Phoenician metal bowls

Phoenician metal bowls are approximately 90 decorative bowls made in the 7th–8th centuries BCE from bronze, silver and gold (often in the form of electrum), found since the mid-19th century in the Eastern Mediterranean and Iraq.^[1] They were historically attributed to the Phoenicians, but are today considered to have been made by a broader group of Levantine peoples.^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]

The first bowls published widely had been discovered by Austen Henry Layard in 1849 in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud.^[1] The discovery of these bowls began not just the known corpus of Phoenician metal bowls, but according to Nicholas Vella: "effectively gave birth to Phoenician art as a style, a definition with which historians of art still largely concur."^[1]^[6] They are foundational artefacts in the study of Phoenician art, together with the Nimrud ivories, which were discovered at the same time but identified as Phoenician a few years later.^[7] However, both the bowls and the ivories pose a significant challenge as no examples of either – or any other artefacts with equivalent features – have been found in Phoenicia or other major colonies (e.g. Carthage, Malta, Sicily).^[8] The whole corpus was studied in detail by Glenn Markoe in 1985.^[1]

The bowls contain hunting, battle, and animal scenes with clear influence from Assyrian and Egyptian art. They are thought to have been made using repoussé and chasing, as well as embossing, metalworking techniques.^[1]^[9]

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Vella, Nicholas (2010). ""Phoenician" metal bowls : boundary objects in the Archaic period" (PDF). Bollettino di Archeologia on Line. I: 22–37. ISSN 2039-0076.
^ Martin, S. Rebecca (2017). The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-8122-9394-4. The first three discoveries of what would be known as Phoenician art occurred in the 1830s and 1840s at Etruscan Cerveteri, Assyrian Nimrud, and Cyprus. Each findspot produced decorated metal bowls…. The bowls were soon tied to the Levant, in part because their physical properties and wide distribution recalled Homer's Phoenicians. One bowl was inscribed in Phoenician, confirming the association; other bowls soon followed. While according to biblical sources (e.g., 2 Chr 2:13–14) areas of Phoenicia, such as Tyre, were producing luxury arts already in the tenth century, these bowls do not seem to date before the eighth century. A variety of regional labels has been applied to the more than one hundred examples, many fragmentary, of the metal bowls that are now known.
^ Onnis, Francesca (2013). "The Influence of the Physical Medium on the Decoration of a Work of Art: A Case Study of the "Phoenician" Bowls". Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art. EBL ebooks online. De Gruyter. pp. 159–180. doi:10.1515/9781614510352.159. ISBN 978-1-61451-035-2. Retrieved 2021-12-13.
^ Sciacca, Ferdinando (2006). "La circolazione dei doni nell'aristocrazia tirrenica: esempli dall'archeologia" (PDF). Revista d'arqueologia de Ponent; Núm.: 16-17 (in Italian). 16–17: 281–292. hdl:10459.1/45270.
^ Neri, Diana (2000). Le coppe fenicie della tomba Bernardini nel museo di Villa Giulia. La Spezia: Agorà. ISBN 88-87218-18-8. OCLC 49386481.
^ Martin, S. Rebecca (2017). The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-8122-9394-4. Even though objects are on record as early as the 1624 discovery of a terracotta anthropoid sarcophagus on Malta, sustained academic and museological interest in Phoenician art history began only in the mid-nineteenth century… The idea of a Phoenician artistic style first emerged through study of discoveries of metal bowls by Layard and others.
^ Richard David Barnett. "The Nimrud Ivories and the Art of the Phoenicians" Iraq, vol. 2, no. 2, British Institute for the Study of Iraq, 1935, pp. 179–210, https://doi.org/10.2307/4241579. "The Nationality of the NW. Palace Ivories: That the group of ivories was not Assyrian was concluded on their discovery from their Egyptian appearance. Francois Lenormant, in the Bulletin archéologique de l'Athenaeum français, No. 6, June 1856, asserted that his father, Charles, had been the first to recognize that the pseudo-Egyptian workmanship was in reality Phoenician, whereas Dr. Birch of the British Museum, the ivories' first publisher, had held them for Egyptian work executed in Assyria, or copied there. Posterity, a few dissentients apart, has followed Lenormant, and some wilder misattributions might have been avoided had it been noticed, as stated above, that in Layard's group seven pieces bore a letter of the Phoenician alphabet, and in that of Loftus were two inscriptions apparently also Phoenician. (There seem to be weaker reasons for describing them as Aramaic.) Modern work has only enhanced the plausibility of Lenormant's view. Other ivories of similar type have been found at Samaria, the capital of Ahab, whose connexions with Tyre were notorious. Again, those found at Arslan Tash in North Syria, according to a fragment among them which bore an inscription in what is either Phoenician or Aramaic, were seemingly made and presented by some Phoenician tributaries of Damascus to their overlord. To these points we may add the internal evidence of the religious scenes themselves, which in Part II of this paper are shown to be just such as would be expected in the art of a country so situated as Phoenicia. A concluding point of internal detail, in striking confirmation, is that the loggia windows represented on the panels of the 'Woman at the Window' illustrate what is in the Talmud called 'the Tyrian window', 'through which one can put one's head', i.e. παρακπύτειν, in contrast to the Egyptian type, through which one could not."
^ Martin, S. Rebecca (2017). The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. pp. 28, 89. ISBN 978-0-8122-9394-4. The two greatest challenges of Phoenician art history are thus highlighted by these critical early discoveries: none of the metal bowls and hardly any ivories were found in Phoenicia, and the portable objects that we assign to Phoenician manufacture do not necessarily share stylistic or iconographic features with one another or with material excavated in Phoenicia. Yet it is almost universally believed that these two genres, metal bowls and carved ivories, mark the inception of Phoenician fine art… While it is tempting to ascribe to lack of excavation the problem of discovering the "true" Phoenician origins of worked ivory and metal bowls, the idea is probably fantastical. We have very little direct evidence of metal working or ivory working on the mainland. Published areas of the well-excavated Sarepta (Sarafand, Lebanon) yielded fewer than ten ivory objects, only three of which are figurative, and not even one scrap of a "Phoenician" metal bowl. And, as Hans Niemeyer and others point out, neither bowls nor ivories appear in the main colonies, not at Carthage, Malta, Sicily, or elsewhere. Even Markoe, the foremost expert on "Phoenician" metal bowls, admitted regarding those from Assyria, "we simply do not know where these vessels were produced."
^ Martin, S. Rebecca (2017). The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-8122-9394-4.

[Vella-1] Vella, Nicholas (2010). ""Phoenician" metal bowls : boundary objects in the Archaic period" (PDF). Bollettino di Archeologia on Line. I: 22–37. ISSN 2039-0076.

[2] Martin, S. Rebecca (2017). The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-8122-9394-4. The first three discoveries of what would be known as Phoenician art occurred in the 1830s and 1840s at Etruscan Cerveteri, Assyrian Nimrud, and Cyprus. Each findspot produced decorated metal bowls…. The bowls were soon tied to the Levant, in part because their physical properties and wide distribution recalled Homer's Phoenicians. One bowl was inscribed in Phoenician, confirming the association; other bowls soon followed. While according to biblical sources (e.g., 2 Chr 2:13–14) areas of Phoenicia, such as Tyre, were producing luxury arts already in the tenth century, these bowls do not seem to date before the eighth century. A variety of regional labels has been applied to the more than one hundred examples, many fragmentary, of the metal bowls that are now known.

[Brown_Feldman_2013_p.-3] Onnis, Francesca (2013). "The Influence of the Physical Medium on the Decoration of a Work of Art: A Case Study of the "Phoenician" Bowls". Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art. EBL ebooks online. De Gruyter. pp. 159–180. doi:10.1515/9781614510352.159. ISBN 978-1-61451-035-2. Retrieved 2021-12-13.

[4] Sciacca, Ferdinando (2006). "La circolazione dei doni nell'aristocrazia tirrenica: esempli dall'archeologia" (PDF). Revista d'arqueologia de Ponent; Núm.: 16-17 (in Italian). 16–17: 281–292. hdl:10459.1/45270.

[5] Neri, Diana (2000). Le coppe fenicie della tomba Bernardini nel museo di Villa Giulia. La Spezia: Agorà. ISBN 88-87218-18-8. OCLC 49386481.

[6] Martin, S. Rebecca (2017). The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-8122-9394-4. Even though objects are on record as early as the 1624 discovery of a terracotta anthropoid sarcophagus on Malta, sustained academic and museological interest in Phoenician art history began only in the mid-nineteenth century… The idea of a Phoenician artistic style first emerged through study of discoveries of metal bowls by Layard and others.

[Barnett-7] Richard David Barnett. "The Nimrud Ivories and the Art of the Phoenicians" Iraq, vol. 2, no. 2, British Institute for the Study of Iraq, 1935, pp. 179–210, https://doi.org/10.2307/4241579. "The Nationality of the NW. Palace Ivories: That the group of ivories was not Assyrian was concluded on their discovery from their Egyptian appearance. Francois Lenormant, in the Bulletin archéologique de l'Athenaeum français, No. 6, June 1856, asserted that his father, Charles, had been the first to recognize that the pseudo-Egyptian workmanship was in reality Phoenician, whereas Dr. Birch of the British Museum, the ivories' first publisher, had held them for Egyptian work executed in Assyria, or copied there. Posterity, a few dissentients apart, has followed Lenormant, and some wilder misattributions might have been avoided had it been noticed, as stated above, that in Layard's group seven pieces bore a letter of the Phoenician alphabet, and in that of Loftus were two inscriptions apparently also Phoenician. (There seem to be weaker reasons for describing them as Aramaic.) Modern work has only enhanced the plausibility of Lenormant's view. Other ivories of similar type have been found at Samaria, the capital of Ahab, whose connexions with Tyre were notorious. Again, those found at Arslan Tash in North Syria, according to a fragment among them which bore an inscription in what is either Phoenician or Aramaic, were seemingly made and presented by some Phoenician tributaries of Damascus to their overlord. To these points we may add the internal evidence of the religious scenes themselves, which in Part II of this paper are shown to be just such as would be expected in the art of a country so situated as Phoenicia. A concluding point of internal detail, in striking confirmation, is that the loggia windows represented on the panels of the 'Woman at the Window' illustrate what is in the Talmud called 'the Tyrian window', 'through which one can put one's head', i.e. παρακπύτειν, in contrast to the Egyptian type, through which one could not."

[8] Martin, S. Rebecca (2017). The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. pp. 28, 89. ISBN 978-0-8122-9394-4. The two greatest challenges of Phoenician art history are thus highlighted by these critical early discoveries: none of the metal bowls and hardly any ivories were found in Phoenicia, and the portable objects that we assign to Phoenician manufacture do not necessarily share stylistic or iconographic features with one another or with material excavated in Phoenicia. Yet it is almost universally believed that these two genres, metal bowls and carved ivories, mark the inception of Phoenician fine art… While it is tempting to ascribe to lack of excavation the problem of discovering the "true" Phoenician origins of worked ivory and metal bowls, the idea is probably fantastical. We have very little direct evidence of metal working or ivory working on the mainland. Published areas of the well-excavated Sarepta (Sarafand, Lebanon) yielded fewer than ten ivory objects, only three of which are figurative, and not even one scrap of a "Phoenician" metal bowl. And, as Hans Niemeyer and others point out, neither bowls nor ivories appear in the main colonies, not at Carthage, Malta, Sicily, or elsewhere. Even Markoe, the foremost expert on "Phoenician" metal bowls, admitted regarding those from Assyria, "we simply do not know where these vessels were produced."

[9] Martin, S. Rebecca (2017). The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-8122-9394-4.

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