Politics of Reverence and Contempt: Achaemenid Phoenicia in Classical Texts

Classical texts have been the primary source of information about Achaemenid Phoenicia and, by and large, the Persian empire ever since G. Rawlinson (1889) addressed the topic directly in his History of Phoenicia. A little over a century later, classical literary works are still widely utilized in historical reconstructions, so much so that they often serve as central sources for Phoenicia. ¹ The importance of classical texts for historical research can be accounted for by the fact that they can supply information for the Persian period otherwise inaccessible through archaeology, numismatics, or the largely fragmentary epigraphic evidence. Moreover, since indigenous Phoenician literature dated to the Persian period is lacking, classical literary works provide the only narrative, coherent accounts of Phoenician history of the time. In spite of their seeming thoroughness and level of detail, however, classical texts are only representations of historical events and facts, rather than history itself. With this in mind, we will refer to classical texts as “sources” in this chapter, primarily in the sense of compendia of information that more often than not must be evaluated hermeneutically for possible biases and agendas.