Malta and the Phoenicians

Abstract

The commercial and colonial expansion of the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean was a phenomenon which lasted throughout the first half of the 1st millennium B.c. There is however a marked controversy among scholars as to its beginning and its extension. Tradition assigns a very high date for the foundation of some colonies, e.g. 1100 B.c. for Utica on the North African Coast and 1110 B.c. for Gades (modem Cadiz) in Spain, and supports a considerable Phoenician expansion during the early centuries of the 1st millennium, even in areas such as the Aegean and central and eastern Sicily where archaeological confirmation of Phoenician settlement is however entirely lacking. These traditional dates are however not accepted and have in fact been severely criticised by some scholars who argue, through tangible archaeological evidence, that Phoenician colonization in the central and western mediterranean could not have commenced before the 8th century B.C. and that even the foundation of Carthage on the North African coast, near Tunis, should be lowered to this century as opposed to the traditional date of 814 B.c. The traditional early dates for the foundation of Utica and Gades are to be taken as mythical, and equally unacceptable would be the presence of the Phoenicians in the Aegean and eastern Sicily. As a matter of fact the Punic pottery sequence does not reach back to before the late 8th or early 7th century B.c. Other scholars , however, consider this picture too hypercritical and take as evidence for the earliest colonisation some Phoenician inscriptions from Cyprus and Sardinia, notably the Nora inscription, which they date to the 9th century B.C. According to others, however, the Nora inscription is more recent being a palaeographic archaism. At present it is difficult to settle the matter adequately because of the scarcity of archaeological data. It can however be certainly accepted as a fact that the colonization of Cyprus had already started in the early 1st millennium B.C. There is ample evidence for this, both epigraphic and archaeological, as well as from literary sources. Also, it is not to be excluded that Phoenician expansion in the west during the late 8th/early 7th century B.C. was preceded by some commercial undertaking on a lesser scale. Literary sources for the history of the Maltese Islands during the Phoenician and Punic period are extremely scanty. Nor, in spite of the recent large-scale excavations conducted by an Italian Mission from the University of Rome at Tas-Silg (Marsaxlokk) and San Pawl Milqi in Malta and Ras il-Wardija in Gozo ,are the archaeological data very copious. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus~ writing in the 1st century B.C., states that the Phoenicians occupied Malta as ahaven in the course of their commercial voyages to the western Mediterranean, and in the same passage he also mentions that they colonized Gozo.