Aliquot and Bonnet (eds.), Phénicie hellénistique

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW:

Julien Aliquot, Corinne Bonnet (ed.), La Phénicie hellénistique: Actes du colloque international de Toulouse (18-20 février 2013). Topoi Supplément, 13. Lyon: Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque Salomon-Reinach, 2015. Pp. 396. ISBN 17640733. €30.00.

Reviewed by Paul Keen, University of Massachusetts Lowell (paul_keen@uml.edu)

[The Table of Contents is listed below.]

As noted by Aliquot and Bonnet in the introduction to this volume, scholarship has often been inclined to treat Hellenistic Phoenicia either obliquely as (to borrow Sartre’s phrase from the conclusion, p. 367) a “somewhat banal Hellenistic province” or as a unique example of Hellenization in which Greek culture found a ready footing among Phoenicians participating in the Hellenistic koine while simultaneously retaining their own language and certain cultural and religious habits.1 In recent years, scholarship on the Hellenistic and Roman Levant, as well as the Punic west, has done much to increase the sophistication and breadth of our understanding of continuities and change in terms of cultural and religious identity beyond the binaries encapsulated in the increasingly out-of-favor concept of Hellenization.2 Nonetheless, outside of Bonnet’s Les enfants de Cadmos, published only shortly before this volume, Hellenistic Phoenicia as a region and chronological period in its own right had eluded monograph- length treatment since Grainger’s 1991 survey.3 Here, Aliquot and Bonnet, two of the principal protagonists of scholarly advances in the region, have sought to remedy this gap and to broaden our understanding of the region and period through the publication of fifteen papers and a concluding analysis by Maurice Sartre, each focused on our understanding of, and the evidence for, the shifting political, economic, and cultural dynamics of the period.

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Cross-file under Phoenician Watch.