The Art of Contact

Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art

S. Rebecca Martin

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780812293944
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art

The proem to Herodotus's history of the Greek-Persian wars relates the long-standing conflict between Europe and Asia from the points of view of the Greeks' chief antagonists, the Persians and Phoenicians. However humorous or fantastical these accounts may be, their stories, as voiced by a Greek, reveal a great deal about the perceived differences between Greeks and others. The conflict is framed in political, not absolute, terms correlative to historical events, not in terms of innate qualities of the participants. It is this perspective that informs the argument of The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art.Becky Martin reconsiders works of art produced by, or thought to be produced by, Greeks and Phoenicians during the first millennium B.C., when they were in prolonged contact with one another. Although primordial narratives that emphasize an essential quality of Greek and Phoenician identities have been critiqued for decades, Martin contends that the study of ancient history has not yet effectively challenged the idea of the inevitability of the political and cultural triumph of Greece. She aims to show how the methods used to study ancient history shape perceptions of it and argues that art is especially positioned to revise conventional accountings of the history of Greek-Phoenician interaction.Examining Athenian and Tyrian coins, kouros statues and mosaics, as well as the familiar Alexander Sarcophagus and the sculpture known as the "Slipper Slapper, " Martin questions what constituted "Greek" and "Phoenician" art and, by extension, Greek and Phoenician identity. Explicating the relationship between theory, method, and interpretation, The Art of Contact destabilizes categories such as orientalism and Hellenism and offers fresh perspectives on Greek and Phoenician art history.

CHAPTER 1

Culture, Contact, and Art History: Framing the Theoretical Landscape

One implication of the study of culture contact is that cultures otherwise exist in separate spaces, spaces that can be distinguished because of certain features thought to belong to specific groups in specific periods. Such thinking is fundamental to much archaeology and art history; it manifests itself expressly in the theory of style and thus shows the intimate relationships between culture and its physical manifestations, referred to variously as material culture or art. Yet cultural distinctiveness should not be taken for granted, however necessary classification of specific traits and objects might seem. Walter Burkert has pointed to this tension, saying, “Probably we should not even insist on separating neatly what testifies to interconnections,” while himself insisting that pointing to “interconnections” is not enough.¹ When several aspects of a context are shared, as in colonial environments, determining what objects or behaviors fall within or outside a cultural group can be difficult.² My understanding of culture, which is discussed below, allows for the possibility that people we might wish to separate into Greek and Phoenician cultural categories did indeed sometimes share a number of traits that make it difficult or impossible to always distinguish them according to their archaeological traces.

Since culture is not an “unchanging, primordial substrate” but a lived and dynamic experience,³ the less the evidence at hand reporting perceptions of that lived experience, the less one can claim to know about a culture. Greek beliefs and values are well represented in the written sources, whereas Phoenician beliefs are obviously not. For Phoenicians the material record must make the case, yet archaeological finds are often wanting or hard to understand. In other words, the difficulty of defining Phoenician culture through its material record—not to mention the problem of defining its unique properties—is compounded by the lack of textual evidence explaining what Phoenicians thought about themselves (or much of anything else, for that matter). These limitations should be taken very seriously when one speaks in general terms of a Phoenician culture or changes to it. Ironically, these very limitations mean that it has become too easy to ascribe to Phoenicians motivations and actions that have very little support—but that of course also lack outright contradictory evidence. It is plain that Phoenicians and vague processual notions such as diffusion go hand in hand in modern scholarship.

How, then, shall one go about understanding contact between Greeks and Phoenicians? What boundaries were being strengthened or transgressed through their interaction? In the wake of postcolonialism, globalization, and self-conscious multiculturalism, borders are increasingly contested spaces. Rather than viewing them as barriers, some prefer to understand ancient cultural boundaries as permeable, unstable, in flux, or fuzzy points of contact. Figuring out how to employ those ideas in historical studies is hard, as is recovering individuals within cultural groups who exhibit different behaviors (subcultures and countercultures).⁴ These subcultures and pluralities are the internal elements that make a cultural system dynamic. Yet, in order for cultural history to work, it would appear that the basic unit—a culture—must be recognizable according to some common factors: shared behaviors (of which language may be one), customs, and artifacts. Likewise, it seems that there must be some recognition of difference to distinguish, however tentatively, one cultural group from another, so that we may speak about the cultures we call Greek or Phoenician.

In sum, it is very difficult to distinguish between historic groups of Hellenes and Phoenicians and the use of “Greek culture” and “Phoenician culture” as heuristic (experiential, investigative) systems.⁵ In the pursuit of clarity, the impulse to calcify culture is very strong, no matter how much we acknowledge that the concept is an abstraction. And so we begin by acknowledging the difficulties inherent in some of the basic terms and concepts that inform this study: culture, models of culture in contact, and the relationships between culture, material culture, and art. It is not my wish to use this discussion to justify monolithic usage of such terms, “Greek” and “Phoenician” most of all. At the same time, I still find them convenient so long as we use the terms carefully and agree that they are our own.

The Critical Terminology: Culture, Material Culture, and Art

I believe that study of artistic production, representation, patronage, display, and reception—the study of, in other words, the particular issues that concern historians of art—is one of the best means to tackle the Greek-Phoenician relationship anew. Before considering the respective Greek and Phoenician art historical traditions, it is important to think about what Greek and Phoenician mean. As ideas about Greek culture and Phoenician culture were developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, they evolved in parallel with major developments in art history and culture theory.⁶ Although Greek literature has always played a role in the conception of both peoples, art—now sometimes called material culture—is a key element in the understanding of Greek culture and, often, the only emic evidence of Phoenician culture. The goal of the discussion that follows is to position this project in the history of culture studies and to avoid the (common, certainly not universal) problem of discussing Greeks and Phoenicians with dated ideas about culture itself.⁷ While this material can be found in a variety of sources, I present it with the explicit goal of illuminating the study of Greek and Phoenician art history.

Culture

How can it be, as some have claimed, “easier to express why we want to study ‘culture’ . . . than to define the term itself”?⁸ Because the concept of culture is not only inherently complex but is also engaged in the description of very different things. It can indicate broad processes, such as human development, or very narrow phenomena, such as elite funerary practices in a particular area. The anxiety provoked by culture is signaled by its frequent encasement in scare quotes,⁹ showing a desire to create distance from the term while acknowledging the lack of an easy alternative. Culture is used to characterize various kinds of human behaviors and fabrications, from the development of language, philosophy, and rituals to the making of tools, literature, and art. Another way of looking at the term “culture” is as a collective category that encompasses social, political, and ideological production.¹⁰ As with the related word “civilization,” culture often carries with it an implication of biological life cycles or evolutionary processes that allow it to be described as early, mature, or declining (as Cic. Tusc. 2.5.13). The culture concept is a core value of humanism; understandably, those who work in the Near East and classical worlds have a keen interest in understanding these “cradles” of Western civilization. Beyond those general notions there is not much agreement among humanists or social scientists about what culture is.¹¹

According to the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, the constitutive elements of cultural behavior were developed accidentally and had to be learned, a point of view that was meant to distinguish culture from race while also challenging prejudicial cultural universalism. Boasian culture is permeable, fluid, and to some extent always an admixture because of contact and diffusion.¹² The impact of Boasian cultural relativism was enormous. Cultural, Marxist, and processual archaeologists in the Anglo-American and German traditions had varied responses, some of which led, ironically, to more bounded and static ideas of archaeologically evident cultural groups. Archaeological culture—in which objects are understood as culture and so as trace elements of a people—is associated especially with the work of V. Gordon Childe. It is not difficult to see how the distinction between archaeological culture (traces of a people through objects) and race might be murky. In practice culture has become a frequent proxy for race and a tool of racism in both academic and public discourse.

In his final book, Global Transformations, anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot discusses this problematic trajectory of the culture concept.¹³ The difficulty with culture, in his estimation, came about because a term once used experimentally was reified, and soon was treated as though autonomous. Trouillot says, “As culture became a thing, it also started doing things . . . culture shifted from a descriptive conceptual tool to an explanatory concept.”¹⁴ The movement from description to explanation is common in classical art history, as, for example, Orientalizing shifted from a label of a style or period to become a teleological process.¹⁵ Trouillot insists that there is nothing inherently essential about culture. Instead, culture is structuring and learned consciously. It is a legitimate way to investigate “human activity.”¹⁶ What happened to the culture concept between Boas and Trouillot is of course quite complex, and no brief summary (or single book) can do the subject justice.¹⁷ Yet a few points are needed here to situate what has occurred theoretically speaking, especially in the study of culture in Anglo-American classical archaeology and, to a lesser extent, art history.

While Boasian cultural archaeology was pioneering and really quite remarkable for its resistance to racial ideologies, some of its flaws were quickly detected. The theoretical culture concept was complex and fluid, but in practice it encouraged taxonomies, historical particularism (unique cultures), and diffusionism—shortcomings that are still thriving today in classical studies. Around the middle of the century, a Weberian school of archaeology became established, especially in Anglo-American anthropology. In this school, culture is approached sociologically and objects, symbolically.¹⁸ By the 1960s the “new” archaeology (processualism) was gaining traction. It espoused more dynamic adaptive models, anthropological approaches, and an expanded idea of which objects should be studied to understand culture. Since the 1960s, cultural studies have emphasized adaptation within cultural groups rather than variations among them. Processual and postprocessual archaeologists have distanced themselves further from ideas of bounded archaeological cultures, ultimately pushing beyond the “static” and “cellular” model of culture, spread to classical studies by Moses Finley, to ever-increasing interest in the “fluidity and connectedness” of cultures in the manner of social anthropologist Fredrik Barth.¹⁹

The impact of these mid-century developments has been quite significant in some circles. The symbolic approach to culture became important to postprocessualists, including Ian Hodder, arguably the most popular theorist in archaeology since the 1980s.²⁰ Hodder’s work is relatively well read among classical archaeologists, a number of whom he has trained. That is not to say that the field lacks other theorists. James Wiseman and Anthony Snodgrass were among the first classical archaeologists to point out that the new archaeology had something to offer.²¹ Wiseman founded a department of archaeology in 1982 at Boston University (where much of this book was written, in the Department of History of Art and Architecture) on the idea of a united discipline. Yet the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Culture, Contact, and Art History: Framing the Theoretical Landscape
• Chapter 2. Arts of Contact
• Chapter 3. Exceptional Greeks and Phantom Phoenicians
• Chapter 4. The Rise of Phoenicianism
• Chapter 5. Hybridity, the Middle Ground, and the “Conundrum of ‘Mixing’”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Acknowledgments