Fraud or Fiasco? Philo’s Nine Books of Φοινικικὰ (‘Phoenician Affairs’) vis-à-vis Mediterranean archaeology and beyond: a reappraisal long overdue

Abstract

Somewhat telling of the fortunes of Phoenician studies in European scholarship and academia (to this day) is the abandon of scepticism with which Herennius Philo’s Φοινικικὰ (‘Phoenician Affairs’/’Phoenician History’) was met from the very beginning of its resurfacing in western Europe. The reserve over the historicity of Philo’s extant passages continued for centuries until the resistance to its status as authentic was curbed only after the excavations of Ugarit in the early 20th c. yielded epigraphic evidence corroborating information contained in Philo’s Phoenician History quoted in Eusebios’ of Caesarea Evangelical Preparation, especially on the Canaanite pantheon. Although contemporary research has focused on the euhemeristic climate for the examination of Philo’s, relegating it to the study of Hellenistic literary culture, its value for Near Eastern and biblical studies, though invaluable, has been weakened since earlier decades. In the present instance, I seek to rehabilitate a manuscript containing the 9 Books of Philo’s Phoenician History, published two centuries ago by Friedrich Wagenfeld in 1837. I demonstrate through a range of data and arguments that the manuscript facsimile of the entire Phoenician History published was authentic, demonstrating both that the scepticism of the time was unwarranted and that excavations undertaken across the eastern and western Mediterranean since then corroborate several of the information contained therein but not available to someone living in the 1830s. Works by Philo survived in at least three manuscripts reported by different individuals by 1836, none of which was studied, a year after Wagenfeld had been fully discredited as a forger by his peers on petty grounds. The content of the manuscript significantly adds to our knowledge of history, culture and literature of the Canaanite-Phoenician world and its neighbours.

Keywords

• Mediterranean Archaeology
• Late Bronze Age
• Phoenicians
• Hellenistic
• Classical archaeology