Exhibition: In the Phoenicians' tracks

Al Ahram Weekly (David Tresilian)

Widely advertised and long awaited, La Méditerranée des Phénicians, an exhibition that opened at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris on 6 October, affords a rare glimpse of ancient Phoenician civilisation, which dominated Mediterranean commerce for a millennium.

From their origins in a handful of city states scattered along the coast of today's Lebanon, the Phoenicians founded a network of trading stations and colonies across the Mediterranean, from the city-states of Tyre and Sidon in the east to settlements on the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Morocco in the west, posing as significant rivals of first the ancient Greeks and then the Romans as they did so. . . .

The fruits of a century and a half of investigation since Renan's time can be viewed in the rooms that follow. "Phoenician art," Renan wrote, was above all an "art of imitation", the Phoenicians having made the most of their position as a set of small, commercially minded city-states in a world of great empires. Borrowing designs and motifs from the ancient Egyptians, the Assyrians and the Greeks, the Phoenicians had a prodigious capacity to produce metalwork, jewellery, ceramics and other items that would appeal to the tastes of their rich neighbours.

Theirs was an art made to be bought and sold, with Phoenician goods being shipped across the Mediterranean in characteristic horse-prowed ships from entrepôts in the Levant and Cyprus. The exhibition includes many examples of Phoenician manufactured goods, including bronze or silver cups and bowls decorated with Egyptianising motifs such as scarabs and sphinxes, faience ceramics, glassware, and carved ivory plaques in Egyptian or Assyrian styles.