In Search of the Phoenicians

A revisionist study challenging the assumption that "the Phoenicians", and by extension "the Carthaginians" or "the Punic people", constituted a unified ethnic or cultural group with a self-conscious identity. Quinn argues that this framing is largely a Greek and modern construction; the people we lump together identified primarily with their cities, families, and gods, not with a pan-Phoenician nation. The book has substantially reshaped how the field thinks about identity in the western Mediterranean and is essential reading for any project that, like this one, has to decide how to handle ethnic categories. Quinn's framing affects the encyclopedia's treatment of Carthaginian self-understanding, the "Punic-ness" of colonies in Iberia and Sicily, and the question of what, if anything, was shared across the western settlements.