"This project is a study of the sociology of contact between Greeks and Phoenicians in the Iron Age between 1000-600BCE. My approach is to focus on the social practices of banqueting in two sites where Greeks and Phoenicians are supposed...
more"This project is a study of the sociology of contact between Greeks and Phoenicians in the Iron Age between 1000-600BCE. My approach is to focus on the social practices of banqueting in two sites where Greeks and Phoenicians are supposed to have come in contact, Zancle on Sicily and Kommos on Crete, since banqueting practices constitute both possible contexts of contact between these specific groups of Greeks and Phoenicians and certain objects of motivated cultural reinterpretation by Greeks and Phoenicians generally (Nijboer 159, 168).
Instead of the imported ceramic remains at these two sites indicating the presence of the peoples who made them, and besides them being evidence of exchange (trade), I intend to view archaeological objects as evidence for the practices of which they are part, and the majority of the ceramic material exchanged in the Iron Age is involved in drinking and dining (Crielaard 60). This last observation is of great importance because it is on drinking equipment that Greeks first made use of their adapted Phoenician alphabet, and it seems to be from the Phoenician marzēaḥ that Greeks learned to recline at their parties.
The symposion, the ancient Greek elite drinking-party, is a favourite locus of ancient authors for the discussion of the gods, love, and other things we assign to the category of culture, often in the form of dialogues or group conversations. The pre-sympotic Homeric banquet was the locus for polite discussion, political competition and negotiation, and the performance of traditional songs; the symposion, while very different, continued these traditions. Oswyn Murray stated in his 1990 edited volume that “it is from the symposiast’s couch that Greek culture of the Archaic age makes most sense” (11), and I propose that the same might be said about the Greek-speaking populations in the Iron Age, in that their banqueting practices may have provided opportunities for them to learn from Phoenicians elements of their religious and social practices (Vlassopoulos 236, for the Classical period), as well as the technology of the alphabet, which proved formative in the emergence of Greek states.
I orient this study around the social practise of the banquet in response to two trends in contemporary scholarship. The first is that archaeologists have been remarking that interpretive models based on trade are insufficient to account for the presence of imported objects (Strøm 371, Shanks 198), and the second is that literary scholars and historians who also observe that casual or commercial contacts cannot account for the Near Eastern elements in Greek literature (Finkleberg 62, Powell 46, West 624) orient their interpretations around two polarized contexts of contact: the contacts of Greek communities with more or less individual itinerant specialists (following Burkert 1992; Bachvarova 23-5, Lopez-Ruiz 35), and the contacts between individuals and parents and children in ethnically mixed families in ethnically mixed communities (following Coldstream 100; Powell 46, Lopez-Ruiz 29, 36, 46). The itinerant specialist is archaeologically undetectable, and its extreme opposite – ethnically mixed families and communities – while extant seems a more intense level of contact than what is necessary for these exchanges.
The intermediate term between these extremes is a realm of interaction actually much broader than “the interaction of Greek and Near Eastern groups for commercial or even religious reasons (often inseparable)” (Lopez-Ruiz 35). It is this intermediate area, which is typically dominated by notions of “trade” that requires attention and redefinition (Lopez-Ruiz 37). Thus, I propose that the social practices of drinking and banqueting, as contexts in which gift-exchange can be negotiated, where knowledge can be passed between people of different cultures, and where bilingualism is encouraged, become exceedingly important in envisioning cultural exchanges attested by the archaeological and literary records, and in constructing a social history for the Iron Age Greeks.
The explanatory value of trade has expanded from accounting for the movement of Greeks and Phoenicians around the Mediterranean to accounting for the reinterpretation of social practices, religious practices, and technologies. I suggest that “trade,” rather than illuminating the mechanisms of cultural exchange has served to efface the social mechanisms, such as ritual drinking and banqueting, that fostered these exchanges.
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----- “Production, Circulation, and Consumption of Early Iron Age Greek Pottery (Eleventh to Seventh Centuries BC).” Crielaard 49-81.
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----- “Sympotic History.” Murray 3-13.
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