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Book Review: How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800

networks with their new neighbours too? And might not a similar mercantile intentionality be seen in Phoenician civic weight standards and coinage, reflecting perhaps each city’s different predominant trading partners or other commercial realities, as well as an effort to stand out from their commercial rivals? Cultic malleability also would have served these artisans and traders well. Whether the Phoenician god Melqart (Greek Herakles, Roman Hercules or local Makeris) in Sardinia (p. 126) or the goddess Ashtart (Greek Aphrodite, Roman Venus or indigenous mother goddess) in Sicily (p. 84), an easily translatable deity would have been advantageous for a merchant-trader society in cultivating a safe middle-ground context for conducting trade or other commercial arrangements. Such openness to hybridisation might be the manifestation of a Phoenician attitude towards self that is more practical and oriented towards commercial and political ends than to visible reverence of an exclusive cultural identity. In Search of the Phoenicians is an ambitious intellectual project that delivers a full broadside to long-held notions of these ancient people, virtually no characteristic of which is left unscathed. Her examination of the presented evidence is thorough and methodical. She meticulously assesses the reliability of the evidence, especially the ancient writers and the sources they relied upon, in her quest to comprehend the ways Phoenician-speakers self-identified. Her final assessment in the validity of the hypothesis is convincing, even if, at times, some of her arguments seemingly hinge upon the most nuanced of interpretations. In the end, we are left with the quandary of what to call these people, if not ‘Phoenicians’: Levantines, Near Easterners, Syro-Palestinians, Tyrians, Sidonians or other metropolitan toponym, or, as Quinn does, Phoenicianspeakers? None of these is without its own problems and limitations. Ultimately, the terms Phoenicia and Phoenician will continue in use because of their familiarity and utility in providing instantly recognisable historical and geographical contexts. But perhaps Quinn’s greatest contribution with this book is that we no longer have any excuse to use them without caution and without recognising that they are modern descriptors and not true reflections of the ancient reality.