"Phoenicia: an imaginary friend to nations in need of ancestors"

"In 1919... These ‘Lebanists’ emphasised the natural symbiosis between the mountain and the coast: for them, the proposed new country was already a coherent whole; it just needed a distinctive history to justify its political autonomy.

The nation-state might have been new in the Middle East, but the Lebanists knew that nationalist movements needed historical legitimation, a common past on which to build a common polity. A local candidate presented itself: the Phoenicians, the ancient traders who had founded the coastal cities, sailed the length of the Mediterranean and beyond, and invented the alphabet that we still use today. Portraying the Phoenicians as champions of free enterprise, much like themselves, the Lebanists argued that these ancient Phoenician roots gave the Lebanese a Western, Mediterranean-focused identity, very different from the Muslim culture of the broader Syrian region, which they saw as distasteful and uncivilised. It was central to their ideology that they were not Arabs: ‘There are no camels in Lebanon’ as the slogan still goes... 

All of this, including Smith’s claim, would have surprised the ancient Phoenicians, a disparate set of neighbouring and often warring city-states, cut off from each other for the most part by deep river valleys. They did not see themselves as a single ethnic group or people, the kind that could provide the ‘groundwork’ for a nation. There is no known instance of a Phoenician ever calling themselves a Phoenician, or any other collective term. In their inscriptions, they describe themselves in terms of their individual families and cities. They don’t seem to have had a common culture, either: their dialects fall on a continuum that linked city states across Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine, and the individual ports developed separate civic and artistic cultures, drawing on different foreign examples and relationships... 

Dismissing Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ridiculous story of Trojan origins, Foche declares that Albion, the son of the god Neptune, first settled Britain, then founded a race of cave-dwelling Giants in the land to which he gave his own name, Albion. More recently, however, the first foreigners to reach this island were the Phoenicians, attracted by Cornish metals. His evidence for this claim includes the ‘Punic dress’ still worn by some women in Wales, as well as that region’s ‘Punic huts’; furthermore, the Abbot explains, the famous British custom of body-painting with woad was clearly an attempt by the Phoenicians to regain some of the colour they had lost over many generations out of the sun. The idea of descent from Phoenicians was ingenious: by dismissing the old Trojan hypothesis, Twyne provided a new national history for the new Tudor dynasty, one that he was careful to associate in particular with Tudor Wales, and one that gave Britain more civilised and heroic ancestors than descent from what he has Foche call ‘an unknown and obscure refugee’."

https://aeon.co/essays/phoenicia-an-imaginary-friend-to-nations-in-need-of-ancestors

FB: "although he emphasises the complementary origins of the British kingdoms, Sammes strongly distinguishes Britain from other European nations. In particular, he is decidedly against Britain’s arch-rival France and the French. Already for Sammes and his contemporaries, the French were closely associated with the Romans, a land-based, territorial state. Britons’ supposed descent from Rome’s traditional enemy, the maritime trading power of Phoenician Carthage, emphasised the differences between the two modern nations, and accounted for Britain’s superiority on the sea"