Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Phoenician Culture II.1: Religion—Deities and Mythical Characters

The Phoenicians have received growing attention in scholarship on the ancient Mediterranean in recent decades (most recently in Anglophone scholarship: López-Ruiz 2021; Sader 2019; Quinn 2018). Yet, as C. López-Ruiz notes, “the study of the Phoenicians is still extremely fragmented, striving to find a space of its own” (2021: 4). These peoples have frequently fallen through the rifts created by the artificial bifurcation of “West” and “East,” of classics and Near Eastern or biblical studies, and of Indo-European and Semitic. Another contributing factor to this fragmentation is the lack of “direct textual transmission” of Phoenician literature, with most knowledge conveyed to us via Greco-Roman sources and archaeological evidence, as noted in the volume under review (165).The recent turn toward more globalizing histories of the Mediterranean Iron Age has somewhat rehabilitated the Phoenicians as active agents in the creation of the interconnected cultural and economic currents that shaped this ancient world (e.g., Hodos 2020). Yet the study of the Phoenicians—their language, culture, history, and archaeology—remains hyper-specialized and rather inaccessible to broader scholarly communities due to the issues described above. The current encyclopedia project, the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Phoenician Culture (EDPC), aims to remedy these sticking points by providing “a compact repertoire that is as complete as possible, of easy and immediate consultation, organized according to criteria that aim to be consistent” (ix). The EDPC in its entirety contains over 2,000 entries by around 200 different authors from 20 countries, as per the publisher’s overview.The volume under review is volume II.1: Religion—Deities and Mythical Characters. The first volume in this series focused on historical figures in the Phoenician world. Another volume on religion will appear in the near future as volume II.2: Cult and Ritual and will be a close compliment to II.1. Later volumes will deal with topics such as language and written sources, archaeological sites and toponyms, and social, political, and economic life. As the editors note, each volume in this series strives to be “in one sense independent, but at the same time inseparable from the others.” (ix) The volumes thus contain a consistent system of tagging individual lemmata within and between volumes to create entries that are concise but inherently interconnected and comprehensive, to allow researchers the fullest reading possible on each topic. This complex tagging system naturally causes one to wonder whether the entire EDPC will one day be digitized in such a way that turns the tags into navigable hyperlinks between entries and volumes (volumes I and II.1 are currently available as eBooks but are not linked to one another via any type of content management system).Volume II.1 focuses on Phoenician deities directly attested in the Levant, primarily in the first millennium BCE (xii). Perhaps the greatest challenge for this particular volume lies in the dynamic nature of divine and mythical figures and the constantly shifting syncretisms that made it impossible to contain any deity within its respective cultural borders (or indeed within a thousand-year time span). The editors acknowledge at the outset that “a deity . . . is a symbolic universe of extreme complexity, subject to variations in form and content, according to the historical evolution of the culture that conceived it, and that continually re-moulds it” (x). They also rightfully question whether the tripartite division into gods, heroes, and mortals, commonly applied to the Greek world, fits with Phoenician culture. Entries thus include figures such as the Rephaim (divinized royal ancestors) and divine personifications such as Eros (“Love”), Phos, Pyr, and Phlox (“Light”, “Fire”, and “Flame”), and Pothos (“Desire”), as detailed in the cosmogonic accounts of Philo of Byblos’s Phoenician History.Furthermore, the complexity of crosscultural interaction in the ancient Mediterranean necessitates including foreign mythical or divine characters absorbed into Phoenician culture. As such, the reader will meet not only Melqart, Eshmun, Astarte, and the various Baals but also Osiris, Ino-Leucothea, Saturn, and Caelestis. In many cases, these “foreign” gods will be described first in their own cultural contexts with a shorter section at the end of the entry, sometimes by a separate author, detailing their evidence in the Phoenician world through elements like theophoric names. Beyond mythical or divine figures, the reader will also encounter entries on mythical elements like The Pillars of Hercules/Heracles and general categories such as Myth and Mythology, Deities in Personal Names, and Divine Names and Epithets.Overall, the separation of the EDPC volume on religion into two subvolumes has allowed space for clear focus on deities and mythological figures and the nature of the evidence for each of these, committing the cults and rituals surrounding these figures and their places of worship to later volumes. The coverage of deities and mythological characters in this volume is thus laudably inclusive but, as with any encyclopedic project, subject to challenges of consistency and comprehensiveness. In exploring these challenges, it is useful to consider how a nonexpert (or an expert in an adjacent field, such as classics or Egyptology) might experience these entries.First of all, the editors note in the introduction that all entries theoretically follow a consistent format (xiii–xiv), beginning with linguistic and documentary data, then general historical information, followed by direct evidence starting from the Levant and moving westward, followed by several more categories. In reality, individual entries vary considerably in length and structure, which is understandable given the variegated nature of the evidence (one might also question the focus from the Levant westward as well, given Phoenician ties to other parts of the Near East). For instance, some entries helpfully list all the ancient sources for a god or hero at the end (e.g., Elissa), while others divide up the entry into subsections such as time periods, etymology, and iconography and discuss relevant ancient sources in each of these sections (e.g., Eshmun). The bibliographies at the end of each entry are ordered chronologically by date of publication and presented in compact format and font. This arrangement is acceptable for entries with only a few sources, but it makes ones with more extensive bibliography (e.g., Bes, 74–75) hard to navigate for the reader and certainly precludes any quick scanning of sources.Perhaps most frustrating is the extent to which many entries omit scholarly references altogether at points where citing key sources would have guided the reader through competing scholarly interpretations of a given divine or mythological figure. For instance, the reader will encounter phrases such as “In the light of recent studies . . .” (128) without subsequent references. Some authors allude to debates about the origins of cults without clarifying the scholars and works behind these debates (e.g., on Demeter and Core: “The reliability of this information has been questioned recently and it has been argued that the author’s comment is part of a stereotypical and imaginary preconception of what is Punic” [94]). Other entries are more adept at walking the reader through the scholarly debates behind these figures (e.g., Sadambaal, 204–5) as well as the ancient evidence (e.g., Holy God of Sarepta, 129–31). In a key reference work for Phoenician divine and mythological figures, such documentation is essential as a guide not only to the evidence but to the arguments that make sense of this evidence.There appear to be few major omissions among entries. Many figures originating outside the Phoenician world proper feature in these pages by virtue of their appearance in Philo of Byblos’s Phoenician History, cited in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica (Philo himself gets his own entry, as does his semimythical source, Sanchouniathon). Two puzzling omissions are Aphrodite and Hera, especially given the inclusion of other Greek deities such as Dionysus, Demeter and Core, Apollo, Athena, and Poseidon, among others. For Aphrodite, the reader is referred to Adonis; Astarte; Baalat Gebal; Baaltis; for Hera, the reader is referred to Astarte and Tinnit. No doubt these figures are blended with their referred counterparts, as are other Greek deities. Yet an inclusion of Aphrodite, for instance, might have allowed more exploration of Cyprus as a major locale where the identities of divine figures were expressed and developed, particularly at sites like Paphos, Kition, and Amathus (no doubt these sites will appear in later volumes of the EDPC). Indeed, another inclusion could have been the Great Goddess of Cyprus or Wanassa. Such goddesses represented connections between Cyprus and the Levantine coast (Herodotus, Historiae 1.105.2–3) and were closely connected mythically to the figure of Kinyras (Tacitus, Historiae 2.3; compare Pausanias, Graeciae descriptio 8.5.2; see Franklin 2015; Młynarczyk 2020), who appears in this volume as Cinyras. Overall, Aphrodite, as well as Hera, may have also allowed for alternative viewpoints to explore the expression of major Phoenician deities like Astarte and Tinnit, both of whom receive extensive treatment in this volume.Many entries contain helpful color and black-and-white images, most of which are small but of acceptable quality. Three topographic maps are presented as Plates 1–3 at the end, displaying the entire Mediterranean, the eastern Mediterranean, and the western Mediterranean. Unfortunately, the captions for Plates 2 and 3 are incorrect (e.g., the caption for Plate 3, which depicts the western Mediterranean is labeled “Phoenicia and the Levant”). Furthermore, these plates do not appear to be referenced in any of the entries beyond the introduction and thus risk being underutilized by readers. All entries rely heavily on abbreviations of ancient sources, place names, and cultural names, which are listed at the front of the volume, divided into four sections (“General,” “Greek and Latin sources,” “Biblical books,” and “Bibliographical references”; the reader is also referred to the OED for further abbreviations). An index of entries from EDPC’s first volume and an index of figures and plates are found at the end of this volume. There are some inconsistencies in spelling (e.g., Boston esh-Sheikh vs. Bustan esh-Sheikh), although these are minimal. Readers should note that the varied choices of spelling (e.g., “C” vs. “K”) may present issues for searches—the editors note in the introduction that no absolute rules were adhered to in spelling (xiv).These issues aside, this volume—and the EDPC in general—represents a monumental undertaking that will no doubt make the Phoenicians more accessible to scholars of the ancient Mediterranean and adjacent regions. The majority of entries are comprehensive and of high quality and bring to light some of the latest research on individual deities and mythical figures. Some discussions are truly thought-provoking in terms of what they teach us about crosscultural syncretisms. For instance, the contexts for the equation of Cronus with Baal Haamon are almost exclusively in Greek authors discussing so-called child sacrifice in the Hellenistic period; in different contexts, Baal Haamon was matched with other gods like Zeus (88–89). Such a discussion begets exciting questions about the nature of syncretism in the ancient world, portraying it as a system whose employment and interpretation were subject to constant mutability depending upon the viewpoints of ancient worshippers (and ancient commentators). This breadth of discussion begs the question of whether an encyclopedia of Greco-Roman gods and mythological beings would be this open to including “non-Greco-Roman” deities, or of recognizing such complex syncretisms beyond obvious cases (e.g., Aphrodite-Astarte).The user of EDPC II.1 will thus find this volume both practical and informative, and oftentimes truly illuminating. It is a treasure trove of knowledge about divine figures that colored and structured the worlds of the Phoenicians and many other Mediterranean peoples. While many entries no doubt reflect the need to derive much research on the Phoenicians from Greco-Roman and biblical sources, the EDPC is nonetheless a testament to the interconnectedness of religious experience in the ancient Mediterranean. The editors and contributors of this encyclopedic dictionary have only made it harder for scholars to ignore the role of the Phoenicians in this history, and they are to be commended for this achievement.