Defining Phoenician Religious Space: Oumm El-'Amed

ANES 37 (2000) 27-55 Defining Phoenician Religious Space: Oumm el-‘Amed Reconsidered Nicholas C. VELLA Department of Classics and Archaeology University of Malta Msida MSD 06 MALTA Fax: 356 330 431 E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Phoenician religious sites have often been cited in discussions about religious beliefs and practices. However, no attempts have been made to reveal systemati- cally the bases and criteria on which scholars have defended the sacred nature of these sites, so that Phoenician temples remain as elusive as ever. This paper looks in detail at one site in Lebanon, Qumm el-‘Amed, where it is claimed that two large temple complexes existed in the Hellenistic period. An attempt is made to understand why major monuments at the site are religious in nature, following a few principles that are set out clearly.*. When Mortimer Wheeler assessed the Hellenic contribution to Roman art and architecture in his standard introduction to the subject published in 1964 he had no qualms in asserting that on the Acropolis of Athens in the * This study is based on the author’s Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Professor Richard Har- rison of the University of Bristol. The author is grateful to the University of Bristol for award- ing him a Post-Graduate Scholarship, and to the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Princi- pals of the Universities of the United Kingdom for having given him the Overseas Research Scholarship Award. A small grant from the Department of Classics & Archaeology, Univer- sity of Malta, facilitated access to Dunand and Duru’s (1962) report on Oumm el-‘Amed. The author would also like to thank Mr Michael Howarth of the Arts and Social Sciences Library, University of Bristol, who helped him retrace details of the painting “Ernest Renan à l’Acro- pole d’Athènes” (1902) by André Brouillet. Finally, the author is also grateful to an anony- mous reviewer and to the Editor, whose comments guided the final version of this article; of course, the author is responsible for all remaining errors of fact and interpretation. This article is dedicated to the memory of Professor Giovanni Tore, teacher and friend. 28 N. C. VELLA latter half of the fifth century BC the Greeks had ‘said practically all that they had to say about architecture’.1 It is unlikely that years earlier, the great French Semitist Ernest Renan who stopped at Athens on his way east, would have said as much so crisply and so bluntly. His portrait by the artist André Brouillet, now at the Sorbonne,2 depicts him in deep thought sitting opposite the ruins of the temple to Athena Parthenos, as if he was wonder- ing what Phoenician equivalents lay in store for him in Lebanon where he was to head a scientific mission for Napoleon III.3 His published results make it clear that a systematic and comfortable definition of a Phoenician temple, as one had for the Greek, could not be had on the basis of the material remains uncovered then, notably at Byblos and Amrith. These lim- itations prevailed with remarkable consistency for many years and when the two Frenchmen Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez published their mon- umental history of art of Phoenicia in 1885, Malta’s megalithic monuments featured as renowned examples of Phoenician religious architecture.4 To these they added open-air religious worship at the “high places” of the Bible, ‘a creed of Canaanite fetishism’ as the Frenchmen called it.5 The Phoenicians prayed and sacrificed on ‘every high hill and under every green tree’; and for that no man-made temples were needed but torrents, forests, mountains, clouds and sky. There is nothing surprising here: the exalting of the natural was a legacy of the Romantic Movement, with its emphasis on the beauty and sublimity of wild nature. To the nineteenth-century anti- quarian this was simply the closest one could get to the emotions stirred by the elegant temples of the Aegean and Greek Sicily. Few advances were made on the nature of Phoenician religious architecture following the publications of Renan and Perrot and Chipiez, and one can easily claim that for decades scholars interested in the field of Phoeni- cian material culture in the homeland where essentially living off the work that these scholars put together. While the Maltese monuments were slowly recognized to pre-date the arrival of Semitic colonists on the islands by more than a millennium and a half,6 Solomon’s temple and the Canaanite “high places” continued to serve as lynch pins in discussions of Phoenician religious sites,7 when in reality neither one nor the other have yet yielded to archaeological evidence. The result has been a huge cacophony of confused 1 Wheeler 1964, p. 11 2 Tournikiotis 1994, p. 344 3 Renan 1864 4 Perrot and Chipiez 1885, pp. 301-218 5 Ibid., p. 251 6 Renfrew 1973, pp. 162-166 7 Moscati 1968, pp. 72-73; Harden 1980, pp. 83, 85; Fantar 1986, pp. 209-213. DEFINING PHOENICIAN RELIGIOUS SPACE 29 writing characterized by a general implicit consensus on what constitutes the sacred in material culture. Take, for example, the discovery of an alleged Phoenician tri-baetyled altar at Motya in Sicily: the excavator quickly identified a block of stone with three perforations as a religious installation without stating clearly why this should be so.8 While some are baffled by this ‘curious structure’,9 the initial interpretation remains unchallenged and the alleged altar continues to serve as evidence for the occurrence in Sicily of the “baetylic triad” which presumably originated in the Phoenician homeland.10 A visit to the site and a close study of the block and the instal- lations that surround it make it immediately apparent that the structure is in fact a weight used to apply pressure on a long wooden lever employed in the production of olive-oil, most probably during the Roman re-occupation of the island. I have discussed this site and its problems at length elsewhere and I men- tion them here to drive home the point that the literature about Phoenician religious sites is fraught with similar non sequiturs.11 No attempt has been made to develop an approach that states explicitly what the framework of inference is: buildings continue to be thought of as “shrines” or “sanctuaries” because they contain sacred objects which were found in other sites assumed a priori to be “shrines” or “sanctuaries”. Labels given at the time of discovery find a prominent place in the literature and scholars remain interested in the conclusions reached. Indeed, in a monograph published recently,12 the author purports to study the Oriental origins of Phoenician and Punic temples in Sardinia: the attempt is commendable, and I readily espouse some of the conclusions reached in the text, but the outcome is unfortunately marred by the simple fact that the author takes the known sites as givens, and nowhere does she state clearly the basis for her selection or question the criteria adopted to define the religious nature of the objects or the places when these were discovered. To shed the discipline of the cir- cularity that has afflicted the arguments of past studies it would have been necessary to make an explicit case for each site taken in isolation, stating the assumptions so that the reader can support or refute the interpretative exercise. I have taken this stand elsewhere with the intent of hacking a clear path through a mass of confused writing,13 following the work of one pre- historian who has cautioned that locations set aside for religious ritual must 8 Tusa 1970, pl. 10 9 Shaw 1989, p. 171 10 Bisi 1991, pp. 229, 233, pl. 66b 11 Vella 1998, pp. 178-180, figs 67-71, 73 12 Perra 1998 13 Vella 1998 30 N. C. VELLA be carefully identified.14 To guide my investigations, however, I did not pro- pose a general theory of religious ritual that can transcend context and ana- lyst, and to which data can be readily “applied” as some archaeologists would have us believe. Indeed, I brought into question the degree to which such a method exists in archaeological thought, showing that despite what has been written in recent years there is no hard and fast rule to recognize ritual from the archaeological evidence.15 I showed that the identification of a religious site or building depends on a logical process wherein there is a double movement from data to interpretation and back again, where an argument is cumulative. The principle that I followed was situational and contextual, and patterns sought in evidence for which the context of depo- sition and its formation had been duly assessed, classified by type and set in a time frame. The choice of an emphasis on narrative16 allowed me to con- textualise my critiques and to present in a clear way the complex and labo- rious chain of inferences upon which much of the interpretation rested. The results were interesting, if frustrating, conditioned by the relatively poor quality of publications: of 48 sites examined only 13 provided suffi- cient evidence for a good case to be made about their religious nature when these were taken in isolation, and for 11 of them this was mainly based on the inscriptional data collected.17 I concluded that to a definition of a Phoenician temple, qualifiers of time and space have to be added because changing political situations in Phoenicia throughout the course of the first millennium BC, and unforeseen and diverse experiences abroad, elicited different responses from Phoenician society as to how it went about orga- nizing its religious space and territory.18 In this paper I intend to demon- strate how this process of identifying a site with a religious monument works in practice by concentrating on a case study from Lebanon.

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