Josephine Crawley Quinn
Professor of Ancient History, Oxford University, and Fellow and Tutor of Worcester College, Oxford. Currently Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library.
Josephine Crawley Quinn works on Mediterranean history and archaeology. She has published articles on topics from Roman imperialism to Athenian sculpture to Carthaginian child sacrifice to Edwardian education, and she co-edited volumes of essays on ‘The Hellenistic West’ (with Jonathan Prag) and 'The Punic Mediterranean' (with Nicholas Vella), as well as the collected papers of Peter Derow (with Andrew Erskine). 'In Search of the Phoenicians', published by Princeton University Press in 2018, won the Goodwin Award of Merit, and her new book, 'How the World Made the West: a 4,000 year history' was published by Bloomsbury in 2024. It will appear in the US from Penguin Random House in September 2024, and in nineteen translations.
She has a BA in Classics from Oxford, and an MA and PhD in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also taught at San Quentin prison. She was a Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome 2001-2, a Getty Scholar in 2008, and in 2009 she won the Zvi Meitar/Vice-Chancellor Oxford University Research Prize in the Humanities. She served as Editor of the Papers of the British School at Rome 2008-2011 and co-directed the excavations at Utica (Tunisia), with Andrew Wilson and Elizabeth Fentress, as well as the Oxford Centre for Phoenician and Punic Studies, with Jonathan Prag.
Supervisors: Erich Gruen, Andrew Stewart, and Mia Fuller
Address: Worcester College, Oxford
Josephine Crawley Quinn works on Mediterranean history and archaeology. She has published articles on topics from Roman imperialism to Athenian sculpture to Carthaginian child sacrifice to Edwardian education, and she co-edited volumes of essays on ‘The Hellenistic West’ (with Jonathan Prag) and 'The Punic Mediterranean' (with Nicholas Vella), as well as the collected papers of Peter Derow (with Andrew Erskine). 'In Search of the Phoenicians', published by Princeton University Press in 2018, won the Goodwin Award of Merit, and her new book, 'How the World Made the West: a 4,000 year history' was published by Bloomsbury in 2024. It will appear in the US from Penguin Random House in September 2024, and in nineteen translations.
She has a BA in Classics from Oxford, and an MA and PhD in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also taught at San Quentin prison. She was a Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome 2001-2, a Getty Scholar in 2008, and in 2009 she won the Zvi Meitar/Vice-Chancellor Oxford University Research Prize in the Humanities. She served as Editor of the Papers of the British School at Rome 2008-2011 and co-directed the excavations at Utica (Tunisia), with Andrew Wilson and Elizabeth Fentress, as well as the Oxford Centre for Phoenician and Punic Studies, with Jonathan Prag.
Supervisors: Erich Gruen, Andrew Stewart, and Mia Fuller
Address: Worcester College, Oxford
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Books by Josephine Crawley Quinn
The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the “Phoenicians” never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies—and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.
Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and communities these people really constructed for themselves in the ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices. She traces how the idea of “being Phoenician” first emerged in support of the imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized as a component of modern national identities in contexts as far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon.
In Search of the Phoenicians delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays, painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to twenty-first century Tunisia.
With a detailed introduction by the editors, the papers make up a distinctive and influential body of work—essential reading for anyone interested in Roman imperialism or Polybius, and Rome's rise to Mediterranean power. They include Derow's classic survey articles on the Roman conquest of the East, the great Greek historian Polybius, his investigations of the Roman calendar, and several papers on epigraphy. It also contains a bibliography of Derow's work.
Papers by Josephine Crawley Quinn
There is a widespread idea that the people we call ‘Phoenician’ called themselves ‘Canaanite’. This article argues that the only positive evidence for this hypothesis, a single line in the standard editions of Augustine’s unfinished commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he claims that ‘if you ask our local peasants what they are, they answer ‘Canaanite’’, is prima facie highly unreliable as historical evidence, and on closer inspection in fact is almost certainly an editorial error: our examination of all the manuscripts — the first to have been carried out — established that what the peasants were really asked in the archetype was not quid sint — ‘what they are’ — but quid sit — ‘what is it’, a phrase that would most obviously refer to their language. While this new reconstruction of the archetype does not necessarily mean that quid sit was what Augustine originally wrote, this passage cannot be used as positive evidence for Canaanite identity in late antique North Africa, or anywhere else.
C’è un’idea diffusa che il popolo che noi chiamiamo ‘Fenici’ chiamasse se stesso con il nome di ‘Canaaniti’. Il presente articolo sostiene che la sola testimonianza che va nella direzione di quest’ipotesi è prima facie estremamente inaffidabile come fonte storica. Si tratta di un’unica riga nell’edizione standard del commentario incompiuto di Agostino alla lettera di Paolo ai Romani, in cui si dice che ‘se tu chiedi ai nostri contadini locali che cosa siano, essi rispondono ‘Canaaniti’’ e che a una verifica più dettagliata corrisponde quasi certamente a un errore redazionale. Il nostro riesame di tutto il manoscritto — il primo a essere stato effettuato — ha stabilito che ciò che nell’archetipo viene chiesto effettivamente ai contadini non è quid sint — ovverosia ‘che cosa sono’ — ma quid sit — e quindi ‘che cos’è’, una frase che si riferisce con probabilità al loro linguaggio. Mentre questa nuova ricostruzione dell’archetipo non implica necessariamente che quid sit fosse ciò che Agostino originariamente scrisse, questo passaggio non può essere usato come una prova dell’identità dei Canaaniti nella tarda antichità in Nord Africa o in qualsiasi altra localizzazione.
The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the “Phoenicians” never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies—and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.
Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and communities these people really constructed for themselves in the ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices. She traces how the idea of “being Phoenician” first emerged in support of the imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized as a component of modern national identities in contexts as far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon.
In Search of the Phoenicians delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays, painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to twenty-first century Tunisia.
With a detailed introduction by the editors, the papers make up a distinctive and influential body of work—essential reading for anyone interested in Roman imperialism or Polybius, and Rome's rise to Mediterranean power. They include Derow's classic survey articles on the Roman conquest of the East, the great Greek historian Polybius, his investigations of the Roman calendar, and several papers on epigraphy. It also contains a bibliography of Derow's work.
There is a widespread idea that the people we call ‘Phoenician’ called themselves ‘Canaanite’. This article argues that the only positive evidence for this hypothesis, a single line in the standard editions of Augustine’s unfinished commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he claims that ‘if you ask our local peasants what they are, they answer ‘Canaanite’’, is prima facie highly unreliable as historical evidence, and on closer inspection in fact is almost certainly an editorial error: our examination of all the manuscripts — the first to have been carried out — established that what the peasants were really asked in the archetype was not quid sint — ‘what they are’ — but quid sit — ‘what is it’, a phrase that would most obviously refer to their language. While this new reconstruction of the archetype does not necessarily mean that quid sit was what Augustine originally wrote, this passage cannot be used as positive evidence for Canaanite identity in late antique North Africa, or anywhere else.
C’è un’idea diffusa che il popolo che noi chiamiamo ‘Fenici’ chiamasse se stesso con il nome di ‘Canaaniti’. Il presente articolo sostiene che la sola testimonianza che va nella direzione di quest’ipotesi è prima facie estremamente inaffidabile come fonte storica. Si tratta di un’unica riga nell’edizione standard del commentario incompiuto di Agostino alla lettera di Paolo ai Romani, in cui si dice che ‘se tu chiedi ai nostri contadini locali che cosa siano, essi rispondono ‘Canaaniti’’ e che a una verifica più dettagliata corrisponde quasi certamente a un errore redazionale. Il nostro riesame di tutto il manoscritto — il primo a essere stato effettuato — ha stabilito che ciò che nell’archetipo viene chiesto effettivamente ai contadini non è quid sint — ovverosia ‘che cosa sono’ — ma quid sit — e quindi ‘che cos’è’, una frase che si riferisce con probabilità al loro linguaggio. Mentre questa nuova ricostruzione dell’archetipo non implica necessariamente che quid sit fosse ciò che Agostino originariamente scrisse, questo passaggio non può essere usato come una prova dell’identità dei Canaaniti nella tarda antichità in Nord Africa o in qualsiasi altra localizzazione.
The new lecture series, organized by SAIA, focuses on connections through time between the Greek communities and foreigners, expats, migrants, invaders. From the Ocean to Persia, from Black Sea to Egypt. On economy and trade, society and culture, colonization and imperialism, following the invention, spread, loss, and conservation of traditions.
A reception will be offered after the lecture.
Colloquium marking the publication of "In Search of the Phoenicians"
by Josephine Crawley Quinn
In Collaboration with The Maxwell Cummings Family Chair
for the Study of Mediterranean Culture and History, Tel Aviv University
Abstract
Traditional approaches to the process known as ‘Romanisation’ usually have taken into account the interaction between Roman colonists and native populations around the Mediterranean. Roman colonisation, however, took place in vast regions over a territory previously colonised by Carthage. How did the settlement of Punic population in certain cities affect the redefinition of identities in Republican and early Imperial times? Is there a distinctive way of ‘becoming Roman’ in these areas? Could certain trends in rituals, town planning or settlement in the landscape be observedin these contexts? How was the coexistence of different identities – Roman/Punic/local – negotiated in these populations? How was this multilayered identity expressed through material culture and to what extent might it have influenced the way these groups interacted with Roman colonists? All these issues are directly relevant to a postcolonial analysis of cities, rural settlements and ritual places with Punic roots in Roman times, where aspects like hybridisation, mimicry, coexistence of several ‘discourses’ in a given city, or expression of different types of social identity through material culture and the ‘rituals’ of the daily life, should be stressed.
Contents
1. Alicia Jiménez (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)
Introduction: Colonising e Colinised Territory. Settlements with Punic Roots in Roman Times
2. Carlos Cañete Jiménez (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)
Retelling the tale: Modernity, Colonialism and Discourse about Roman Expansion
3. Rossella Colombi (Independent Researcher)
Indigenous Settlements and Punic Presence in Roman Republican Northern Sardinia
4. Alicia Jiménez (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)
Roman Settlements/Punic Ancestors: some examples from the Necropolis of Southern Iberia
5. Carmen Aranegui, Jaime Vives-Ferrándiz Sánche (Museum of Prehistory, Valencia)
Romanisation in the Far West: Local Practices in Western Mauritatia (2nd c. .B.C.E. - 2nd c. .C.E.)
6. Josephine Quinn (University of Oxford)
The Reinvention of Lepcis
7. Elizabeth Fentress
Response: Cultural Layering and Performative Ethnicity
8. Peter van Dommelen
Response: Local Representations