To provide a proper prototype and parallel for modern Lebanon, these Lebanists insisted that the Phoenicians were always a separate, single people or even nation, united by geography, culture, religion and a common identity. As Charles Corm, a charmer and a chancer, as well as Ford Motor Company’s sole representative in Syria, bluntly put it in the July 1919 issue of his short-lived nationalist journal La Revue Phénicienne: ‘We want this nation, because it has always taken precedence in all the pages of our history.’ The argument worked: from 1920, Greater Lebanon was administered as a separate state within the French Mandate. But was it true? [...]
All of this, including Smith’s claim, would have surprised the ancient Phoenicians, a disparate set of neighbouring and often warring city-states, cut off from each other for the most part by deep river valleys. They did not see themselves as a single ethnic group or people, the kind that could provide the ‘groundwork’ for a nation. There is no known instance of a Phoenician ever calling themselves a Phoenician, or any other collective term. In their inscriptions, they describe themselves in terms of their individual families and cities. They don’t seem to have had a common culture, either: their dialects fall on a continuum that linked city states across Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine, and the individual ports developed separate civic and artistic cultures, drawing on different foreign examples and relationships: Byblos, for instance, looked more to Egyptian models; Arados to Syrian ones; Sidonian architecture drew on both Greece and Persia; while Tyre cultivated close political and commercial ties with Jerusalem. [...]
Just as British nationalists could deploy the Phoenicians to differentiate themselves from the more ‘Roman’ French, proponents of Irish nationality used a Phoenician past to distinguish the Irish from the more ‘Roman’ British. In this view, the British occupation of Ireland was cast as a great struggle between sophisticated, noble Carthage, ie the Phoenician-Irish, and the savage imperial power of Rome, ie Britain. At the same time, Vallancey’s grasp of Phoenician particularity in the ancient world was hazy, and he did not strongly distinguish them from other ancient peoples: he describes the Phoenicians as absorbing the Scythians on their travels, and he assigns the Irish round towers at different times to Phoenician and Persian construction.
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