Ann Neville - Mountains of Silver and Rivers of Gold : the Phoenicians in Iberia.

A mo thuismitheoiri

I have arrived from my foreign land. I have passed through countries and have heard
about your being, you of the primordial state of the two lands, you who have engendered what exists.
In you your two eyes shine. Your Word is the way of life that gives breath to all throats.
Now I am in the horizon, flooded by the happiness of the harija oases, and I speak to it like a friend.
In me there is a source of health, of life, beyond your shores .

Hieroglyphic inscription on an Egyptian alabaster urn from Tomb 1 of the cemetery of
Cerro de San Cristbal, at Almucar (Granada)

UBC STUDIES IN THE ANCIENT WORLD: VOLUME 1
Series editor: R. J. A. Wilson

First published in 2007
by Oxbow Books, Oxford
for the Department of Classical, Near Eastern & Religious Studies,
University of British Columbia,
Vancouver V6T 1Z1

Ann Neville 2007

9781782974369

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover photographs by courtesy of Professor H. G. Niemeyer, Hamburg
Front cover: Trayamar (Mlaga), Tomb 1, c . 650 BC, during excavation
Back cover (right): Bronze statuette of a male divinity, from Cdiz; height 31 cm;
(below) The site of Toscanos (centre) as it appeared in 1961, looking south-east; the low-lying
ground in the centre and right of the photograph were covered by sea in antiquity

This book is available direct from
Oxbow Books, Oxford
www.oxbowbooks.com
and
The David Brown Book Company
PO Box 511, Oakville, CT 06779, USA
(Phone: 860-945-9329; Fax: 860-945-9468)

This publication was grant-aided by the Publications Fund of the National University of
Ireland, Galway, and by a subvention from the University of British Columbia.

Designed by Charlotte Westbrook Wilson

Printed in Great Britain at
Short Run Press, Exeter

by R. J. A. Wilson

This book is the first volume of a new series, University of British Columbia Studies in the Ancient World , published by Oxbow Books for the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at UBC. The series aims to make available monographs on a variety of subjects within the remit of the research interests of the Department, but with an emphasis on archaeology in its broadest interpretation. Future volumes will deal with nineteenth-century excavations at Carthage (by Joann Freed, of Wilfred-Laurier University, Waterloo) and with Greek temple-building from an ancient architects perspective, the latter book containing selected papers written by the late Jos De Waele (University of Nijmegen). I am grateful for the collaboration of Oxbow Books, and in particular to David Brown for agreeing to accept the new series under the umbrella of Oxbow, a company which has done so much for archaeological publishing over the past two decades.

The present volume by Ann Neville, Mountains of Silver and Rivers of Gold , provides an important fresh synthesis of the extraordinary evidence for the Phoenician presence in southern Spain and Portugal. The Phoenicians have always been something of a Cinderella in English-language archaeological publishing. While there is an enormous bibliography on the Greek colonization movement, very little has been written in English about the parallel and approximately contemporary settlements of the Phoenicians overseas, and especially their achievements in the far west of the Mediterranean. It is true that the doyenne of such studies, Mara Eugenia Aubet Semmler, published in 1987 a book later issued in English as Phoenicians in the West : politics, colonies and trade (Aubet 1993), now re-issued in a much expanded second edition; but this is a book (despite its title) which offers a very broad sweep of its subject over the eastern as well as the western Mediterranean, and only three out of the eleven chapters deal with Phoenician settlements in Iberia (Aubet 2001). Before the publication of the present book, Aubets account has remained the most detailed summary in English of the astonishing discoveries of Iberian-based archaeologists over recent decades, work which has remained largely unknown to those who have not read the original reports in Spanish and Portuguese. The discovery only in the late 1980s that the Phoenicians also settled on the Atlantic coast of Portugal (e.g. at Abul: Mayet and da Silva 2000), a very foreign environment to anyone used to the quieter shores of the Mediterranean, has revolutionized our understanding of Phoenician ambition, as is fully recounted in the pages that follow. The story is an exciting one, told here by Ann Neville in a lively and very readable account, rich in detail and searching in its analysis. It is an account which not only assesses in full measure the discoveries old and new in Iberia, but also sets them in their wider geographical, social and economic context: Ann Neville is fully aware of Phoenician, Egyptian and Greek interaction all over the Mediterranean during the period that interests her (principally the eighth to sixth centuries BC), and each relevant scrap of evidence has been duly scrutinized and utilized. In addition she has also covered the equally fascinating theme of cultural interaction between the Phoenician settlements on the coast and those of the indigenous Iberians in the interior.

Ann Neville has now left archaeology and it has not proved possible for her to take account of publications which have come out in the last few years. That there has been a delay between the submission of the manuscript and its appearance now is in no way due to the author; it has been more to do with her editors extensive commitments in administration, research and teaching, and his recent transatlantic move. The last item in her bibliography dates to 2005, and takes account of the latest exciting developments in the excavation of the El Carambolo sanctuary at Carmona (see p. 198 n.162); but research which was published in 2003 and 2004 has also not been systematically culled for this book. The rest of this Foreword is therefore intended to draw the readers attention to some recent publications which have a bearing on the themes of Ann Nevilles book.

It was precisely the absence, referred to above, of information in English on Phoenicians in the West that prompted publication in 2002 of The Phoenicians in Spain (Bierling 2002), a book which might seem at first sight to cover the same topic as the present work. Its subtitle, however ( A collection of articles translated from Spanish ), is significant: the book is not a synthesis of its subject at all, but usefully makes available for the first time in English certain key papers published between 1978 and 1997. Not surprisingly most are cited in their Spanish original versions in Nevilles bibliography below; but readers should be aware that the following items listed there are now available in English in Bierlings book: Aubet Semmler 197778 and 1987; Niemeyer 1986b; Pellicer Cataln 1986b; Ruiz Mata 1986a and 1993a; and Schubart 1986; while Gonzlez Prats et al.s 1997 paper on La Fonteta (Bierling 2002, 11325) covers exactly the same ground as Nevilles Gonzlez Prats 1998.