This research group aspires to reconstruct aspects of a lost body of literature of crucial
importance for knowledge transfer in the ancient world. Although only bits and pieces of
Phoenician literature have survived, there are historical and cultural grounds to
hypothesize, based on evidence for several genres, that it exerted much influence both
westward, upon the classical civilizations, and eastward, into the Northwest Semitic
traditions (Ugaritic, Hebrew and Aramaic). The main goal of this research group is to
outline the poetic language, style and content of poems and songs that could have been
transmitted both orally and/or in writing. Such endeavor will be based on converging
lines of investigation: literary and stylistic analysis of Phoenician and Punic epigraphic
evidence and of fragments of literary texts transmitted in translation, matched by
comparative exploration of pertinent Greek and Latin sources on the one hand, and
cognate, Ugaritic and Hebrew poetic works as well as texts of other neighboring
cultures, on the other. The philological scrutiny and typological description will be
complemented by historical, social, geographical and inter-cultural contextualization of
the contact zones and situations in which speakers of various languages throughout the
Mediterranean may have been exposed to – and informed by – Phoenician song
culture.
Recovering possible features of the lost Phoenician poetry in a historically grounded
view of cultural contact is a task for a team of philologists that crosses the usual
boundaries between academic disciplines. The proposed research group ultimately
aims to pioneer research into the question of how the geographical and linguistic divide
between Graeco-Roman and ancient near Eastern literature could have been possibly
bridged.