Herodotus’ Phoenicians: Mediators of Cultural Exchange in the Mediterranean

Abstract

In this paper the author explores Herodotus’ representations of the Phoenicians. Although Herodotus does not include an ethnography of the Phoenicians as he does with many other cultures, such as the Persians and Egyptians, the Phoenicians play an important role in the dispute between the Persians and the Greeks. Scholarship on Herodotus’ ethnography has tended to focus on the literary goals of the historian in his construction of Greek identity or the problems with using his ethnographies to reconstruct historical information. In this paper, the author builds on current scholarship and argues that Herodotus represents the Phoenicians as the intermediaries of knowledge between the cultures of Egypt and Greece. The author argues that this representation is not simply a literary representation, but is also based on the historical dynamics of cultural exchange in the Mediterranean where the Phoenicians acted as the conduit for material and cultural goods, such as myths and rituals.