Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Relations

by Michael Dietler (Editor), Carolina López-Ruiz (Editor)

Overview

During the first millennium BCE, complex encounters of Phoenician and Greek colonists with natives of the Iberian Peninsula transformed the region and influenced the entire history of the Mediterranean.

One of the first books on these encounters to appear in English, this volume brings together a multinational group of contributors to explore ancient Iberia’s colonies and indigenous societies, as well as the comparative study of colonialism. These scholars—from a range of disciplines including classics, history, anthropology, and archaeology—address such topics as trade and consumption, changing urban landscapes, cultural transformations, and the ways in which these issues played out in the Greek and Phoenician imaginations. Situating ancient Iberia within Mediterranean colonial history and establishing a theoretical framework for approaching encounters between colonists and natives, these studies exemplify the new intellectual vistas opened by the engagement of colonial studies with Iberian history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226148489
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/15/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Michael Dietler is associate professor of anthropology, associate in classics, and member of the Program on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. Carolina López-Ruiz is assistant professor of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University.

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COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS IN ANCIENT IBERIA

Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Relations

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The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-14847-2

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Chapter One

Colonial Encounters in Iberia and the Western Mediterranean: An Exploratory Framework

Michael Dietler

Introduction

This chapter is intended to do two things. In the first place, the reflections offered here seek to explain why the ancient encounters explored in this volume should be of interest and importance to a wide variety of readers, well beyond the group of specialists convened to produce this panorama of new research on ancient colonialism in Iberia. In the second place, I aim to contextualize the specific Iberian cases we are considering here within both the broader history of colonial encounters in the ancient Western Mediterranean and larger theoretical debates about colonialism that are taking place within fields such as anthropology and postcolonial studies. In other words, in addition to setting the stage for readers not already familiar with the history of the ancient Mediterranean, I want to suggest both why the particular case of ancient Iberia is of considerable significance to broader studies of colonialism in the social sciences and humanities and, reciprocally, why scholars focusing on the Iberian case can profit from a broader engagement with discussions in these other domains.

Why does ancient Iberia matter? Briefly put, because the ancient colonial encounters that took place in Iberia, and in the western Mediterranean more generally, during the first millennium BC have played a profound role in the historical construction of colonial discourses, ideologies, and practices in the imperial projects of modern European nations and in the very construction of modern European identity and "Western civilization." For reasons that will become clear later, it is crucial that scholars engaged in the study of modern colonialism appreciate this phenomenon and its many ramifications. One such ramification is that this complex modern entwinement with the ancient colonial past has had a pervasive reciprocal influence on the way that archaeologists and historians now approach and understand these seminal ancient encounters. Because of the crucial role it has played in the foundational mythology and discursive constitution of "the West," a critical reexamination of ancient Mediterranean colonialism is very much needed. However, the legacy of this relationship makes it is impossible for us to evaluate and improve upon current understandings of these ancient colonial encounters without simultaneously exposing and disarticulating the entangled strands of ancient and modern colonialisms. These are rather sweeping contentions, to be sure, and I attempt to justify them with a more detailed argument later.

But first, in order to make my comments and the gist of this volume more comprehensible to readers not already familiar with the ancient history of Iberia or the Mediterranean, let me contextualize the subject within a brief general history of colonial encounters in the ancient Western Mediterranean. This is, in fact, a complex tale in which encounters and entanglements between manifold indigenous peoples and foreign agents from several expanding states of the Eastern and Central Mediterranean played a recurrent and crucial role (fig. 1.1).

A Brief History of Colonial Encounters in the Western Mediterranean

The Western Mediterranean during the first millennium BC encompassed a diverse and dynamic landscape of social identities, linguistic communities, political formations, and modes of interaction. However, in very general terms, one is dealing with indigenous societies constituting three broad linguistic groupings: (1) Iberian, along the coastal zones of southern and eastern Spain and extending into coastal Roussillon and Western Languedoc in France; (2) Celtic, in the lower Rhône basin of France and the interior regions of France, Spain, and Portugal; and (3) Ligurian, along the Provençal and north Italian coast east of Marseille (fig. 1.2). Celtic is an Indo-European language family with modern versions still spoken today in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany. However, it disappeared from the Western Mediterranean and continental Europe, with the exception of Brittany, as a result of Roman colonization and colonialism. Iberian was a non-Indo-European language family that became completely extinct as a result of the same process of Roman expansion. It is known only from untranslatable texts written in several scripts adapted from the Phoenician and, in one area, Greek alphabets. Ligurian is another extinct language group known essentially from only a few toponyms and ethnonyms. Hence it is even less well understood, and its broader linguistic affiliation is uncertain, although most scholars seem to agree on a tentative placement within the Indo-European family. Finally, a language known as Tartessian, with a much smaller distribution in the Guadalquivir Valley of southwestern Spain, should also be mentioned. This was a non-Indo-European language and was apparently not related to Iberian or any other known language. It was the earliest of all these languages to be written, with a script derived from the Phoenician alphabet.

Three different major categories of alien traders and colonists interacted with these native peoples prior to the Roman conquest of the region in the late third and second centuries BC: Phoenicians, Etruscans, and Greeks. The earliest of these were the Phoenicians. Phoenician is actually an ancient Greek term applied collectively to Semitic-speaking peoples originally from a number of independent city-states (e.g. Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos) along the Syro-Palestinian coast whose identities were more locally focused and who most likely had no collective ethnonym. This is an important feature to bear in mind in the discussion of colonial encounters: Phoenician is an artificial category that should not be taken to indicate a coherent, uniform, or stable culture or identity—or even a precise place of origin. It is a vague, pragmatic collective term that indexes a complex set of identities and cultural practices that evolved constantly throughout a long, interlinked process of colonial expansion in different parts of the Mediterranean.

"Phoenician" traders and settlers, understood in this sense, began to spread along the southern shores of the Mediterranean in North Africa perhaps as early as the late second millennium BC, although the precise dates of these ventures are uncertain. Archaeological excavations confirm that the famous city of Carthage (qart khadasht, or "new city") was founded in Tunisia at the end of the ninth century BC, supplanting an even earlier nearby colony called Utica, and several smaller colonies were established farther west in Algeria and Morocco at roughly the same time. As early as the beginning of the eighth century BC Phoenicians had also established several trading settlements on both the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of southern Spain and on the island of Ibiza. As Ana Arruda documents in chapter 4, recent archaeological evidence clearly demonstrates a contemporary Phoenician presence at multiple sites on the western coast of Portugal as well. But Phoenician colonies were predominantly restricted to the south and west coasts of Iberia. There is no textual or archaeological evidence for Phoenician colonial settlements along the eastern coast of Spain north of a line running roughly from Alicante to Ibiza, although it is certainly possible that a few small communities of Phoenician traders resided in indigenous Iberian settlements farther north.

The Phoenician colonial settlements in Iberia were usually located at the mouths of rivers. Prominent examples include Cádiz/Gades (or Gadir) and Huelva in southwestern Spain, Abul and Santa Olaia in Portugal, a dense concentration along the Andalusian coast (Morro de Mezquitilla, Toscanos, Cerro del Villar, Almuñécar, etc.), and a few on the southeastern coast (e.g., Fonteta at Guardamar). In some cases, especially in the Guadalquivir, Río Tinto, Tagus, and Mondego regions, these were rivers leading to rich metal resources of the interior (especially silver but also gold, copper, tin, lead, and iron). In fact, it has been suggested frequently that before the conquest of the Phoenician city of Tyre (the mother-city of Carthage and Cádiz) by the Assyrians in 573 BC, these Spanish settlements were an important component of a trans-Mediterranean Phoenician metal trade. However, as various chapters in this book show, metals were by no means the only resources of interest to Phoenician traders, nor can the location of metal sources explain the origin of all, or even most, Phoenician colonies in Iberia. Timber, salt, slaves, agricultural products, murex for purple dye production, access to good farmland, and a variety of other things have all been invoked to explain the location and livelihood of particular Phoenician colonies. It appears that these colonies were simultaneously importing material from the Eastern and Central Mediterranean, producing their own products for export (e.g., wine, salt, purple dye, ships), and engaging in trade with surrounding native societies and each other. Ship-based Greek traders were sporadically active in Spain as well (e.g., at Huelva), although there is little evidence for this before the sixth century BC and, unlike the Phoenicians, Greeks did not establish any colonies in the Western Mediterranean until the sixth century BC.

The late seventh century BC appears to have marked the apex of Phoenician trade expansion in the Western Mediterranean, after which there was a period of decline or transformation. By the early sixth century BC, many of the early establishments had either disappeared or become "indigenized" (that is, the material culture elements that made them distinctively recognizable as Phoenician had been transformed to such an extent that they resemble other native sites of the region). The well-preserved and recently excavated port site at La Rábita / Fonteta (Guardamar del Segura), buried under modern dunes near the mouth of the Segura in Alicante, is a case in point that also demonstrates some of the difficulties in understanding the nature of Phoenician colonies. Based upon some distinctive architectural features and ceramics, one can determine that it was founded by Phoenicians near the end of the eighth century BC. But the town appears to have attracted a growing native population as well, and this native presence became increasingly discernible after the mid-seventh century and dominant during the sixth century BC.

From the sixth century BC on, the power of the former Phoenician colony of Carthage began to eclipse that of other Phoenician cities, and it gradually began to incorporate the former autonomous Phoenician establishments in Iberia, Sicily, and Sardinia within the expanding "Punic" commercial and political sphere. Punic is actually the Latin rendition of the Greek term Phoenician, but the former label is now generally used by scholars to distinguish things associated specifically with Carthage and its domain of influence. Carthage also began to found new colonies of its own in Iberia and elsewhere (among the most important of which was Carthago Nova / Cartagena, founded in 229 BC on the southeastern coast of Spain). Moreover, the rapidly expanding urban centers of Cádiz, Malaka/Málaga, and Ebusus/Ibiza eclipsed older Phoenician trading ports such as Toscanos in size and importance. During the third century BC, a large swath of interior southern Iberia was also brought within the evolving Carthaginian maritime empire, which became the major rival in the Western and Central Mediterranean of the rapidly expanding Roman Republic. Carthage and Rome fought a series of major wars beginning in the mid-third century BC, and Punic Iberia eventually passed under Roman dominion following the defeat of Hannibal and the Barcid Carthaginian armies in the Second Punic War at the end of that century. Consolidation of Roman control over the whole of indigenous Iberia required nearly two centuries of warfare and experimentation with administrative and cultural techniques of domination, but it eventually resulted in the establishment of the imperial provinces of Hispania Tarraconensis, Baetica, and Lusitania.

Meanwhile, along the nearby arc of coastline sweeping from southern France through Catalonia, the history of colonial encounters was rather different. In Provence and Languedoc, Etruscan merchants were the first alien agents from the east to initiate contacts with indigenous Celtic- and Ligurian-speaking peoples of the area. These traders began to frequent the French coast during the late seventh century BC. Etruscan is, again, not an endogenous ethnonym; it is an alien Roman term used to designate collectively the inhabitants of a number of independent city-states in the Tuscan region of central Italy who referred to themselves as "Rasenna" and were called "Tyrrhenoi" by Greeks. As with Iberian, Etruscan was a non-Indo-European language that gradually disappeared in favor of Latin after Tuscany was subsumed within the expanding Roman sphere of control. Unfortunately, although the Etruscans had developed a script based on the alphabet of Greek colonists in Italy, we do not have access to textual descriptions of their encounters in the west, as we do to a certain extent for Greek colonists. But archaeological evidence indicates that the Etruscan presence in France was different from that of the Phoenicians in Spain: it consisted largely of a ship-based "floater" trade without the founding of colonial settlements, although Etruscan trader enclaves at indigenous settlements have been suggested for a couple of sites, most notably Saint-Blaise in the Provence and Lattes (ancient Lattara) in Eastern Languedoc. Recent excavations at Lattes offer the only strong material evidence supporting such a proposition, but the data are still ambiguous in terms of the precise scale of an Etruscan presence there. Etruscan products consumed in southern France consisted overwhelmingly of wine transported in distinctive amphorae that originated most probably in southern Etruria, along with smaller quantities of Etruscan bucchero nero drinking ceramics and a few bronze basins. The small quantities of early East-Greek wine-drinking cups found in France were probably imported by the same merchants who brought the Etruscan goods.

Not only were Etruscans the first colonial agents in this region, but the inhabitants of southern France were by far the biggest consumers of Etruscan exports. However, the consumption of Etruscan goods was largely a coastal phenomenon: there are no indigenous sites with significant quantities of this material more than about thirty kilometers inland. To be sure, very small numbers of bucchero nero drinking cups and bronze basins circulated a bit more widely, and a handful of amphorae shards have been found as far north as Lyon, but these do not alter the overall pattern. There is a particularly high concentration of Etruscan imports in the lower Rhône basin, and Etruscan amphorae also constitute a significant proportion of imported materials as far west as Roussillon. However, with the exception of the Greek colony of Emporion, Etruscan imports are conspicuously absent from (or very poorly represented at) sites farther south in Spain, and it does not appear that Etruscan traders were active to any significant extent in Iberia.

These Etruscan merchants were quickly followed, at the beginning of the sixth century BC, by the first colonial settlement of Greeks in the Western Mediterranean, at Massalia (modern Marseille). Once again, the collective term Greek needs some qualification in this context, because it does not denote a coherent or stable identity or culture, at least not in the period of colonial expansion in the Western Mediterranean. It is used here purely for reasons of convenience to denote speakers of a closely related set of language dialects that originated in the Greek peninsula and were spread elsewhere as a result of colonial expansion. In any case, the "Greek" colonists who settled at Massalia were from the Ionian-Greek city of Phocaea on the coast of Turkey, and, in contrast to the heterogeneous pattern of Greek colonization in southern Italy and the Black Sea, it was almost exclusively Phocaean Greeks who settled in the Western Mediterranean. Massalia grew quickly to become, at an eventual size of about fifty hectares, by far the largest city in the entire Western Mediterranean, colonial or indigenous, until after the Roman conquest.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Ex Occidente Lux: A Preface

Michael Dietler and Carolina López-Ruiz

Part I          Theoretical Issues and Frameworks

1          Colonial Encounters in Iberia and the Western Mediterranean: An Exploratory Framework

            Michael Dietler

2          Colonial Relations and Social Change in Iberia (Seventh to Third Centuries BC)

            Joan Sanmartí

Part II        New Perspectives on Phoenician and Greek Ventures on the Mediterranean and Atlantic Coasts

3          Colonial Contacts and Protohistoric Indigenous Urbanism on the Mediterranean Coast of the Iberian Peninsula

            Maria Carme Belarte

4          Phoenician Colonization on the Atlantic Coast of the Iberian Peninsula

            Ana Margarida Arruda

5          Greeks and the Iberian Peninsula: Forms of Exchange and Settlements

            Pierre Rouillard

Part III       Plant Resources, Agrarian Practices, and the Colonial Political Economy

6          Botanical and Archaeological Dimensions of the Colonial Encounter

            Ramon Buxó

7          Lumbermen and Shipwrights: Phoenicians on the Mediterranean Coast of Southern Spain

            Brigitte Treumann

Part IV       The Question of Tartessos: A Debate Reframed

8          Phoenicians in Tartessos

            María Belén Deamos

9          Precolonization and Colonization in the Interior of Tartessos

            Sebastián Celestino Pérez

Part V        Interrogating Colonial Texts and Imagined Landscapes

10        Tarshish and Tartessos Revisited: Textual Problems and Historical Implications

            Carolina López-Ruiz

11        Iberia in the Greek Geographical Imagination

            Javier Gómez Espelosín

Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: A Coda

Michael Dietler and Carolina López-Ruiz

 

 

List of Contributors

Index

Editorial Reviews

Iberia was one of the major regions of the Iron Age Mediterranean, but it remains poorly known among English-language archaeologists, historians, and classicists. This book, providing superb case studies of everything from the literary sources to the botanical remains, will be required reading for many years to come.”

Ian Morris

The diversity of authors in this collection is noteworthy, and the archaeological and historical data they present are rich and highly useful. This book will be a widely consulted benchmark in the study of early Iberian colonialism, and will stimulate focused, interactive debates over the topic for years to come.”—Susan E. Alcock, Brown University

Susan E. Alcock