese and Tunisian nationalists in the twentieth century. This lecture will give an overview of the book’s arguments, and discuss some of the reactions it has received.

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