Putting Phoenicia on the Map. From the Greeks to Ernest Renan’s Mission

This study questions the anachronism about Phoenicia, often thought to have ended when Alexander the Great conquered the Levant. However, toponymic evidence suggests that Phoenicia came into existence with and after Alexander’s conquests. Then it became an administrative division of the Roman Empire, to subsist as an ecclesiastical title down to Ottoman times. It was only in 1861 that the French scholar Ernest Renan invented and mapped “Phoenician archaeology.” Later interpretations of Renan’s view, converging with Biblical projections, led to the anachronistic use of “Phoenicia.” This anachronism still governs historiography and politics in the Levant today.


Introduction
In 1860 the Mission de Phénicie arrived at Beirut, then one of the thriving ports of the Ottoman Realm 1 . Sponsored by Emperor Napoleon III of France, the delegation was headed by the scholar Ernest Renan. It aimed at "exploring ancient Phoenicia", to establish a "Phoenician archaeology" based on findings Renan initially hoped would be abundant. The results were, however, disappointing, according to Renan himself. Yet the consequences were crucial in putting Phoenicia on the map and creating the toponymic anachronism that still governs the study of Phoenicia today. In the Levant itself, fifty years before Renan's Mission, "Phoenicia" was mostly an episcopal title of the local Rûm (Greek Orthodox) Church hierarchy. Later, "Phoenicia" became so politically important that the Mandatory French authorities used it to craft a founding narrative for Lebanon. In this paper, I propose a genealogy of the toponym Phoenicia and how what I call the "Phoenician anachronism" was born by superposing the archaeological findings of the Levantine city-states on the Roman administrative unit of Maritime Phoenicia. I focus on 1 For more information on Beirut see Kassir, 2003;Davie, 1996. 2 The paper uses primary sources in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and French. It does not consider Syriac ones. An extensive study of all possible sources can establish more comprehensive results.
Ernest Renan's Mission, using his writings, notably a report he submitted to Napoleon III (See Renan 1864). Through a selection of primary sources and maps, I discuss the birth of the toponym Phoenicia as an ambiguous geographical construct in Greek literature. I show how the toponym evolved into a Roman administrative unit, then subsequently persisted as an ecclesiastical title down to the Nineteenth Century's Ottoman Empire. With the Mission de Phénicie, Renan's findings participated in shaping out an anachronistic pre-Alexandrian Phoenicia. In the end, I propose a pattern of Phoenician anachronism. I use toponyms and related demonyms as markers of identity. The article is exploratory and aims at understanding the dynamics by which an undefined name becomes a toponym of a defined space, then a political claim 2 . I shall use "Phoenicia" and "Phoenicians", as a toponym and its derived demonym.
Sea. Around the 8 th Century BCE, Homer's Iliad presents "Phoenicians" as sailors who brought a beautiful silver cup made by the Sidonians (Homer,Iliad,Book XXIII,. 4 In the Odyssey, "Phoenicia" is a place in the easternmost part of the Mediterranean (Homer,Odyssey,Book IV,. There are numerous references to the derived demonym "Phoenicians" as eastern Mediterranean sailors, talented in commerce, in the works of Plato and other authors of Classical Greece. Herodotus, c. 430 BCE, mentions "Phoenicia" and "Phoenicians" many times in his writings, asserting that it is, above all, a coast (Herodotus, The Histories, Book IV, 39). According to him, the Greeks learned the alphabet from the Phoenician Cadmos and his companions (Idem,Book V,59). He makes it the home of Europa (Idem, Book IV, 46), who left Tyre to sail to Crete: ...unless we say that the land took its name from the Tyrian Europa, having been (it would seem) before then nameless like the rest. But it is plain that this woman was of Asiatic birth, and never came to this land which the Greeks now call Europe, but only from Phoenicia to Crete and from Crete to Lycia. Thus, much I have said of these matters, and let it suffice; we will use the names established by custom.
"Phoenicia" becomes recurrent in Greek tragedies, the Phoenician Women of Euripides being the most prominent example. Outside Greek writings, no mention of Phoenicia was attested. In the 11 th Century BCE, the ancient Egyptian story of Wenamun, priest of Amun and envoy of Ramses XI, mentions Tyre and Byblos as two different realms (Harper and Breasted, 1906, 279), but no Phoenicia or Phoenicians. Assyrian texts are abundant with references to "kings of the seacoast, people of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Arvad," and consider them as skilled sailors, but do not confer common identity on them (Luckenbill and Breasted, 1926, 166;1927, 145). Even their Hebrew neighbours did not know about the existence of a Phoenicia: Different Biblical texts make numerous references to Sidon, Tyre, Gebal (Byblos), and their peoples and kings, considering them as different citystates, skilled merchants, and sailors 6 . Yet, they had no common collective identity, nor a common belonging of the kind present among the Greeks and the Hebrews (Quinn, 2017, 61-62). "Phoenicia" was the toponym established by the Greeks, for a place that did not exist per se and had no "ethnic group" related to it outside the Greek cosmography. Citizens of Levantine city-states, Tyrians, Sidonians, Aradians, did cooperate and might have founded Tripoli together, yet they continued to be autonomous polities and did not constitute a coherent group, and many were already Hellenised (Idem, 67-68). When Alexander laid siege to Tyre, the Sidonians came to his aid (Idem, 47, 68).

Towards the "Phoenicisation" of the Levantine coast
Following the death of Alexander the Great (c. 323 BCE), the Levantine coastline became an area of conflict between two rival Macedonian dynasties: the Seleucids, ruling from Antioch on the Orontes, and the Ptolemies, ruling from Alexandria in Egypt. During this period, later called "Hellenistic", the city-states were fully integrated into the Greek world (Aliquot and Bonnet, 2013). It is during this period that we see the emergence of some "Phoenicianness" among the inhabitants of the coast of the Levant, marked by the adoption of Koine Greek as the lingua franca to replace their local dialects. For the first time, the Levantine coast is under the suzerainty of those who thought of it as Phoenicia, be they Seleucids or Ptolemies. Local culture began to adapt. One of the earliest examples might be the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible, done in Egypt during the 3 rd and 2 nd Centuries BCE. The "merchants of Sidon" mentioned in Isaiah 23:2 was translated into Phoinikes, "Phoenicians" 7 . The introduction of Phoenicia into the Hebrew Bible was not universal: "Canaan" and "Canaanites" continued to be used in most occurrences (Quinn,Op. Cit.,37). In Phoenicia itself, no political framework was created to fit the toponym. The city-states continued to be autonomous but began to issue coins with symbols stemming from the Greek view of the Phoenician identity 8 . For example, on some Tyrian coins, a palm tree, phoinix 9 , is visible on the reverse (Quinn,Op. Cit.,(137)(138)(139)(140).
The Levantine coast was placed under the hegemony of the Roman Republic by Pompey (64 BCE) and became part of the province of Syria whose seat was Antioch. For the first time in history, an administrative "real" Phoenicia was born, as an eparchy of Roman Syria, itself a Roman new creation that did not exist before (Keilo, 2020

The Imperial and glorious moments of the toponym Phoenicia
During the Second Century CE Phoenicia was still a part of the Roman province of Syria. Around the year 150 CE, in his Geography, Claudius Ptolemy includes it in his tabulae (Siniscalchi and Palagiano, 2018 Emesan, wanted to consolidate some Phoenician belonging (Hall, 2004, 93). But Severus did not "restore an ancient regional name" as this regional name did not exist before the Graeco-Roman era.  (Justinian,Op. Cit.,Constitutio Omnem,7). The Roman emperor orders the governor of the province to supervise Law students (Idem, 10) 22 : In the city of Berytus the most illustrious President of the Maritime Phoenicia, together with the most blessed Bishop and the professors of law of that city shall discharge this duty.
Phoenicia is by now a confirmed toponym of two Roman provinces, the one is maritime and the other inland. All official existence of all the two Phoenicias ends in the Fourth Decade of the 7 th Century with the Arab conquest.
The new conquerors change the political divisions and Phoenicia was taken off the map.

The Roman continuity in an Arabic "Coast"
The local Rûm Melkite 23 population, Arabised or Greekspeaking, continued to use the toponym "Phoenicia" in their geography.  (Yaqubi, 2002, 160-167). Arab geographers do not seem aware of a "Phoenicia." Yet, curiously enough, some speak of "the Coast" 35 , "the Coast of Sham" 36 , or the "Coast Country [Countries]" 37 as a proper noun. In the early Ninth Century, Waqidi 38 , one of the first Muslim chroniclers, writes about "conquering the Coast Country" (Waqidi, 1997, 26). Yaqubi ( †897) calls Tyre "the [mother] city of the Coast[s]" (Yaqubi,Op. Cit.,165). Other geographers and chroniclers use the word Sawahil for the Levantine shore to the north of Acre and the south of Latakia 39 . Would "Coast" be a loan translation for the Graeco-Roman "Maritime" Phoenicia? 40 During the Crusades, William of Tyre ( †c. 1185) and Jacques of Vitry ( †1240) mention the Maritime and the Lebanese Phoenicias in their Graeco-Roman borders and limits, undoubtedly based on the administrative and ecclesiastical geographies still known in the Roman Empire 41 (William of Tyre, Book XI, Chap. 9, 13, 14; Book XVII, Chap. 14; Book XXI, Chap. 11; Jacques of Vitry, Book III). William of Tyre goes on to call Damascus the "metropolis of Little Syria, otherwise called Lebanese Phoenicia" (Idem, Book XVII, Chap. 3). The pilgrim Johannes Phocas wrote about Tyre being "the most beautiful city of Phoenicia." Yet, he speaks of Beirut as the border between Phoenicia and Syria (Phocas, 1889, 9-10): Was he following the administrative geography of the Crusader kingdoms, where the borders between Jerusalem and Tripoli are some kilometres to the north of Beirut?

America, Phoenicia, Judaea
In Western countries, Ptolemaic geography was still at the base of world maps. In 1507, in the first map known to mention the toponym "America", by Martin Waldseemüller ( †1519), the world is not only mapped after Ptolemy's Geography but also after Amerigo Vespucci's journeys (Waldseemüller, 1507  The tendency continues: "Phoenicia" appears sporadically on some maps, most of them depicting "the Holy Land", or the Levant seen from a Biblical perspective (For example see Liébaux, 18 th Century; d 'Anville, 1752;Arrowsmith, 1815;1828).

The Ottoman Rûm ecclesiastical Phoenicias
On the other hand, in the first half of the 16 th Century, the Ottoman Book of Navigation continues to use the plural expression Sawahil Sham "Seacoasts of Sham 42 ," of the Arabic-speaking geographers for the Levantine coast, especially around Tripoli and Beirut (Piri Reis, c. 1525, W.658.316.A; W.658.317B). Simultaneously, the book uses the word sahil (in singular) for Egypt and the same plural sawahil for North Africa. In other terms, no singularity was given for the Levantine coast. The Ottoman Cedid Atlas (1803) does not use the term and ignores the existence of Phoenicia. Under the Ottoman Empire, the former two provinces named "Phoenicia" were present only in titles used by local Rûm (that is, Greek Orthodox) Christians of the Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. In the list of episcopal titles, for instance, the Archbishop of Tyre and Sidon is "exarchos over the Paralias (Maritime) [Phoenicia]." The Archbishops of Beirut and Tripoli are "over First [Maritime] Phoenicia." Archbishops of Emesa, Heliopolis, and Palmyra are "over the whole of Lebanese Phoenicia" (Charon, 1907, 225-226;Rustum, 1988 [2], 61-62). By then, the two Phoenicias were mere honorary titles of Church prelates. 39 For example, in Maqdisi, 186;Ibn Khordadhbeh, 1889, 97-98;Yaqut El Hamwi, 1995, 133. Idrissi ( †1165), one of the most eminent medieval geographers, does not seem to be aware of "Phoenicia" or of its "Coast." 40 At the same time, all the above-mentioned Arab authors are conscious of the toponym "Palestine" and use it in their geographies and chronicles. 41

The revival of some "Phoenicia"
Renan was certainly not the first intellectual to be interested in Phoenicia. In 1758, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy deciphered the Phoenician alphabet (Barthélemy, 1764), and Arnold Heeren wrote about Phoenicians as a "nation of Antiquity" (Heeren, 1833). Both, like many others, saw Phoenicia in the perspective of Graeco-Roman Antiquity and the Bible, following the projections made by Christian Roman authors, as shown above. The Nineteenth Century began with a revival of Philhellenism (Tolias, 2017), simultaneous to the Greek Revolution. "The French are by tradition Philhellenes" (Idem, 51), and Phoenicia was seen in this perspective. De Chateaubriand and de Lamartine did not explore Phoenicia but "Lebanon" as a mountain, with the latter speaking about "Phoenicians, who measure their enterprises only by the material utility", in an argument worthy of ancient Greeks (Lamartine, 1842, 61). Renan 43 was elected to the prestigious French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1856. "Phoenician inscriptions" were being debated in the savant milieu in France at the time. The sarcophagus of Eshmunazar, king of Sidon, was discovered in 1855 44 and had a long inscription in Phoenician letters. Later, in 1856, it was offered to the Louvre by the Duc de Luynes (de Luynes, 1856, vi), himself a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. The sarcophagus' discovery led to some "unearthing" of Phoenicia. For example, in 1859, a well-known local Maronite author, Tannous Chidiac, wrote his book on the chronicles of Mount Lebanon. He writes that "Lebanon is four days long, in Phoenicia of Syria Secunda, in the fifth zone of the third clime, and Phoenicia means the palm land" (Chidiac, 1859, 5). Chidiac followed the Graeco-Roman geography and its Arabic descendant, yet with the Biblical projection of the toponym. He goes on to say that "Beirut was called after Baal Beryte the Phoenician god" and "Tyre was known in Phoenician days..." (Idem,8,12). Phoenicia was by then a debated subject, after the discovery of Eshmunazar's sarcophagus; it was no more reserved for the Greek Orthodox episcopal.

A mission to "unearth Phoenician civilisation"
In 1857 Renan read a report on Sanchoniathon before the Académie, followed in 1858 by a full report on the "real character of Phoenician history" (Renan, 1857;1858) where he considers Phoenicia a "country 45 " (Idem, 1858). Renan was one of the renowned philologists of Semitic languages in France 46 . Such conditions made him the ideal 43 Renan was, indeed, a Philhellene. For more information on the subject see Renan, 2009. 44 by Alphonse Durighello, then vice-consul of France in Sidon. 45 In French "pays." 46 In 1862, Renan became the professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France.
candidate to head an archaeological mission to the Levant, on the recommendation of Hortense Cornu, a mutual friend of Napoleon III and Renan (Pommier, 1965, 128;Robin, 2011, 140-141). After some negotiations, in May 1860 the Emperor formally asked Renan to head the mission, after the savant expressed his wish more precisely: "Dig up the ancient Phoenicia, who knows what this land hides" 47 (Robin, Idem). Renan was interested in the history of Christianity and wanted to go to the Holy Land to prepare for his work on the life of Jesus Christ (Renan, 1863). The international conditions were rather propitious: after the 1860 civil war in the Levant, the French expédition de Syrie disembarked in Beirut in August 1860, in the name of protection of Christians. In October, the Mission de Phénicie was created by a ministerial decree (Robin,Op. Cit.,135), some weeks before Renan's arrival in Beirut 48 .  (Robin, 2011, 137 (Baclou, 2014, 17).

From a "country" to some ports…
For Renan himself, the results of the Mission de Phénicie were humble (Renan, 1864, 814-817) 50 . In his report submitted to Emperor Napoleon III, Renan was not the merriest about his discoveries: for him, Phoenician archaeology, inscriptions, and material culture's findings were largely unsatisfying (Idem; Renier, 1861). Before his journey, Renan had considered Phoenicia a country (Renan, 1858, 243). However, with the Mission, his view evolved and changed. Phoenicia became a mere series of ports (Renan, 1864, 836) 51 : Phoenicia was not a country; it was a series of ports, with a rather narrow suburb. These cities, situated ten or twelve leagues from each other, were the centre of some municipal life like the Greek cities. The Phoenician civilisation did not spread to the mountains and had little effect on the population of Syria. Before the Greek domination, Lebanon, Coele Syria, and Syria were completely backward countries. The roads in these regions, which were not very practicable, were built by the Romans (as we know from the inscriptions); even the Roman roads, for example, those of the River Lycus [Nahr el Kalb], were never able to give way to vehicles.
Renan goes on with even harsher judgements on the absence of originality in Phoenician art or on its imitating character (Idem, 820, 825;Will, 1984, 11-12). In all his arguments, Renan had one authority: Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Idem, 829-830), and he evaluated the Levantine pre-Alexandrian city-states from this perspective. Simultaneously, Renan had sent most of the 120 found objects to the Louvre, where they constituted a substantial part of the important Antiquités orientales collection 49 The Mutassarifate of Mount Lebanon was the Ottoman subdivision that governed Mount Lebanon 1861-1918 and resulted from the Ottoman reforms (Tanzimat). For more information see Salibi, 1965. 50 As notes J.-C. Robin: The Mission resulted in a paradox: all Biblical or classical civilisations left remarkable monuments and epigraphic evidence, but not the supposed Phoenicians in their supposed homeland Phoenicia (Robin,ibid.,132). 51 In French "La Phénicie ne fut pas un pays ; ce fut une série de ports, avec une banlieue assez étroite. Ces villes, situées à dix ou douze lieues l'une de l'autre, furent le centre d'une vie toute municipale comme les villes grecques. La civilisation (Louvre, 2021). "Phoenicia" became a place name associated with some archaeology of the Near East. Despite the loss of his sister, Renan kept good memories of his Levantine excavations and mapping 52 .

…But a long-lasting toponymic (re)invention
The consequences of the Mission were quite important in terms of (re)invented toponymy: in his pre-Mission and then report writings, Renan used "Phoenicia" as the toponym to refer to the Levantine city-states before Alexander and the Greeks. As showed above, "Phoenicia" became a part of the landscape in the Levant precisely because of Graeco-Roman literature and politics. Before their era, no Phoenicia existed in situ. Renan was undoubtedly conscious of this fact, being a Philhellene and familiar with Graeco-Roman writings. As also discussed earlier, Renan stopped considering Phoenicia as a country and was disappointed by the findings. Nonetheless, the name "Phoenicia" was again put on the map as a historical reality: an imaginary pre-Alexandrian Phoenicia was invented and inserted into the historical scene of the Levant, because of Renan's work, but also out of an anachronistic superposition of Graeco-Roman and Biblical sources.
There is still a question about Renan's use of primary sources in his supposed mapping of ancient Phoenicia, and his elaboration of a very precise action plan (Robin,Op. Cit.,127). As shown earlier, medieval sources, Roman and Western, do refer to Lebanese Phoenicia. Renan was undoubtedly conscious of Lebanese Phoenicia's existence, but he only uses "Phoenicia" for the seaports, the ancient Maritime Phoenicia. He seems to (intentionally?) ignore the Lebanese Phoenicia, with its main cities: Damascus, Emesa, Heliopolis, and Palmyra. Was Renan only interested in ancient Greek sources of Homer and playwrights who conceived Phoenicia as an amorphous narrow Levantine seacoast? It is a plausible explanation, as Renan says that "Laodicea [Latakia] is the extreme-north limit of Phoenicia and almost a Phoenician colony. Beyond it, it is Greek, Roman, and Christian Syria that must be sought" (Renan, 1864, 112 Amphitheatre was constructed by the Romans. Both were not a part of the Roman province of Phoenicia. One may ask: in this case which Phoenicia is Renan's? The undefined ancient Greek pre-Alexandrian one could be an answer. In other terms, Renan's Phoenicia is the virtual, rather imaginary one, filling the space between Greece and Judaea (Bonnet, 2012), as "Greece has a special role, like Judaea, a role in which it will never be equalled" (Idem, 830) 53 .

Aftermath: Phoenicia becomes a historical "reality"
This imaginary Phoenicia entered historiography and cartography as a reality, not only in France but also in the Ottoman Realm, then the sovereign entity over the Levant. The toponym was used, anachronistically, for Biblical maps to refer to the Sidonians and the Tyrians of the Ancient Testament. Already, in the popular Van Dyck-Smith Arabic translation of the Bible, the versions illustrated with maps showed a "Phoenicia" in the time of David and Solomon. The Jesuit version of the Bible did the same. When Youssef Debs, Maronite Archbishop of Beirut, wrote his History of Syria, he consecrated a whole chapter to a Phoenicia that already existed "before the conquest of Palestine by Joshua son of Nûn," while acknowledging that its name was a later Greek invention (Debs, 1904, 249-251

An anachronism named Phoenicia
"Phoenicia" went from being an abstract undefined place to be a "real" toponym, that is, a name of a specific administrative unit. Then it fell out of use. Later, the toponym was used, anachronistically, in archaeology and politics. This led to the creation of some alternative historical reality. The result might be represented in a diagram, an oversimplified one: Figure 8. The invention of an anachronistic Phoenicia. Image by the author.
In the first phase, "Phoenicia" was an exonym used by the Greeks to refer to the different and independent Levantine city-states. These city-states did not share a collective identity and did not identify as Phoenician or as from Phoenicia. In the second Graeco-Roman phase, a Phoenicia was created as an administrative unit and later was divided into two distinct provinces. In the third phase under the Arabs, "Phoenicia" became a title used for Church hierarchy. In the fourth phase, related to the Mission de Phénicie, the Graeco-Roman toponym of Phoenicia is superposed onto the archaeological findings of the pre-Alexandrian city-states. The imaginary pre-Alexandrian Phoenicia is thus born out of a projection of the Biblical city-states of the ancient Levant into a toponym borrowed from the political geography of the Roman world. Ernest Renan, the planner of the founding archaeological mission to "unearth Phoenicia" in the Ottoman Realm, used the projection while being quite conscious of its paradoxical nature 63 . The "Phoenician anachronism" is not unique. Maybe the most famous anachronism is also related to an Empire that preceded the Ottoman Realm: the use of the place name "the Byzantine Empire" to refer to the Roman Empire when Constantinople was its Imperial seat (330-1453 CE). The use of the toponym "Byzantium" and "Byzantine Empire" created a "reality" and an erroneous history, according to which the Roman Empire ended in the 5 th or 7 th Century CE (For the explanation of this confusion see Ahrweiler, 1975;Kaldellis, 2019). But the Roman Empire continued without interruption until at least 1204.
The Gaule example is also well-known: the "Gaulois", as self-aware inhabitants of Gaul, were invented by the Third French Republic to create its récit national. How did the French approach to the récit national participate in shaping the Phoenician anachronism? Maybe the closest case is the one of the toponym "Syria", itself a Graeco-Roman implementation. It has taken even more concrete dimensions as it was used for a newly founded state that is neither the continuation nor the succession of Roman Syria, but a successor state of the Ottoman Realm. In the Syrian Republic, the ancient toponym "Syria" was used and is used to justify Syrian claims over Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan (Keilo, 2020). Back to our study: can we speak of pre-Alexandrian Phoenicia as a "country" with some collective identity, inhabitants self-identifying as Phoenician, and then use the place name accordingly? In politics and ideology, anachronisms are acceptable, even necessary. But, in political and historical geographies, if there ever was a united self-identifying Phoenicia, it was under the Roman Empire and in the Hellenic context, and not any other.

Acknowledgements
I thank L'Orient-Le Jour, a leading Lebanese newspaper, for publishing the preparatory article of this study 64 . I also thank Travaux et Jours, the peer-reviewed journal of the Saint-Joseph Jesuit University of Beirut (USJ), for giving me the chance to publish the preparatory article about the toponym "Syria" 65 , closely related to "Phoenicia." I am grateful to Antoine Courban, professor emeritus at the USJ. His profound knowledge about the history of the Levant and his review of the preparatory articles were of great help in writing the study.