Josephine Quinn. In Search of the Phoenicians. Princeton University Press, 11 desembre 2017, p. 201, 203. ISBN 978-1-4008-8911-2. «My starting point was that we have no good evidence for the ancient people that we call Phoenician identifying themselves as a single people or acting as a stable collective. I do not conclude from this absence of evidence that the Phoenicians did not exist, nor that nobody ever called her- or himself a Phoenician under any circumstances: Phoenician-speakers undoubtedly had a larger repertoire of self-classifications than survives in our fragmentary evidence, and it would be surprising if, for instance, they never described themselves as Phoenicians to the Greeks who invented that term; indeed, I have drawn attention to several cases where something very close to that is going on... A distaste even for self-government could also explain a phenomenon I have drawn attention to throughout the book: our “Phoenicians” not only fail to visibly identify as Phoenician, they often omit to identify at all. It is striking in this light that the first surviving visible expression of an explicitly “Phoenician” identity was imposed by the Carthaginians on their subjects as they extended state power to a degree unprecedented among Phoenician-speakers, that it was then adopted by Tyre as a symbol of colonial success, and that it was subsequently exploited by Roman rulers in support of their imperial activities.»
Josephine Quinn. In Search of the Phoenicians. Princeton University Press, 11 desembre 2017, p. 24, 204. ISBN 978-1-4008-8911-2. «My answer to the question Moscati posed in 1963 is that nothing did in fact unite the Phoenicians in their own eyes or those of their neighbors, and that his Phoenician people, or civilization, or nation, is not actually a real historical object, but rather a product of the scholarly and political ideologies I have discussed in this chapter. Such modern ideas about the ancient Phoenicians are thoroughly interwoven with ideas about the modern nation-state. That does not in itself, of course, mean that they cannot also be true. But the picture presented by our ancient sources is very different... In the end, it is modern nationalism that has created the Phoenicians, along with much else of our modern idea of the ancient Mediterranean.»
