Nations and Nationalism 7 (4), 2001, 451±465. # ASEN 2001
The appropriation of the Phoenicians
in British imperial ideology
TIMOTHY CHAMPION
Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton,
Southampton SO17 1BJ
ABSTRACT. The Phoenicians played ambivalent roles in Western historical
imagination. One such role was as a valued predecessor and prototype for the
industrial and maritime enterprise of nineteenth-century imperial Britain. Explicit
parallels were drawn in historical representations and more popular culture. It was
widely believed that the Phoenicians had been present in Britain, especially in
Cornwall, despite a lack of convincing historical evidence, and much importance was
placed on supposed archaeological evidence. Ideological tensions arose from the need
to reconcile ancient and modern Britain, and from the Semitic origin of the
Phoenicians. This example shows the power of archaeological objects to provide
material support for national and imperial constructions of the past.
The Phoenicians have played various and often quite ambivalent roles in
Western historiography (Liverani 1998; Parry 1995: 308±30). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were a somewhat mystical part of the
Mediterranean world, available to be invoked as exotic outsiders and as the
origin of cultural traditions. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they
played a more equivocal role. As an urban, literate, manufacturing and
trading society on the fringes of the Graeco-Roman world, their location
either in the history of Western civilisation or in the emerging stereotype of
the oriental was ¯exible, and as a people with a Semitic language they were
inevitably caught up in the growing anti-Semitism of the later nineteenth
century.
One part of their image was a major role in the imperial iconography of
Britain in the nineteenth century, yet that role is now mostly forgotten. The
intention here is to try to explore both their popularity and their subsequent
demise.
Imperial iconography
London lost two of its most symbolically important buildings in ®res in the
1830s, the Palace of Westminster in 1834 and the Royal Exchange in 1838.
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Timothy Champion
The replacement of both buildings was immediately put in hand, and their
successors are, once more, familiar London landmarks and icons of Britain's
political and economic dominance. The projects to rebuild these structures
also coincided with the height of the fashion for historical painting in
Victorian England. This genre was never as popular in England as it was in
France, and in particular it never received the same measure of state support
as a means of promoting and disseminating patriotic images of the national
past (Dumas 1995; Sherman 1989). There was, nevertheless, a de®nite tradition of historical painting; the schemes proposed for the decoration of the
Palace of Westminster and the Royal Exchange were two of the most important projects of historical decoration in Britain in the nineteenth century, and
tell us much about the symbolic importance of historical imagery at the time.
By 1840, the new Palace of Westminster was far enough advanced for
attention to be paid to the internal decorations, including murals (Boase
1954). Many of the suggestions for the murals were on historical themes ±
mostly medieval, with many images of Anglo-Saxons, but also a fair sprinkling of ancient Britons. The ideological significance of these paintings is
nowhere better conveyed than in a proposal of 1847 for a decorative scheme
in the central corridor of the Palace. It consisted of a set of six paintings, in
three matched pairs of ancient and modern (Boase 1954: 341; Smiles 1994:
148). They focused on the concepts of savagery, superstition and slavery, and
quite explicitly compared the ancient Phoenicians in Cornwall with Captain
Cook in Tahiti and the ancient Britons with the modern Polynesians, and the
suppression of the Druids with the suppression of suttee: conversely, the
modern Britons, bringing peace, prosperity and freedom in the wake of their
imperial expansion, are equated with the ancient Phoenicians and Romans.
There was, eventually, a very similar approach to the decoration of the
Royal Exchange (Willsdon 1997). The courtyard of the new building was
roofed in 1883±4, and a programme of decoration was started, though not
finished until the 1930s. This was to be a series of historical scenes, including
episodes from the history of England and of the City of London. The first to
be finished was painted and donated by Lord Leighton, the then president of
the Royal Academy. It was on the theme of Ancient Commerce, and was
eventually paired with a companion piece on Modern Commerce, by Frank
Brangwyn, completed in 1903. Leighton's painting, done in 1894±5, has an
alternative title of `Phoenicians trading with Ancient Britons on the coast of
Cornwall' (Rhys 1895: 46 and plate following). The richly clad Phoenicians
are presented as the bringers of civilisation, learning and technical skill to the
mostly fur-clad Britons, with whom they traded textiles and high-quality
manufactured goods in exchange for furs and metal.
The general message of these paintings would have been obvious to
nineteenth-century spectators, and the comparison of ancient and modern
was made very explicit. But who were these Phoenicians? How did they fit
into the discourse of empire, and how should modern-day historians interpret
the more subtle and detailed meanings of these images?
The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology
453
Phoenicians in history and archaeology
The Phoenicians who so appealed to the nineteenth century as a suitable role
model for a modern industrial and mercantile people were a literate and
urban society of the east Mediterranean, occupying approximately the area of
modern Lebanon in the late second and ®rst millennia BC (Moscati 1988).
They were not a single united state, but a cluster of city-states of which the
best known are Tyre and Sidon. Though the full extent of their cultural legacy
to Greece is disputed, the Greek alphabet was certainly derived from a
Phoenician prototype. The Phoenicians remained a considerable economic
and political force in their homeland until they were swallowed up in the
empire of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BC.
Like the Greeks, the Phoenicians also founded colonies, especially in Sicily,
North Africa and southern and eastern Spain. Of these colonies, the most
powerful was Carthage in modern Tunisia. Phoenician expansion into the
western Mediterranean was mainly a search for raw materials, especially
metal ores. The technical quality of their manufactured goods, especially
metalwork, was very high. It was widely recognised in antiquity, and modern
archaeological finds support this judgement.
Carthage rose to be a major political power in the central and west
Mediterranean basin, and a serious rival to Rome. Our knowledge of this
history is, of course, almost entirely from the Roman perspective, but one
major theme of Roman history in the third and second centuries was the
series of wars between these two rival states, culminating in the defeat of
Carthage and the destruction of the city in 146 BC. Already in those days the
image of Carthage and more generally of the Phoenicians was beginning to be
laden with layers of meaning, drawn mostly from the former's opposition to
Rome and the latter's location on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean,
exposing it to well-established prejudices against the oriental.
The archaeology of the Phoenicians is now reasonably well established
(Aubet 1993; Moscati 1988). Phoenician maritime activity certainly extended
beyond Gibraltar into the Atlantic, and there was an important colony on
the site of the modern city of Cadiz. How much further northwards along the
Atlantic coast of Europe Phoenician merchants ever sailed is unknown. The
direct archaeological evidence for the presence of Phoenician or Carthaginian
traders as far north as Britain is non-existent, and the most recent review of
Phoenician activity in the west does not even bother to consider the question
(Aubet 1993).
It is, rather, the documentary evidence of the classical authors that has
provided the basis for speculation about Phoenician activity in the Atlantic.
There is reliable evidence for voyages along the African and Iberian coasts,
but voyages in the waters of northwestern Europe are more doubtful. Several
authors comment on the tin trade in Spain and the Atlantic, and these
references, although often obscure, have sometimes been taken to apply to
Cornwall. Among others, the Greek geographer Strabo, writing in the first
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Timothy Champion
century BC and referring to maritime activity along the Atlantic coast of
Spain, talks of the acquisition of tin in islands called the Cassiterides (`Tin
Isles'), a trade controlled by the Phoenicians. There has been much speculation about their location, but the most reasonable interpretation is that the
reference is to islands off the northwest coast of Spain (Hawkes 1977: 130,
n.1). There have, nevertheless, been many attempts to identify them with the
Scillies, in support of Phoenician presence there and, by extension, in
Cornwall (Holmes 1907: 483±514).
Diodorus Siculus gives a different story. After an account of Phoenician
activity in the western Mediterranean and in the Atlantic beyond Gibraltar,
and their journeys to islands in the Atlantic, presumably Madeira or the
Canaries, he goes on to describe other islands off the coast of northern
Europe, starting with Britain. He gives a generalised description of the island,
and then addresses the question of the tin trade:
the inhabitants of Britain who dwell about the promontory of Belerium [modern
Cornwall] . . . work the tin into pieces the size of an `astragalos' and convey it to an
island which lies off Britain and is called Ictis . . . merchants purchase the tin and carry
it from there across the strait to France; and ®nally, making their way on foot through
France for some thirty days, they bring their wares on horseback to the mouth of
the river Rhone. (Diodorus Siculus, V, 22; translation adapted from Oldfather (1933:
vol. 3, 157))
Diodorus never actually says that the Phoenicians sailed to Cornwall. In fact,
he says quite the opposite: the production of Cornish tin was in the hands of
the natives of Cornwall, and its transport to the Mediterranean was organised
by local merchants, by sea and then over land through France, well outside
Phoenician control.
Nevertheless, there was a persistent belief that the Phoenicians had reached
Britain, and these passages were often used in support of that idea. Thus
Canon George Rawlinson (1889: 69±70) wrote:
The Phoenicians had one more colony towards the west, which has a particular
interest for all English-speaking peoples. Phoenician ships from Gadeira [Cadiz]
braved the perils of the open ocean, and coasting along the western shores of Gaul and
Spain, without (apparently) making settlements, crossed the mouth of the English
Channel from Ushant to the Scilly Isles, and conveyed thither a body of colonists who
established an emporium. The attraction which drew them was the mineral wealth of
the islands and of the neighbouring Cornish coast, which may have become known to
them through the Gauls of the opposite continent.
One object that attracted much attention in this context was a tin ingot
dredged up at the mouth of the River Fal in Cornwall in 1812. It is massive,
weighing 158 pounds, and has a distinctive X or H shape. It is on show in the
Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, where it is described as the most famous
archaeological object found in Cornwall. It is now thought that the ingot is of
late-medieval date, but its fame derives from the fact that for much of the
The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology
455
nineteenth century it was thought to be of Phoenician manufacture and clear
evidence of their presence in Britain. The evidence for this was the passage of
Diodorus quoted above. Despite the obscurity of the meaning of the Greek
word astragalos, which has several possible meanings, none of them appropriate, it was readily accepted that this had to be an example of it. Sir Henry
James (1863) even managed to ®nd a letter of the Phoenician alphabet
stamped on it, though in a later version of what was substantially the same
account (1871) he made no mention of it, and had apparently changed his
mind. Later, more cautious and critical scholars, such as Hugh Hencken
(1932: 166), showed how unlikely such an identi®cation was, but that came
too late to prevent the widespread use of the object as `proof' of Phoenician
presence in Cornwall.
Phoenicians and empire
Before the emergence of a soundly based knowledge of the archaeological
record of Europe, which did not really take place until after the middle of the
nineteenth century, the written record of the classical authors was the only
basis for a knowledge of the past. The search for the origins of prehistoric
traditions in northern Europe, therefore, almost inevitably involved an
attempt to forge a link with the known peoples of ancient history. The
Phoenicians were a people from the civilised Mediterranean world, but
outside the mainstream of Graeco-Roman development, and therefore a
suitable source for the tracing of speculative cultural origins. Documentary
references to them were available, since the works of both Strabo and
Diodorus were known from the late ®fteenth century, in the Greek originals
and Latin translations.
In 1590 the English humanist, John Twyne, ascribed the settlement of
Britain to the Phoenicians, rather than to the giants who had dominated
medieval accounts (Ferguson 1993: 93). In 1646 the French scholar Samuel
Bochart published an influential work arguing on philological grounds that
France had been settled after the Flood by voyagers from Phoenicia. His
ideas were followed by the fanciful English author, Aylett Sammes, in his
Britannia Antiqua Restaurata (1676), who extended this Phoenician colonisation to southwestern Britain (Parry 1995: 308±30). These ideas were in turn
taken up by several later writers, especially those such as William Stukeley
who were seeking an origin for the imagined beliefs of the Druids (Piggott
1985: 100).
A similar fascination with the Phoenicians as a valued cultural origin could
also be found in Ireland. Romantic historical fantasising had sought to trace
an origin for Irish culture in the known civilisation of the classical world, and
two conflicting hypotheses prevailed in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries: one associated the Irish Scoti with the similar sounding
Scythi well known from Greek literature, while the other looked rather to the
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Timothy Champion
Phoenicians (Leerssen 1996: 68±156). The Phoenician hypothesis took on a
particularly anti-English note:
In the opposition between civility and barbarism, the Anglo-centric view saw the Irish
as savages and the English presence as a source of civility; the Phoenician hypothesis
turned the tables, and predicated civility on the native Gaels while bracketing the
English presence with the Viking spoliations, seeing them as violent disruptions.
(Leerssen 1996: 74)
It is undoubtedly ironic, as well as indicative of the mutability of such claims,
that, only a short time after the Irish had been invoking the Phoenicians as
their ancestors, the English should also be looking to them as their own
prototypes.
In the nineteenth century, however, the Phoenicians took on a different
meaning. As archaeological, and especially philological, knowledge grew,
so it became harder to envisage the Phoenicians as the direct ancestors of
any cultural traditions in Britain or Ireland. Attempts to derive Gaelic words
from Phoenician roots were shown to be what they were, pure fantasy. The
replacement of antiquarianism by a more scientific archaeology laid the
foundations for a surer knowledge of the ancient monuments (Leerssen 1996:
108±40).
Instead, the Phoenicians were given a new role, as seen above, as the
prototypes of British imperial and commercial dominance. There were several
factors that fitted them to this role. The Phoenician reputation for manufactured goods, especially metalwork and textiles, matched the role played by
Birmingham and Manchester in Britain's industrial might, and their reputation as sailors paralleled England's claim to be the dominant maritime
power of the century. These parallels were reinforced by a persistent belief in
the presence of Phoenicians in Britain, especially in Cornwall, despite the lack
of credible archaeological evidence.
Thus Rawlinson (1889: 23), referring to `hardy mariners' and `the silken
bonds of mutually advantageous commerce', described the Phoenicians as:
the people who of all antiquity had most in common with England and the English ±
the people who ®rst discovered the British Islands and made them known to mankind
at large, and the people who circumnavigated Africa, and caused the gold of Ophir to
¯ow into the coffers of Solomon.
Rawlinson (1889: 38±9) also quotes with approval Deutsch's (1874: 162±3)
summary of the Phoenician character:
They were the ®rst systematic traders, the ®rst miners and metallurgists, the greatest
inventors, the boldest mariners, the greatest colonizers ± while elsewhere despotism
overshadowed as with a pall the whole Eastern world, they could boast a form of
government approaching to constitutionalism; of all the nations of their time they
stood the highest in practical arts and science.
It is scarcely surprising that, with such a record of achievement, nineteenthcentury Britain should look to them as their mentors. As Martin Bernal
The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology
457
(1987: 350) says, `Many Victorians had a positive feeling towards the
Phoenicians as sober cloth merchants who did a little bit of slaving on the side
and spread civilisation while making a tidy pro®t.'
The Africa connection
In Leighton's painting the manufactured objects on offer to the Britons are
imaginary, but there is one speci®c reference to hard archaeological evidence.
In the bottom left-hand corner is a clear depiction of two large H-shaped
metal ingots, clearly representations of the ingot found in the River Fal.
Leighton was a frequent visitor to Cornwall, and was there during the
preparatory work for this painting (Willsdon 1997: 316); there were also
copies of the ingot in London, so he was certainly familiar with it and its
signi®cance.
But at the time of Leighton's painting, conceived in 1892 and executed in
1894±5, there was another and more explicit reading of this work. In 1890
Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa Company had annexed Matabeleland and Mashonaland (modern Zimbabwe). Rhodes firmly believed that the
archaeological remains of the country, especially the site of Great Zimbabwe
itself, could not have been built by indigenous communities, and attributed
them to a Phoenician origin. In 1891, he sent an archaeological expedition to
the site under the English archaeologist, J. Theodore Bent. Bent had worked
in the Levant and the Arabian Gulf, and was regarded as the leading expert
on the Phoenicians. He concluded, predictably, that the site had been built by
a race from Arabia, akin to the Phoenicians (Bent 1892: 222). He also found
moulds for casting X-shaped metal ingots (Garlake 1973: 115±16 and fig. 65),
and drew an explicit parallel with the ingot from Cornwall, which he regarded
as `undoubtedly made by Phoenician workmen', as evidence of Phoenician
contacts with two remote parts of the world (Bent 1892: 216±19).
Bent's account of his work at Great Zimbabwe was published in 1892, and
proved very successful: it was already in its third edition by the time Leighton
was finishing his work. He was not the only traveller venturing into
Mashonaland in Rhodes's wake (MacKenzie 1988: 131±2). Lord Randolph
Churchill set off to examine the potential of the mineral resources, and sent
back regular reports, which were printed as articles in The Daily Graphic and
later assembled in a single volume published in 1893 (Churchill 1893). Thanks
to the work of these and other writers, the expansion of the empire through
Rhodes's seizure of what was later Rhodesia, and the quest for mineral
resources there, would have been familiar topics in the England of the early
1890s. So too would the question of the cultural origins of the area's archaeological sites. The possibility of an indigenous origin was firmly denied, and
many other sources of inspiration were cited, mostly from the Mediterranean
region or the Near East, and especially the Phoenicians. Thus Leighton's
painting draws an even more explicit parallel between the Phoenicians and
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Timothy Champion
the British empire: Britons are not just modern parallels to the Phoenicians,
but Rhodes and his followers were actually following in the footsteps of the
Phoenicians in bringing civilisation to southern Africa.
Britons ancient and modern
The incorporation of such explicit comparisons of Britain and the Phoenicians into the discourse of empire was not a simple matter, but raised
complex and sometimes con¯icting issues. The most important of these was
the connection between modern and ancient Britons.
The juxtaposition of ancient and modern scenes associates modern Britain
with non-British societies of the ancient period, and particularly with the
more advanced societies of the Mediterranean. This is a constant topic in the
representation of the pre-Roman past of Britain, and interaction between
the indigenous people and the representatives of the civilised world was a
favourite theme, especially in the nineteenth century. Thus, the Phoenicians as
merchant venturers and manufacturers are often to be found alongside the
Romans, especially in the form of one of Caesar's landings in Kent, or
Christian missionaries, emphasising the values of progress, trade, government and religion that were so critical to the ideology of imperial expansion
(Smiles 1994: 140). The clear ideological message of these representations and
the positive values attached to the harbingers of Mediterranean culture as the
predecessors of modern Britain required a correspondingly negative valorisation of the `natives', the symbolic equivalent of the subjected peoples of the
empire. The prehistoric people of Britain, however, could not easily be dismissed as `other', since they were in some sense ancestral to modern Britain,
even if only in name rather than biologically or culturally.
It had not always been thus, however. For a time in the eighteenth century,
the ancient Britons had been accepted as a valued part of our ancestry. At a
time when a national identity for Britons was being forged, in Linda Colley's
(1992) word, in opposition to France and uniting England, Wales and Scotland,
a common ancestry in prehistory was a useful idea. Ancient Britons were seen
as the ancestors of modern Britain, and as the origin of many of our most
prized social and political institutions. Many positive images of the ancient
Britons were produced (Champion 1996; Smiles 1994: 129±40); where they
were shown in conflict with the forces of Rome, the perspective was that of
the ancient Britons resisting invasion.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, an alternative vision of
the past had emerged, which focused on England rather than Britain, and saw
England as an essentially Saxon country (MacDougall 1982). The coming of
the Anglo-Saxons in AD 449 was seen as the origin of our language, our
democracy, our villages, and the start of history. Many of the popular histories
of England, such as John Green's Short History of the English People (1874),
actually began with the alleged event of AD 449, consigning the Roman
The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology
459
period and even more so the prehistoric to an unrelated, non-historical, nonEnglish limbo.
The ideological imperative to dissociate modern Britain, or more properly
modern England, from the ancient Britons can also be seen in attitudes
towards archaeological sites and monuments. When Sir John Lubbock was
attempting in the 1870s to promote a bill in Parliament to protect ancient
monuments, he met much opposition based on fear for the rights of private
property owners, suspicion of government interference and resentment of the
vested interests of archaeologists, but some of the most outspoken objections
came from Lord Francis Hervey, MP for Bury St Edmunds. He described the
pre-Roman period thus:
England was once inhabited by barbarians ± he would not call them our ancestors, but
our predecessors ± who stained themselves blue, ran about naked, and practised
absurd, perhaps obscene, rites under the mistletoe. They had no arts, no literature ±
and when they found time hanging heavily on their hands, they sat around piling up
great barrows, and rings of stone. Were these the monuments which the hon. Baronet
was about to preserve?
In a later debate, he dissociated modern Englishmen even more clearly from
the ancient Britons:
What he did not understand was that Englishmen should be called upon to exhibit
enthusiasm for the monuments of that barbarous and uncivilized race whom our
forefathers took the trouble to expel from the country. Our forefathers came from
beyond the sea, and drove out those wretched people.
This surely is the concept of the ancient Briton so strikingly represented in
Leighton's work, echoing what Macaulay (1849: I, 4) had said nearly ®fty
years earlier: `Her [Britain's] inhabitants, when ®rst they became known to
the Tyrian mariners, were little superior to the natives of the Sandwich
Islands.'
Contradictions
The problem of the cultural status of the ancient Britons and their relationship to modern Britain was not the only contradiction inherent in the
incorporation of the Phoenicians into the discourse of empire. Other tensions
were also present, mostly derived from the ambivalent place of the
Phoenicians themselves ± and their colony, Carthage ± in Western history.
In the first place, Britain chose to compare itself in different contexts with
both Rome and the Phoenicians. As the decorative scheme for the Palace of
Westminster shows, it was possible to celebrate both these comparisons in
juxtaposition without incongruity. The Roman qualities of efficiency and
organisation could perhaps be regarded as complementary to the Phoenician
merits of industry and commerce, so there was no inherent contradiction,
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Timothy Champion
despite the incongruity. More problematic was the linking of the Phoenicians
with the Carthaginians, who were the archenemies of Rome, and English
appeals to the past had to avoid any direct invocation of a parallel with
Carthage, not only because it was defeated by Rome, but also because of its
negative character in most historical representation.
A more fundamental problem arose from the Semitic identity of the
Phoenicians and their inclusion in the developing discourse of orientalism
(Said 1978). Stereotypical characteristics such as luxury and duplicity, as well
as horrific religious practices, were attributed to them. Even Rawlinson, an
enthusiast for the Phoenicians, who played down the reputation for trickery,
had to admit that `the religion of the Phoenicians was not, in the historic
period, of a very elevating or improving character' (1889: 29). The positive
estimation of the Phoenicians was very much a product of British, or
specifically English, thinking, not shared for instance with France (Bernal
1987: 352±9). There, the attitude to the Phoenicians and especially to the
Carthaginians was very much more negative. The expansion of French
imperial interests in the Levant and particularly in North Africa no doubt
demanded a different image, but French antagonism to England also required
that the Phoenicians should be damned by association.
Some of the negative characteristics of the Phoenicians as orientals were
also emphasised by the growing anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth century.
The most prominent of the Phoenicians in Leighton's painting is a strikingly
oriental figure, with characteristic facial profile, extravagant gesture and
flowing robes. He would be easily recognised by Victorian spectators, since
these particular features formed key elements in the representation of ethnic
types in the later nineteenth century. But the identity they represented was
Semitic, rather than specifically Phoenician, and by the later decades of the
century was more explicitly associated with the image of Jews. Physiognomy
was an important element in the representation of identity, and the increasingly common portrayal of Jews, especially in the theatre and in popular
art forms such as cartoons, had made the hooked nose and the beard a widely
recognised symbol of Jewish identity (West 1993). The flowing robes would
also have recalled current fashions in the staging of one of the famous
dramatic representations of a Jew, Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of
Venice. Some of the most popular and influential renditions of this role, by
actors such as Edwin Booth and Henry Irving (Erdman 1997: 18±31), portrayed Shylock as an exotic oriental. Irving acknowledged direct inspiration
from Levantine Jews seen on a visit to the Mediterranean. The clothing which
Leighton gave to his Phoenicians, especially the long flowing robes and the
floppy pointed cap, bears a very striking resemblance to the stage costumes
worn by these actors, especially that of Booth, which was inspired by a
painting of the French orientalist artist Jean-LeÂon GeÂroÃme (Erdman 1997: 24
and figures 1±2). GeÂroÃme was a prolific artist specialising in oriental scenes
which he painted in a detailed realist style, based on many visits to the
Mediterranean and the Near East, especially Egypt (MacKenzie 1995: 50, 54).
The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology
461
By the end of the century, Leighton's orientals could have been seen in a very
different and less positive light.
A very different form of contradiction was presented by Cornwall. During
the nineteenth century the problem of defining a distinct Cornish identity
became more pressing (Vernon 1998). The coming of the railways and the
opening of the Tamar bridge in 1859 had made the region more accessible.
The Cornish language had died out in the eighteenth century, so a new
cultural identity could not easily be rooted in a non-Saxon linguistic heritage.
This identity was not entirely `imagined', but rooted partly in the `real',
documented through scientific research, especially in folklore (Vernon 1998:
156±8). Though archaeology was as yet poorly developed, the remains of
the remoter past also offered a unique resource in the form of the link with
the Phoenicians. Though they were widely used as a model for imperial
Britain, only Cornwall could lay any real claim to a Phoenician presence in
the Iron Age. There was considerable interest in promoting the arguments
for a Phoenician presence in Cornwall (Bannister 1866±7; Birch and Barham
1850; Edmonds 1863; Edmonds 1871; Poole 1864±5; Watkins 1856). The
archaeological evidence was thin, to say the least, so it is easy to understand
the continued belief in the Phoenician origin of something as distinctive as the
tin ingot from Falmouth. It was important to demonstrate not just the
presence of the Phoenicians in Cornwall, but also a lasting legacy. This
demanded considerable ingenuity, and many attempts were made to relate
local Cornish customs, practices and dialect words to Phoenician roots. As
late as 1906, the president of the Royal Institution of Cornwall could say (Fox
1907±9: 18):
. . . to say nothing of the art of Cornish cream having been introduced to us by these
navigators from Syria. There is in your museum an important witness in the block of
tin; the astragalus ± the vertebra or ankle bone ± dredged up near St Mawes, early in
the last century. This treasure is considered by some to be only second in historical
interest to the Coronation Stone at Westminster.
In the ensuing debate, it was suggested that the Phoenicians had been
responsible not only for clotted cream, but also for the use of saffron in cakes
in Cornwall.
Here, the Phoenician heritage was part of the strategy through which
Cornwall sought to resist incorporation into the national unity of an AngloSaxon England, and Leighton's picture, together with the tin ingot in Truro
Museum, could be seen as signs of a purely local past, not a national one.
Decline of the Phoenicians
The popularity of the Phoenicians as a civilising prototype and as a signi®cant
presence in pre-Roman Britain has declined rapidly since the heyday of the
late-Victorian empire. There are a number of reasons why this might have
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Timothy Champion
come about, apart from a growing disenchantment with the whole imperial
project.
In the first place, the growing anti-Semitism of the later nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries made it less acceptable to appeal to the Phoenicians, who were difficult to separate from the Jews. This can be seen in an
illustration to a popular book on archaeology widely read in the middle
decades of the twentieth century (Quennell and Quennell 1945: fig. 90). The
picture, not fully described in the text, is entitled `Currency bars', and shows
an exchange of iron for textiles. Though the type of exchange is identical to
that depicted by Leighton, the character of the participants is very different.
The ancient Briton wears cloth, not furs, while the textile merchant, with a
distinctive Semitic physiognomy, is dressed only in trousers. The decline from
the noble, opulent Phoenician to the ignoble, almost subhuman, figure of the
twentieth century is a marker of the increasingly anti-Semitic feeling of the
times.
The growth of archaeological knowledge also made the role of the
Phoenicians increasingly doubtful. They had been able to flourish in the
nineteenth century, when comparatively little was known about Britain in
the first millennium BC, but the rapid expansion of the archaeological
evidence from the 1880s onwards, such as the pioneering excavation of the
Iron Age village at Glastonbury in 1893±8 and 1904±7 (Coles and Minnitt
1995), made it increasingly obvious that the development of later prehistoric
society should be traced in the framework of Western Europe without
recourse to exotic inspiration. Bulleid's excavation at Glastonbury showed a
sophisticated level of domestic architecture, and of craft skills such as carpentry, pottery and metalwork, quite inappropriate for the fur-clad savages
of Leighton's paintings. Arthur Bulleid (1894: 151) summed up the inhabitants as `industrious and fairly civilised'. In 1911 the Illustrated London News
published a long account of the work. Bulleid's (1911) provocative title was
`Not the Woad-daubed Savage of the Old History Books: the Civilised
Ancient Briton'.
The belief in a Phoenician presence in Britain was already in decline by
the beginning of the twentieth century. The decline in the enthusiasm for
empire removed the reason for it to be perpetuated. Most archaeological
works had already begun to show their perception of the importance of the
Phoenicians by simply failing to mention them. In the popular imagination,
however, they lingered on and are still to be found occasionally, an example
of the legacy that can be created by an outdated ideology and its creative use
of the past.
Conclusions
This brief analysis of the story of the Phoenicians in Britain serves to illustrate
and to emphasise some of the complex ways in which archaeological objects
The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology
463
can be implicated in the discourse of nationalism. As archaeological knowledge has improved, so the range of meanings that can be attached to objects
has decreased. In the early days, however, many inaccurate interpretations
could be made without fear of being proved wrong. Thus the interpretation of
the ingot from the Fal as Phoenician was so effective not only because it
seemed to match Diodorus's description, but also because there was no means
of proving it wrong. Archaeological objects were thus doubly amenable to
such discourse, since they could be invested with powerful and ¯exible
meanings, and these meanings could not be easily falsi®ed.
This case also tells us something about the power of archaeological objects
to impress through their sheer physicality. The only archaeological object
regularly invoked as evidence for the presence of Phoenicians in Britain was
the tin ingot from the Fal. It is not in any sense an aesthetically attractive
object, but it is a symbol of technological achievement, it has a distinctive
shape and it is, above all, massive. The comparison made with the Stone of
Scone is instructive: in both cases the symbolic power of the object lies in its
material existence and its cultural associations, rather than in any other
properties. Objects do not have to be beautiful or numerous or to display
outstanding craftsmanship to be effective symbols in nationalist and imperial
discourses. It is their very materiality that endows them, in appropriate
circumstances, with the power to impress. The values attached to the ingot
from the Fal also serve to problematise the notion of `authenticity'. The
object works by its material existence to provide a visible authentication of
the preferred interpretation of the ancient authors, but it can only itself be
called `authentic' in a very limited sense. It is not a modern forgery, like
Macpherson's poems of Ossian, so it may be called an `authentic' relic of
the past, but it is not an `authentic' relic of a Phoenician past; it was only the
poor state of archaeological knowledge at the time that allowed such an
interpretation to be attributed to it.
Perhaps the most significant lesson from this analysis is that a national or
imperial appeal to a past civilisation does not have to invoke them as direct
ancestors. With the exception of Cornwall, the nineteenth-century ideologies
examined in this article never claimed the Phoenicians as ancestors or even
as cultural founders. The logic of the claim is to establish them instead as
prototypes or role models. An England committed to an idea of itself as
essentially descended from the Anglo-Saxons could not invoke a relationship
to the classical world, whether Greek, Roman or Phoenician, in any other
way. The relationship between past and present is not the linear one of ancestral descent, but a cyclic one of following once more in ancient footsteps.
Place, too, is important, and the discursive power of such a claim works
through the ability to demonstrate that the prototypes had been present in
ancient Britain, or had preceded Britain in bringing civilisation to Africa.
Another important property of most archaeological objects is provenance:
they have a location, and can serve to link past and present to a particular
place, which itself takes on a heightened symbolic importance. Hence the
464
Timothy Champion
significance of Cornwall, and the ideological imperative to interpret an object
from there as Phoenician.
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