If we are to credit Wagenfeld’s account of events, C.L. Grotefend’s charge of fraud on the basis of the German-manufactured epistolary paper of Pereira’s letters may betoken nothing more than that the Portuguese contact had visited Hannover, or bought paper made in Hannover at some stage (or even borrowed the epistolary paper from his nephew who had spent a stint in Bremen!). At any rate, the exact conditions of the discovery of the manuscript are of lesser importance since secrecy over the possession of a rare manuscript may have been preferred for a number of reasons. A fiction over the circumstances of its discovery does not make the manuscript automatically fictitious.

The historical events of its discovery suggest that the manuscript may have been plundered during the military conflict that took place between 1828 and 1834 pitting the forces of Dom Pedro IV, ex-emperor of Brazil, against those of his brother, Dom Miguel, pretender to the Portuguese throne, who had usurped the crown of Portugal.²⁹

Furthermore, Grotefend’s charge that there was no monastery of Santa Maria in Marinhão, turning the manuscript’s locale of discovery into a fictive one, thereby adding to the suspicion with which Wagenfeld’s discovery was met, may be due to a simple error in names. A convent dedicated to Santa Marinha da Costa is located in Guimarães, 18 km to the west of Marinhão. Could there have been a confusion via which the convent of Santa Marinha, immediately west of Marinhão, turned into Santa Maria de Marinhão in the letters concerning the manuscript? After all, the correspondence between Grotefend, Wagenfeld and the Portuguese contact was in hand-writing (one assumes!) and Marinha could easily be mistaken for Maria in writing and by scholars from different linguistic and national backgrounds at that. The hypothesis I put forward here is attractive for another reason. Marinhão is situated less than 70 km from the location of the first major battle of the 1828-1834 war that took place at Ponte Ferreira in 1832.³⁰ Conceivably, the monastery could have been looted and the manuscript stolen by marauding mercenary troops in Dom Miguel’s service. But even if the name of the monastery had been indeed fictive, or had not existed at all, the circumstances of its discovery may explain a degree of mendacity on Wagenfeld’s part or of his contact, if the manuscript had been plundered from the monastery during the period of military battles and political upheaval of the civil war, and had been whisked out of the country.

That a member of the military forces taking part in this war was from Portugal but had links with Hannover, or that he was from a German city and fought in Portugal, is conceivable given the multinational mercenary battalions deployed. The manuscript being carried off by a Hannoverian officer returning to Hannover or to another German city with a looted manuscript is not only possible but also explains the route via Oporto and the manufacture locale of Pereira’s epistolary paper. The war had begun with a populous rebellion against the usurper Dom Miguel breaking out in Oporto, wherefrom Pereira allegedly had posted his letters. The fact that the conflict had only ended in 1834, and the manuscript may have been looted out of the country in ways that were legally questionable, even in Bremen or elsewhere in the new German Confederation, may have been the main pivot determining the silence on the manuscript’s whereabouts that followed the original publication of the brochure by Wagenfeld in 1836, and the fact that the manuscript could not be presented to the public, or that a partly fictive account of its discovery was given. In fact, that much concerning a possible plundering of a monastery was conceded by Le Bas (1836: 545-546) in his own rebuttal of the manuscript’s authenticity (!), who writing two years after the end of the war was aware of the upheaval in Portugal. Despite his astute judgement and his admission that more manuscripts of Philo’s Phoenician History had been reported elsewhere by different individuals, he still judged the entire affair a fraud, only leaving a small possibility as to the contrary.

In addition, G.F. Grotefend, in his correspondence with Pereira that was published in 1836, admits that he received another manuscript of a medieval text from Germany, purportedly found in the same box along with Philo’s Phoenician History manuscript, at the same Portuguese convent (Le Bas 1836). Unless one expects Wagenfeld to have been a master forger of the content of ancient Greek manuscripts over 100 pages long, but also to be handcrafting forged medieval manuscripts with German tales, the accusations of forgery do not hold water. In conclusion, the circumstances of the discovery of the manuscript at a convent during a time of a multi-year war and its removal may have involved illegality and the possibility of disrepute or actual legal action against the culprit, which may explain why the manuscript was not available for examination - had there originally been plans for it to be examined, the accusations levelled against Wagenfeld and the public humiliation that he suffered within the same year would have aborted them. In conclusion, any of these factors may have led to a partly fictive account of the discovery of the manuscript causing its unavailability for inspection, which however does not affect its authenticity.

While universally rejected close to two centuries ago, there is no fundamental problem with the MF text in terms of linguistic or historical data or even, narrative form. Several of the evidence for Phoenician colonization in the eastern Mediterranean, which is implied in the text, would not have been a current academic idea in the 1830s. Even a background in Semitic philology and a fantastic knowledge of ancient Greek would require an enormous amount of investment for authoring nine books of an imaginative narrative spanning the regions from Iberia to Sri Lanka with the means available in the 1830s. It seems more likely that the precocious publication by a young scholar lacking the means to defend the authenticity of the manuscript and dying humiliated less than a decade after its publication, resulted in a considerable loss for scholarship, in addition to the loss of his life. It is up to modern and future investigations to examine in depth the text of the purported and probably real manuscript - if this interpretation defending the veracity of Wagenfeld’s manuscript publication is correct.

What information could have Wagenfeld consulted to make his forged manuscript appear authentic? The counter-factual pertaining to the claim of forgery requires an assessment of the stage of research and the diffusion of knowledge concerning the Phoenicians by the 1830s. Several aspects of Phoenician colonization, such as its territorial extent, had been published and analyzed at length by that time, even if archaeological excavations were yet to take place. By the mid-19^th c., the knowledge concerning Phoenicia - which an interested forger may have absorbed - derived from the Bible and the Greco-Roman literature on Phoenician colonies: principally the works of Diodorus of Sicily and Strabo, as well as ongoing attempts at epigraphic decipherment of Phoenician inscriptions (Fales 2017: 181-182). Knowledge of the Bible would have facilitated Wagenfeld in coining names and toponyms with a biblical ring to them had he decided to contrive a pseudonymous content of an ancient work on the Phoenicians.

Wagenfeld’s interest in Philo's Phoenician History did not surface out of a Philonic-like primeval void. Fragments pertaining to this work had been published over a century prior to Wagenfeld’s forays into Philo in the 1830s, but attention had begun already in the 16^th c. In western scholarship, the text appears to have been accessed in print at least by the year 1544, with the edition of extant passages in Eusebius’ PE by the active printing firm of Robertus Stephanus in Paris,³¹ which early print was still a point of reference two centuries later, as demonstrated by the commentary in a mid-18^th-century dissertation on Sanchuniathon (Hök 1745). In his work on universal chronology combining philological sources and astronomical and calendrical data so as to build a systematic world chronology, the humanist Joseph Juste Scaliger regarded with distaste the seemingly incoherent work of Philo (1583: 432), a view not shared by Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who in his Scienza Nuvoa (1725) buttressed with several arguments the historicity of Sanchuniathon (Grafton 1975). A translation of the work in English by Richard Cumberland (1720) credited the antiquity of Philo’s work and the existence of Sanchuniathon.³² The latter’s historicity was also defended by Samuel Hök (1745) in his short graduate dissertation written in Latin, on the basis of Philo’s fragments, offering a critique of what he regarded as the unreasonable critical reception of the historicity of Philo’s texts. Another English translation, aspiring to be closer to Eusebius’ original, appeared by Isaac Preston Cory (1828) over a century later. Yet soon after, Franz Karl Movers (1836) published a critical study on the strategy of oral transmission in Philo’s fragments, setting the tone for the hostility of much of 18^th-century scholarship.

More broadly, discussions over the Phoenician civilization had timidly made a start several centuries prior to Wagenfeld’s lifetime. Historical evaluations of the emergence of Phoenician studies (e.g. Gras et al. 1989) single out Samuel Bochart (1599-1667) as a pioneer who systematized research on the Phoenician language and script, as well as on the history of the Phoenician colonies, followed by Simon’s (1682) contribution to biblical exegesis. By the 18^th c. the Phoenician presence in the Mediterranean was being discussed widely in historical circles, assisted through archaeological finds and forays into Phoenician epigraphy. In 1758, Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716-1795) gave a seminal lecture on Phoenician monuments and the alphabets. His study of the Phoenician alphabet concerned inscriptions and numismatic evidence, including from Cyprus and Malta, thus giving an extent of the geographical ambit of the Phoenician civilization.³³ Transcribing Phoenician inscriptions from Kition and Malta, of which the first had been found in situ and reported in print by Pococke (1745, vol II: 213), who had described the foundations of what in his view was a Phoenician colony, Barthélemy (1764) discussed the deciphering in dialogue with passages from Eusebius’ oeuvre. That Kition was a Phoenician colony would have been known from Greek literature, for example from the biography of Zeno, the Stoic philosopher, a Phoenician native of the city. The famous Assyrian Sargon stele was discovered in Larnaca only in 1845 and important excavations did not occur until late in the following century.

In the same year of Barthélemy’s seminal study, Michele Vargas-Machuca (1764) first claimed that the Campanian coast, from Ischia and the entire region of the Bay of Naples to Capri, was first colonized by the Phoenicians and at a later stage, by Chalcidian Euboeans. By the late 18^th c. the ambit of Phoenicians, initially on the authority of Diodorus of Sicily (Bib. Hist.) and Josephus (Ant Jud.), had even reached the shores of the British Isles. The Phoenician legacy was seen not only in Phoenician commercial enterprises of tin acquisition in Cornwall, but in the antiquity of the Irish language itself, as argued by Charles Vallancey (1772) in his An essay on the antiquity of the Irish language; being a collation of the Irish with the Punic language, in which he claimed that the Irish language bore traces of Phoenician heritage. Almost becoming a household name, the Phoenicians had left the ambit of scholarly circles, invading other social and professional realms. Indicative of that is the following episode taking place in central America. In May 1786, under the orders of José Estachería, President of the Royal Audiencia of Guatemala, a reconnaissance of abandoned Maya cities was undertaken by Antonio del Río, Captain of Artillery in the Spanish army, and Ricardo Almendáriz, professional artist, with the former, upon encountering Mesoamerican ruins, declaring the following about those who had built Palenque, Chichén Itza and Uxmal: “the conclusion…must be that the ancient inhabitants of these structures lived in extreme darkness, for, in their fabulous superstitions, we seem to view the ideology of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans and other primitive nations most strongly portrayed”. Antonio del Río then goes on to suggest that “ […] some one of these nations pursued their conquests even to this country […]”.³⁴ One gathers that if Phoenician antiquity was commonplace or a familiar encyclopedic knowledge among the military personnel sent to entrench Spanish colonial rule in Mexico in the 1780s, with military commanders so well-versed in Phoenician history as to espouse a possible Phoenician ancestry for Maya cities, then a philologist in Germany a century later could have come up with the idea of writing a fabulous account of Philo’s text. On that, he would have had a state-of-the-art historical grounding, arriving in the following decade.

In 1793, the first volume of Arnold Hereen’s (1793-1815) historical work on “the politics, intercourse, and trade of the principal nations of antiquity”³⁵ developed the historical outline, political and commercial structures of Asiatic people, devoting at least a third of the book to the Phoenicians, along with presenting historical narratives on the Babylonians and Persians. Stressing their role in the development of the Mediterranean, going into detail in the organization of commerce across the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula, Hereen discussed various themes utilizing Greco-Roman authors: the exploitation of argentiferous ores in Andalusia (Strab. Geog. 3), spice trade with Arabia in the Red Sea and beyond through the coastal seaways and overland caravan routes, as well as early trade with Egypt, involving Greeks and Phoenicians (e.g. on cinnamon: Hdt. Hist. 3.111), informed through a critical examination of the Bible and other sources. A detour on Tyrian Herakles put emphasis on Mediterranean trade with Egypt. Several of the German historian’s insights on Greek myth and Phoenician commerce, as well as the organization of commercial structures and the commodities traded, while relying on ancient Greek sources for the most part, on occasion picked through a curious elective affinity, such as Hellenistic-era Theophrastus’ bucolic poetry, would not have been out of place in contemporary accounts of the Phoenicians, with the caveat that the latter almost exclusively privilege archaeology over literary sources. By the 1830s, discussion on the mineral wealth of southern Iberia was gaining attention.³⁶ In the year Wagenfeld’s MF appeared in print, Gesenius’ (1837) Scripturae Linguaeque Phoeniciae, a milestone on Phoenician epigraphy in three volumes, was also to be published, yet too late for Wagenfeld to have consulted it while weaving a forged narrative on Phoenicians. Another multi-volume work dedicated exclusively to the Phoenicians, authored by Franz Karl Movers, appeared in four volumes between 1841 and 1856. The first volume, dedicated to the religion and gods of the Phoenicians (Movers 1841), came out five years after Wagenfeld’s published manuscript. Phoenician archaeology began with Ernest Renan’s exploration mission of Lebanon, tasked by Napoleon III in 1860 and published as Mission de Phénicie (Renan 1864).

By the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, exciting discoveries and research into the Phoenician past, from historical, archaeological and epigraphic perspective, could have motivated a ‘scientific’ fraud. In a climate charged with a Phoenicomania, from a private obsession to a public climate shaping tastes on the reception of antiquity, Phoenicians had become a household name, had been claimed as ancestors to the Irish and were being sharpened as notional, if not real, ancestors to the commercially-focused, British empire-building.

Had Wagenfeld intended to recreate a lost Phoenician world, Hereen’s volumes, published in Wagenfeld’s native tongue, would have provided a backbone as to the kind of society and political structure his text was to envision, in addition to being able to directly consult ancient sources, such as Strabo (Geog. 3) on the Phoenician settlement and the exploitation of the mineral wealth of Iberia. From this source of information alone, Wagenfeld could have weaved into his allegedly fictional account an episode of Melqart set in Kition, naming his main character Melikarthos, a name mentioned by Bartélemy (1764).

In the MF, Crete is referred to as a place with once a formidable navy, the population of which was later concentrated on the mountains, while on the coasts there were located substantial Phoenician colonies of various cities. Excavations revealing the now-termed Minoan and Mycenean past of Greece were yet to take place, so there was little to go by on the Canaanite settlement in Crete described in the MF. Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Mycenae would not begin before 1878, almost half a century after Wagenfeld’s publication. The maritime character of what is termed the Minoan civilization, and concepts of thalassocracy, to which the MF clearly alludes, had no archaeological corroboration until the discovery of Knossos in the early 20^th c. Thus, on the importance of Cretans as a significant seafaring nation in the 2^nd millennium BCE, Wagenefeld would not have had access to the archaeological discoveries of the Minoan civilization, which were yet to take place. Other than drawing inspiration in poetic reminiscence over the divine Minos as a watcher and guardian of Crete (Hom. Il. 13.450), and delving into Thucydides’ (Hist. 1.4) references to Minos as the first to construct a fleet, evict Carians from the Cyclades and install his progeny as governors, Wagenfeld would have had access to Strabo’s (Geog. 10.4.8-10.4.9) summarizing of historical knowledge of Minos as an important lawgiver who was the first to rule over the seas (ἱστόρηται δ᾽ ὁ Μίνως νομοθέτης γενέσθαι σπουδαῖος θαλαττοκρατῆσαι τε πρῶτος). While Wagenfeld could have glimpsed information on Bronze Age Cretan thalassocracy from such ancient sources, anticipating archaeological discoveries over the maritime character of Cretan Bronze Age through scattered references to Minos’ thalassocracy, and granted that he could have had an inkling over the extent of Canaanite travels westwards through the extent of the Phoenician inscriptions that were being studied and published in the 1830s, there is no way he would have been aware of these intricate relations of Canaanites in Crete. As regarding specifically Canaanite/Phoenician settlement on Crete, it is doubtful Wagenfeld could have had any knowledge of such presence on the island.

On present archaeological evidence, early Phoenician presence is unambiguously attested for the Early Iron Age at the sites of Itanos and Kommos on Crete. Given the lengths into which Hereen went in the 1790s so as to describe Phoenician presence in Cyprus, Asia Minor and Sicily, one may suppose that Wagenfeld could have framed his account in that existing historical narrative. In Chapter 2 of Hereen’s first volume, the utilization of Crete by Phoenician mariners as a by-way station actually relied on interpreting Herakles’ enmity against Geryon, set in Iberia and pertaining to Herakles’ 10^th labour in the myth, as revealing a kernel of truth. Accordingly, the hero’s deadly fight against Geryon, the son of Chrysaor (‘χρῡσ-άωρ’, cognate with χρυσὀς, ‘gold’) condenses adversarial encounters between Tyrians and a local, Iberian kingdom. Note that in Hereen’s interpretation, Herakles is explicitly equated with Melqart, as a metonyme for Phoenician commercial expansion.

Another problem that attends the evaluation of the authenticity of the manuscript concerns the snippets of information on Phoenician presence on Crete available to Wagenfeld through Stephanos of Byzantium’s (Ethn. S.v. Ἰτανὸς) reference to Itanos, mentioned in this Byzantine work as a port and colony on the edge of Crete, founded by the homonymous son of Phoenix or one of the mixed-origin mythical men known as Kouretes (Strab. Geog. 10.3). The assumption that Wagenfeld may have been inspired to build a narrative on Canaanite colonies in Crete having come across this two-line reference to Itanos in Stephanos’ dictionary,³⁷ is weakened by the fact that Meineke’s publication of it, the first modern publication, took place in 1849, with the main text ending on page 713.³⁸ Even if Wagenfeld had access to the Aldus Pius Manutius’ (1502) version of Stephanos’ text he must have studied it thoroughly in order to gain inspiration from it on Phoenician colonies in Crete. Although the Aldine Press of the Italian humanist and printer had innovated by introducing the portable book format at a time that incunabula were going out of fashion,³⁹ it is dubious that Wagenfeld would have had access to a copy and that he would have encountered the brief reference to Itanos on Crete, the Phoenician origins of which are merely alluded to in Stephanos’ works. A list of ancient Cretan cities in a manuscript held in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice features Itanos, albeit it was not published until the middle of the previous century, making it improbable that Wagenfeld was aware of it.⁴⁰ Since then, archaeological research has identified Itanos with the abandoned town Erimoupolis (‘deserted city’) in the Siteia munipality, in north-eastern Lasithion, but the earliest archaeological identification of the site by Federico Halbherr (1891) well postdates Wagenfeld’s publication. The only source on Itanos that Wagenfeld may have had access to must be limited to Herodotos’ (Hist. 4.151.2) remark that prospective Theran colonists, following the oracle of Delphi to found a colony in Libya, arrived in Crete seeking men to guide them in their colonial forays in Libya, chancing upon Korobios, a man from Itanos, who eventually led them to Libya to found Cyrene; yet the episode is not placed in the Late Bronze Age and makes no reference to Phoenician connections for Itanos - albeit, to the sharp-eyed reader of Herodotos’ Histories it was probably clear that Korobios hailed from a Phoenician colony, for he is singled out as ἀνδρί πορφυρέι, a “prophyran man”, i.e. a man fishing for murex shell or otherwise associated with it.

Neo-Babylonian cuneiform sources attest to a Phoenician man named Yatūnu ( ^I ia-a-tu-nu) who held a high royal office as a resident (qīpu) of a Babylonian temple ca 750-560 BCE, whose Phoenician name, ytn translates as “He has given” (Zadok 2024: 168, 174). This is an independent source for the Phoenician origin of Itanos as a name, with a Hellenized masculine ending in-os. Yet all of that would not have been known in the 1830s. One may retort that the discoveries of Phoenician inscriptions in Wagenfeld’s era, from across the Mediterranean, naturally led to an understanding of the reach of Phoenician expansion even if its dates and exact places were shaky. Regarding Phoenician colonies on Crete, Wagenfeld could have conjured up the notion from the plentiful Phoenician inscriptions that had been unearthed across various Mediterranean spots prior to the 1830s, some of which had been published. Similar suspicions could arise on the basis of classical Greek texts that could have added to the general knowledge of Phoenicians and from which Wagenfeld may have gleaned information on Phoenician maritime activities, using them as a source of inspiration.

Book 8 of the MF is a maritime exploration voyage given in the form of a round-sailing trip (Periplous) of uncharted territory into the Indian Ocean. Le Bas (1836) painted with aghast incredulity the reception of this account as published in Wagenfeld’s (1836) abridged form of the manuscript, charging Wagenfeld with drawing inspiration from the 6^th-century BCE Periplous by pseudo-Skylax, a text purporting to be a sailing manual across the Mediterranean, surviving in a 13^th-century manuscript and first appearing in print by David Hesel in 1600, providing a possible prototype for the alleged forger. But this is not the only possible source. The Periplous of Hanno, narrating a Carthaginian expedition across the coast of Africa and supposedly the Greek translation of the original Phoenician text of the 5^th c. BCE, survived in the 9^th-10^th century Codex Heidelbergensis 398 and was first edited for publication in print by Sigismund Gelenius in Basel in 1533. This first edition in print by Gelenius (1933) included three other works, including Arrianos’ (Anab.), which in his description of Alexander’s III Indian military campaigns (8) supplies an independent testimony for Hanno’s’ circumnavigation of Africa. The expansive cartographic view offered by these ancient accounts shaped early modern understandings of geographical information at the time of European ‘discoveries’ of the so-called New World. In this context of expanding maritime navigation, commerce and the emerging extra-territoriality of political authority, classical texts such the Periplous of Hanno received attention and influenced the early modern shaping of conceptualizing the world (Kroupa 2019). From this point of view, an enraptured European readership spread knowledge of Hanno’ Periplous among certain circles of classical learning far and beyond. Hanno’s Periplous may have inspired some of the tales in the description of the sea voyage to the Indian Ocean in Wagenfeld’s MF. Conceivably, in his wonder with the Phoenician past, the young scholar could have hunted for rare folios. In both the Periplous undertaken by the Carthaginian Hanno and the one described in Wagenfeld’s publication, the sea voyage account has to be written down and deposited at a temple (in the case of Wagenfeld on the columns of the temple, in the case of Hanno, on tablets deposited at the temple). Yet this earlier publication of a Greek translation of a text written in Phoenician and deposited at a temple constitutes in itself no exposé that can dish out Wagenfeld as a forgerer. In describing a maritime expedition force along the coast of Africa by the Carthaginian naval commander Hanno, which was translated into Greek already in antiquity, there is a precedent for this other Phoenician voyage, the recounting of the expedition in writing and its deposition in a temple. After all, topographical lists following expeditions are known to have been inscribed on temple columns in Egypt too (Kilani 2020b: 140-141). One may choose to view the ancient Periplous genre as a comparandum for Wagenfeld’s discovered manuscript, rather than, as Le Bas (1836) claimed, a source of inspiration for a subversive forgery which sought a gloss of legitimacy in a much-disseminated ancient work.

Further, the examination of the other two factors, history and archaeology of the Phoenician past into Portugal, also suggests authenticity. Although considered forgery and discredited, the postulated discovery of such a manuscript in Portugal is plausible since Phoenician myths survived in Iberia through to the medieval Arab lore. After all, it is now known that the southern and central Portuguese coast was densely inhabited with populations influenced by the Phoenician culture, with Phoenician communities archaeologically detected in the deltas of almost all major river systems of Portugal. Archaeological research has identified Phoenician colonies and Orientalizing settlements on the river plains and estuaries of the Guadiana, the Gilão, the Sado, the Tagus and the Mondego, showing the extent of Phoenician penetration in Iberia. Apart from the cultivation of the domesticated olive and viticulture that continue to this day, other economic practices established by the Phoenician colonial system in the early 1^st millennium BCE, such as salt pans and fish preservation, survived well into the medieval period (Pappa 2017: 297-299). It is unclear how late into the Roman period the Phoenician language was spoken in Atlantic Iberia. But it is possible that pockets of Phoenician populations maintained their identity into late antiquity, as in other regions. In Libya, populations self-identifying as Tyrian are epigraphically attested in the Punic language as late as the 5^th c. CE (Krahmalkov 1994).

In such a situation, where the ancient Phoenician past was valorized, it is no wonder that a treatise on Phoenicians written in Greek would have been preserved in a monastery through the Roman period, and the period of the Arab conquests. It could have survived for centuries in a Christian convent even during the Al-Andalus rule given the latitude Islamic rule showed towards Christian monastic life in the early centuries of conquest.⁴¹

In addition, it is rather significant for the evaluation of the authenticity of the manuscript that the image of Herakles, as a syncretized Melqart, the titulary god of western Phoenicians, continued to play a significant role in popular and elite culture of Iberian societies, not only up to the Roman period, but through to the medieval and beyond. Despite manifold cultural interactions emanating from the Roman conquest of Iberia, this Phoenician god continued to have a bearing in Iberia, leaving his legacy on the independent Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms that evolved out of the disintegration of the Roman empire and the invasions that followed it. Drawing on Roman propaganda for imperial self-representation, the Habsburgs were recasting the legacy of the past as the legitimacy of the present. In the Habsburg empire of Carlos V, with its territorial grasp extending from Spain and the Netherlands to Peru and the Caribbean, the motto of royal propaganda was the that “the sun never set”. Yet that was only a repurposing, to the same end, of Roman imperial propaganda. As Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Dion. Ant. Rom. 1.3.3) noted, the Romans were the first empire-builders to be remembered for making the sunrise and sunset the boundaries of their empire. Not confined to the expansive view of the empire, royal self-representation in Portugal and Spain drew on the local cults of Melqart that had pre-existed in Iberia, as manifested in the art and culture of the period. A historical examination of the continuing importance of Melqart/Herakles/Hercules in early modern Iberian culture encompasses royal self-representations and the various staged comedy plays that featured Hercules or the emasculation of Hercules (deriving from episodes in his Greek mythology) penned by playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca.⁴² In discussing the importance of Hercules in early modern Iberia, Fox (2019) treats the evidence as a royal propaganda and performance of masculinity in that era, albeit noting that it has relevance for the population which maintained legends and artefacts connected to Hercules.⁴³ For Fox (2019), Herakles, in his Roman guise as Hercules, becomes a hero of “Hispanic foundational fictions”, adopted by the Hapsburg monarchy, which claimed direct descent from Hercules, which King of Portugal Sebastian sought to emulate (1554-1578) (Fox 2019). If an imperial royal house as powerful as the Habsburgs needed a legitimating figure, would they really have resorted to a secondary hero from Rome if this tale had no local traction and relevance at the time? A merely literary analysis of this historical representation of the royal elite fails to trace the gravitas of the myths in Iberia; for far from being a Hispanic fiction of the time of Calderón, these were myths with a presence of over two millennia by then. Down to the 16^th c. BCE, tales related to Hercules, entrenched in local memory, were still in circulation. Such tenacity of mythological figures from the Phoenician past into early modern Spain, through the inherited Roman cultural repackaging, makes it plausible both that manuscripts with Greco-Roman works were circulating, and that a copy of Philo’s Phoenician History would have been treasured enough to survive. Roman culture, having absorbed the ideas of Hellenistic period, had been integrated into popular ideas and ways of seeing the world, crystallized in the language itself. When Pindar describes that Artemis Lochia (‘of pregnancy’) and Eilytheia, minor deity of birth labour, are shown in Greek art holding torches, in Pausanias’ interpretation the imagery is explained as a symbol of bringing children to light through the act of birth (Parisinou 2000, 162-163). Birth as a way of giving light to children has been transmuted into the common phrase that denotes ‘to give birth’ in Portuguese: dar luz (‘to give light’).⁴⁴ Whether Pausanias was influenced by Roman culture that passed on to Iberia in his interpretation of Greek poetry and art, or whether Roman culture had adopted a Greek way of understanding giving birth as illumination, is a moot point for the survival of ancient motifs in early modern and modern Iberian culture.

Intimations that Phoenician myths contained in Philo’s Phoenician History circulated for centuries after the Roman conquest, through transmutations, preserved in medieval texts show the continuing importance of a Phoenician myths in the intellectual but mainly popular culture domain. In the geographic book ‘The Book of Roger’⁴⁵ composed mainly through witness accounts and supplemented by ancient historical and geographic works where the former was not possible, the geographer Muhammad al-Hammudi, known as al-Idrisi, born in the last decades of the 11^th c. CE in Ceuta, Spain (under Muslim rule) transmitted a local tale circulating in Lisbon deriving from the myth of the kabirim, a variant of the one surviving in Philo’s Phoenician History. In particular,

Matesanz Gascón (2002) argued persuasively that this medieval tale, set in a distant, timeless world, reflects a Phoenician myth on the eight brothers kabirim, described in Philo’s work as sailors who built a ship, were shipwrecked near Mount Casius, the Phoenician Mount Saphon, the seat of Canaanite storm gods. When al-Idrisi visited the still-Muslim Lisbon, he was informed that a road close to the ‘thermal baths’ was called ‘the street of the Adventurers’ (al-mugarrarun). Al-Idrisi’s visit to Lisbon dates to before 1115 and this is when he must have received this account. A vernacular story linked to this street name told of a bizarre account where the first primordial brothers, eight in number, built a ship, and out of yearning for adventures, sought to explore the ocean. Landing upon an island with a sycamore tree and rams whose flesh could not be eaten, they sailed off again, but were shipwrecked on a foreign land. Captured by the men of that kingdom, they were kept in prison and then transferred to another place, abandoned while still bound. That place was named ‘Asafi’. In his analysis, Matesanz Gascón identified the toponym ‘Asafi’ in the story, said to be populated with Berbers, with the region of Safi, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

But if we look for archaeological support to this medieval topographic description, and Matesanz Gascón’s interpretation of a concealed Phoenician myth underlying this medieval lore, there may be some other locality closer at hand. Al-Idrisi’s description of ‘the street of the Adventurers’ being close to the “thermal baths” can be mapped onto the archaeological topography of the city. Medieval Lisbon was known for its thermal springs (Ramalho et al. 2020). The central district, Alfama derives from the Arabic al-hamma (thermal, or hot water). Roman baths have been excavated in the foundations of the Palácio Penafiel, located at an area surrounding the intersection of the Rua de São Mamede and Rua das Pedras Negras (‘street of black stones’), in the vicinity of the remains of a temple of Kybele.⁴⁶ A 4^th c. CE inscription identified the baths as the Thermae Cassiorum, the name linked in scholarship to the Roman gens Cassia. Even disregarding the assonance between ‘Asafi’ and ‘Saphon’, and ‘Casius’ and ‘Cassiorum’, al-Idrisi’s topographic detailing appears to place the ‘Street of the Adventurers’ near the Roman-era baths, close to the summit of central Lisbon, close to the modern Cathedral, and near the bank of the Tagus - an ideal location for the transposition of the toponym Mount Casius/Saphon, as the seat of storm gods, translocated from the mouth of the River Orontes in Syria to that of the River Tagus in Atlantic Iberia. Rather than an anomaly, this would reflect a common pattern of transferring sacred toponyms, stamping the new colonial realms with familiar place names as also attested in the 4^th c. CE geographical poem Ora Maritima by Avienius, which locates a Mount Cassius (Cassius inde mons tumet) on the Iberia coast (Or. Mar 255),⁴⁷ not necessarily the same sacred mountain by that name in Iberia. If so, the summit could have been a cultic locus of the Phoenicians, linked to their mythology of expanding maritime frontiers as betokened by the myth of the kabirim. In that case, a myth from the Phoenician past would have been anchored into the landscape of Lisbon, ancient Olisipo, and the memory of the landscape, even when the locale turned into Roman baths and later fell under Islamic rule. All this vindicates Matesanz Gascón’s argument of a distant memory of Phoenician myths in medieval lores.The survival of a Phoenician myth in a medieval geographical work which as its primary source used witness accounts of its time finds a parallel in Arab literature of the High Middle Ages where the religious elements are hard to distinguish from the profane in Islamic narrative literature that contained biblical Greek and Jewish stories that by then had taken the colour of fantastic folk tales (e.g the biblical, Book of Daniel 13, story of Susana (Pennachietti 2006).

What all this shows is the circulation of remnants of old Phoenician myths in medieval Portugal, making the preservation of a manuscript with an ancient translation of a Phoenician text at a monastery in Portugal plausible. To investigate with such fastidiousness all possible sources for the narratives contained in MC, as attempted here, and the possible sources of transmission of ancient knowledge through the medieval period, is to shoehorn the unnecessary conceit of disproving the forgery claim, which proves futile, evaporating on philological and historical grounds that inhere in the manuscript text and corroborate its authenticity.

In an account of Melqart’s travels west, he is described as if a mortal, aligned with the theogony of Book 1, as preserved in Eusebius’ quoted passages, which treats gods as if humans (2.9-2.12).⁹² His name is given as Melikarthos. Competing with his brother, Isroas, over the affections of a young maiden, Deisone (perhaps a name chosen by Philo, as the female version of Dias (Zeus), hence analogous to Baalat as a female version of Baal), whom he wins over, he composes melodies for her, the performance of which the Tyrians subsequently institute on the eve of Melqart’s festival. Following Deisone’s murder by his brother, Melqart and his companions reach Cyprus, where he conquers Kition, is proclaimed a king by the locals but rejects the honour, sails to the opposite island where he encounters the blind and aged Jurus (Ἴουρος), his uncle on the paternal side. Melikarthos’ future, the old man prophesizes, is to conquer the unknown sea and reach the boundaries of the world, his status elevated to that of Kronos (Baal Shamon?). Soon after delivering his mantic forecast, Jurus dies and after mourning him for three days, Melqart rises, bathes and beguiled by the oracle, sets sail towards the West.

Apart from mythologically embodying what was known already in the 1830s of expanding Phoenician cults, the thrust of a long Near Eastern heritage emerges unmistakable in this passage, echoing Gilgamesh ending his mourning over the death of his friend by bathing.⁹³ Yet the Epic of Gilgamesh could not have served as a vital resource for Wagenfeld from which to enrich the narrative texture of his supposedly farrago of a manuscript adding a legitimizing gloss to his concoctions, for it was only deciphered in 1872.

Marshalling his companions on his westward voyage (2.11), Melqart/Melikarthos then comes ashore after a shipwreck on the land of Ersiphonia, ascends and descends mountains where he performs rites to the gods, continues further with a ship that his comrades had built and sailing on a river, the contingent reaches an island, Melikarthos steals the cattle he chances upon due to his great distress from hunger, causing the hostile reaction of their owner Obibakros (2.11), then sails again, gets shipwrecked with his companions, whereupon they reach safety swimming to another island.

Assorted further mishaps earn him a spell of adventures whereby he comes to be seen as a god by the local populations of Tartessos. While Melikarthos (2.12) and his companions subsist on marine shellfish and littoral fish, he falls ill; subsequently, he alone braves the thick forest intending to hunt game in the hinterland but encounters a sleeping, serpent-legged woman who leads him to her similarly-figured queen Leiathane and her crew of servants. This queen had been banished from the city onto the island Melikarthos had reached by a certain Masisabas who ruled Tartessos at the edge of the earth. The queen bade him to go kill her persecutor, promising that he will then acquire his riches, and to this purpose gives Melikarthos a box containing a poisonous substance with which to smear his arrow, turning it into a toxic weapon. Melikarthos eventually kills Masisabas (2.13-2.14) and as a result becomes a god in the eyes of the locals, who are described as living in primitive ways, while his companions are also perceived as divine beings, albeit of lesser status than their leader. The locals build an acropolis for him, a city and a shrine at a time when silver abounded in the land. Finally, Melikarthos goes missing on a hunting expedition. Failing to recover him, whether alive or dead, his companions determine that the wifeless amongst them shall return to Tyre and erect a temple in his honour “in the old city of Tyre” before the city was built, the rest of the men having permanently settled down with local women in Tartessos.

Interestingly, Anatolian rituals of vanishing gods are now known to reflect Mesopotamian and Syrian traditions; the Ugaritic tradition preserves searches for Baal and the mourning for him.⁹⁴

The name of the half-human, half-serpent queen, Leiathane, must be cognate with the biblical Leviathan, a crocodile or whale-like monstrous denizen of the sea (e.g. Job 41-41).⁹⁵ Echoes of Greek mythology also resonate in this narrative arch, mainly of Herakles’ 10^th and 11^th labours and other episodes of his life. In his first western labour, Herakles steals the cattle of Geryon in Erytheia, located near Tartessos (Hes. Theog. 979-983),⁹⁶ while the episode of the Deianeira and the poisonous chiton she gives to her husband (Apol. Bibl. 2.7.7), whose origins date at least to the 7^th c. BCE,⁹⁷ resonates with Leiathane's gift of a poison as a weapon to Melqart.

Acknowledging that Melqart appears as a symbol of Phoenician maritime commerce in this account, Le Bas (1836: 555) interpreted it as the alleged forger’s naïve subterfuge, playing on the tropes of a temple of Melqart in Tyre, embellished with two columns, mirroring Herodotus' (Hist. 2.42) depiction of its wondrous sight. Equally manifest in Le Bas’ attitude towards Wagenfeld, is his postulate that the parallelisms with Herakles’s mythology debunks its claim to authenticity, noting the narrative similarities with the Herakles-Deianeira debacle of a poisonous chiton leading to the hero’s death and apotheosis, as well as with the stealing of Geryon’s cattle. Such an argument can no longer stand. Near Eastern influence on Greek myth and religion is fundamental and pervasive, with many analogies and parallels explained as the product of cross-cultural encounters (López-Ruiz 2014), therefore any parallelism between the Herakles-Deianeira myth and the myth of Melqart cannot constitute from the outset a claim to forgery, especially given the well-documented, since antiquity, syncretism of Melqart with Herakles, already investigated in depths by Herodotos (Hist. 2.43-2.44).⁹⁸

The MF not only explains the phenomenically intrusive passage on serpents in Book 1, as embedded in Eusebius’ P.E., but also illuminates Tartessian art depicting serpent-like beings on the Pozo Moro funerary monument in Spain whose origins cannot be traced back to Near Eastern models, and which depict anthropomorphic serpents at a banquet.⁹⁹ Such serpent-like beings find no correspondence in extant Phoenician mythology or art, and are difficult to explain. A serpent-bodied queen Leiathane in Iberia, however, provides a mythical resource otherwise missing. Located immediately to the west of modern Chinchilla de Monte-Aragón (Albacete, Spain), this funerary monument was erected at a point where the Via Heraclea, as was known by Roman times, the ancient road system connecting Gadir, famous for its temple to Melqart/Herakles,¹⁰⁰ linked Tartessos with the Pyrenees. At the plains of La Mancha, the road turned to the right towards the Mediterranean coast between ancient Libisosa (Lezura) and Saltigi (Chinchilla de Monte-Aragón) before descending southwards to Carthagena, from there following a costal road north to the Pyrenees. Although this stretch of the road, the Via Augusta, is documented better for the Roman period, the road network was a main axis of communication dating at least from the 8^th c. BCE. Connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea, the road passed through Abdera, a stop of the Phoenicians prior to the foundation of Gadir and of Herakles on his return from the stolen cattle according to Greek sources on the foundation of Gadir (Plácido 2002). The location of the monument at the intersection of the Via Heraclea, an ancient road, and the material dimensions of the mythical journey of Herakles in Iberia during his 10^th and 11^th labours of stealing Geryon’s cattle and the golden apples (or flocks) of the Garden of Hesperides, both set at the far western edge of the world, seem to derive from early Phoenician interactions in the region, generating stories and lores that were absorbed by Greek mythology.¹⁰¹

In addition, an intriguing premise is that several of Melqart’s companion stayed on in Iberia, having married local women. Consistent with early mixed populations in the colonies of the expanding Phoenician diaspora, the narrative offers a summary of the process of forming an early settlement, corroborated by archaeo-scientific finds on a personal, human scale. Emerging molecular analyses of uniparental (matrilineal) markers on skeletal remains from Phoenician colonies in the Mediterranean suggest the input of foreign maternal lineages in ancient Phoenician colonies.¹⁰²

Extant literary sources regarding the Late Bronze Age in Phoenicia are singularly reticent about details save for the Amarna corpus of diplomatic correspondence between regional powers. Comparing the names of rulers known from the corpus to the lists of kings in the MF returns some interesting results. The most robust case for a correspondence between the individuals mentioned in these two sources can be made for a king of Byblos, named as ‘Ράβωθος in the MF (4.2). Son of the king of Sidonians Bimalos (Abi-Maal?), he ascended the throne of Byblos through coercion orchestrated by his father, who after conquering Beirut amassed a fleet of Sidonians and Beirutians with the aim of sailing to Byblos to ascertain that Raboth’s rule was welcome. Arriving with 1000 Sidonian archers, the narrative goes, Raboth reigned over Byblos for 30 years.

Raboth(-os) is clearly a Semitic name, transliterated here with the inflectional ending of masculine nouns in Greek; the root rb (a military title: ‘commander’) is attested among the Phoenician personal names inscribed on bronze arrow-heads from Lebanon and dating to 13^th-11^th c. BCE (Rolling 1995: fr. 6). This is approximately within the upper date range of Philo’s Phoenician History on the basis of the accepted fragments in Eusebius’ P.E.

A king of Byblos, particularly active in diplomatic correspondence with Egypt, is attested in broadly this date range. He is known by the Akkadian spelling of his name, transliterated in multiple orthographic variants in the Latin alphabet as Rib-Addu, Rib-Haddu, Rib-Hadda, Rib-Addi, Rib-Eddi, Rib-Addi,¹⁰³ allowing for differences in the rendering of sounds in a syllabary versus an abjad, and in the phonemes of modern languages (e.g. English vs French).¹⁰⁴ What if this Raboth stands for Rib-Addu? Philo’s rendering of the Phoenician alveolar stop /d/ in the last element of the compound name Rib-Addu with the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ in Greek, instead of the expected dental voiced fricative /δ/,¹⁰⁵ does not pose too many problems given the lack of a standardized orthographic vocalization in Greek and the wide orthographic variety of Phoenician words in alphabetic scripts.¹⁰⁶ Since the most likely case is that Philo was looking at texts written in copies in the Phoenician abjad, for names he was not familiar, he would have to choose a likely vowel that may not have corresponded to the actual ancient pronunciation or the vocalization of Babylonian and Canaanite names written in Akkadian script and language, the lingua franca of Amarna corpus. This for example would explain the difference between Rib-Addu found in modern scholarship alongside the variants Rib-Hadda. Transliterating the name into Greek, Philo chose the closest three consonants of the original word, necessitating the hypothetical values for the second and third vowel for which graphemes were not provided (unlike with the name attested in the Akkadian syllabary in the Amarna archive, which supplies a final vowel due to the script used).

To the matching of kings’ names, Raboth and Rib-Addu in the MF and the Amarna corpus respectively, and their offices (both were kings of Byblos) can be added a comparable life arch: both were kings of Byblos whose rule was cut short through external intervention. Both were described as suffering from illness. Known in detail through his prolific correspondence with Amenhotep III, and subsequently with his successor, the eccentric Amenhotep IV/ Akhenaton (1353-1336 BCE) of the Amarna archive (62 extant letters in total), Rib-Addu’s ruling over Byblos in the mid-14^th c. BCE, under Egyptian suzerainty, came to an end through a coup orchestrated by the usurper Abdi-Ashirta (spelling variant: ֜Abdi-Ašîrta) of Amurru (Pfälzner 2012, 772-773).¹⁰⁷ In exile, Rib-Addu continued being prolix in his correspondence with Egypt, sending demanding and panicky letters to the Pharaoh complaining of the conspirators.¹⁰⁸ In one letter (EA 137:29-30) of the Amarna correspondence, it is stated that Rib-Addu was ill (Kilani 2020b: 172). On his part, the usurper Abdi-Ashirta also addressed himself to the Egyptians, expostulating with mendacity on the deposed king’s accusations of him acting treacherously against his Egyptian vassals.

In Books 4 and 6 of the MF, Raboth’s life arch, recorded in a chronicle form, recalls the events described in ‘real-time’ in the Amarna correspondence. Having assumed the throne of Byblos, Raboth becomes “kings of all cities”, implying that neighbouring Phoenician towns were under the suzerainty of Byblos, itself a vassal of Egypt. Yet after 30 years for reasons not elaborated on, he visits Sidon (where his father had been a king), leaving behind in his post in Byblos a certain Barsis who ruled for 18 years over Byblos while a war had broken out between Sidon and the “Giants”. Assuming de facto power over Byblos, Barsis becomes a general of “all forces” in Byblos, while Raboth is stranded in Sidon, enfeebled by illness. Upon his death in battle, Barsis is succeeded by an individual for whose name the chronicle is not entirely certain; it gives us two possible names: he was either called Obdovaltis (Abd-Baalat) or Obdastartis (Abd-Astart). Both are theophoric names, composed of the element ’bd (servant) and the name of a goddess. In the second case, the chronicle Philo translated would have given Abd-Astart, ‘servant of Astart’, corresponding to the identity of the Abdi-Ashirta of the Amarna corpus.

Thus, in the allegedly fraudulent manuscript of Philo, there is a king of Byblos, Raboth, who inexplicably leaves his throne of Byblos, which is then taken by Abd-Astart, while the deposed king is ill. In the Amarna correspondence, there is a king of Byblos, Rib-Addu that gets deposed, is ill, and his throne is taken by Abdi-Asirta. Interestingly, in the narrative of the MF, there is no real explanation as to why Raboth left Byblos other than stating that a war had broken out and he was ill. Yet that this is a pretext is evident by the fact that Raboth’s illness did not prevent him from ruling over Sidon (his father’s kingdom, after all) for another 30 years. Whether there is any truth as to the duration of this rule, is of secondary importance; what stands out is the effort of the later chronicler to elide the turmoil in Byblos caused by a coup and Raboth’s dethronement, glossing over dynastic usurpation. Philo gives us the narrative from official records of Byblos that would stump out any notion of coup, presenting an idealized picture, while the Amarna correspondence gives witness accounts of how the Byblian king Raboth’s power was usurped. It is easy to see how the Middle-Babylonian of the Amarna ‘Abdi-Asirta’ in the Akkadian syllabary would transform into Obdastartis (in the Latin transliteration) of the Greek vocalization of the Canaanite name recorded in abjad.

Although the site of Amarna was identified by westerners in the late 1700s, the correspondence archive was only discovered in the 1880s, too late for Wagenfeld to have taken note. The remarkable correspondence between the chronicle events, in a Greek translation, and the Amarna corpus, in Middle Babylonian, is the surest proof, that Philo’s Phoenician History published by Wagenfeld was in fact authentic.

Throughout the Phoenician History, Tartessos is considered a Tyrian colony. In Wagenfeld’s text the Phoenicians routinely travel west, to Tartessos, one of the Tyrian colonies, defined as populated by the “descendants of Melqart”. (8.15):

In a vivid language (Book 8), a detailed narrative is given of the fateful voyage west of the Byblian crew of a ship with an incompetent captain that drives the vessel off course on their route to Tartessos, and their subsequent travails and escapades after their shipwrecked ship ends up at an unintended destination, an island group west of Tinge (Tangier). The Byblian ship, having sailed past the Tiborsyfa Cape, the far western edge of the continental land, comes ashore at one of the islands of Imyrhakinai. These are the farthest western point (4.18):

Of the archipelago, the isle furthest away is described as ten days’ journey (voyage, in actuality) from “the cape of the winters”:

This pithy description of the winter cape must be a reference to Phoenician sailing crews ‘wintering out’ in temporary locations as intermediary stops during long voyages until the following sailing season for their return voyage, which has long been a suggestion of contemporary archaeological research into Phoenician trading posts. Yet such references are also present in Herodotus’s work (Hist. 4.4.2) with regard to Phoenician navigation,¹⁰⁹ of which Wagenfeld would have been aware had he intended to forge a Phoenician History.

The Imyrhakinai archipelago is dotted with islands of various names: Hyresa (Ὑρῆσα), Hyrizeima (Ὑριζεῖμα), and Igydoula (Ἰγυδούλα). Herysa is described as a volcanic island. They were once populous but the narrative describes them as presently near-deserted due to wars, natural phenomena that led to many perishing and others deserting the islands.

The shipwrecked Byblian crew, having come ashore on one of the islands, divided themselves into two groups; one stayed on the beach, the others went on a reconnaissance march into the hinterland, in search of water and other provisions. Some islanders eventually spotted the members of the latter group, rescued them along with those stranded at sea, some of whom had already perished from thirst, and proceeded to salvage what they could of the crew’s belongings from the ship, only to discover sacred books with images pertaining to the goddess Astart. Fearing that the rescued foreigners practiced sorcery, they determined to have the issue adjudicated by their king. Transported to a prison on a different island, the royal seat of the archipelago, the Byblians were left to await a decision on their fate. The king enlisted the services of an old man, who in his youth had spent some time in Tartessos where he had learned Phoenician (“our language”). Conspiring with the remaining crew to conceal the contents of the books so that everyone’s life, including his own, would be spared, he offered instead to the king a tendentious account of the books’ contents. The contrivance worked and after a few more events, one involving a night exploration of the town where they were held, there was a ‘happy ending’. Decimated after the shipwreck and having been left stranded on the coast without provisions, some perishing in prison, and following some more incidents, the remaining crew could after all eventually return to Byblos. The narrative falters at this moment, implying that some of the sailors had managed to make their way back to Phoenicia earlier. In a vivid passage that wrestles with the details of a hard life at sea, the focus zeroes in on the callouses protruding from one of the men’s deformed hands, befit of a sailor’s hard life at sea.¹¹⁰ Could Wagenfeld have made all this up?

Recognizing that the toponym Imyrhakinai refers to the Canary Islands, Le Bas (1836, 564, note 1) posited a Hebrew origin for the toponym, allegedly embodying the phrase ‘distant islands’,¹¹¹ to him a clue of forgery. Indeed, at least in modern Hebrew, the vocalization of the phrase ‘distant islands’ (איים רחוקים) has considerable assonance with Ἰμυρχακίναι.¹¹² In biblical Hebrew, the term for ‘island’ was the same (אי), also used in relation to the island of Caphtor (probably Crete).¹¹³ Not quite an automatic proof of forgery by Wagenfeld, who must have been versed in biblical Hebrew having presumably studied theology, though the argument for a common Semitic root for the word ‘island’ shared between Hebrew and Phoenician is invalidated by lexicographical works on Phoenician.¹¹⁴ Yet given the biblical account of a joint fleet organized by Hiram and Solomon (“Tarshish ships”) to Tarshish, one may theoretically at least account for a Hebrew place-name and loanword into Canaanite.¹¹⁵

Without underestimating these two observations, further avenues will be explored here. So alternatively, it is put forward here that the etymology of the toponym is to be sought in a compound word with a Hittite loan word, finding its counterpart in the attestation of the Luwian irhanua, from irḫa (‘boundary”), of an ultimately Sumerian root, which may have been a more broadly shared loan word in neighbouring languages.¹¹⁶ In that scenario, one may envisage singular nominative Imyrhakine analyzed as a composite of Ἰμ-υρχα-κίνη: the Phoenician suffix ֜m (‘mother city’),¹¹⁷ followed by irḫa (‘boundary’) and kīnu- (‘to break open’, ‘to open up).¹¹⁸ In this sense, it would mean something close to ‘mother-city of the opened border region’, relating to the new borders of expanding maritime commerce by Canaanites during the 13^th c. BCE, in diplomatic and other contacts with the Hittites that would explain loan-words and linguistic code-switching.¹¹⁹ Alternatively, the initial ‘m in Imyrhakine may stand for the collective singular noun, with a plural meaning, denoting a cluster of ‘opened up borders’, i.e. an archipelago.¹²⁰ Another interpretation is that one of the compound toponym’s root words may derive from the same root as the derivative Hittite adjective araḫzena, “bordering, adjoining, surrounding, outer, external, foreign alien”, a good description for a distant group of isles.¹²¹ But since irḫa derives from an originally Sumerian root, one may suppose a direct loan into Canaanite, rather than Hittite, bypassing the need for a Hittite loan. If Luwian, it can be compared to the toponyms Ἵμβρος/ Ἱμβρασός, the name of the east Aegean Imvros island, and the epithet of the Luwian deity im(ma)ral-la/I, the latter with a postulated meaning of ‘belonging to fields’, cognate with *im(ma)ra, ‘open country’.¹²² If so, Imyrhakinai may stand for ‘open border’, apt for a new archipelago. Perhaps pushing too far, this is presented here as a hypothesis, pending research by specialists in Semitic, Luwian and Hittite languages.

Mycenaeans had travelled the central Mediterranean region and Luwians and Hittites were in contact with them on both epigraphic, textual and archaeological evidence (Fales 2017; Cline 2009), showing how loan words from Hittite could have passed on to Canaanites. Mycenaean Greeks, who identified as Achaeans, had trade stations in the Aeolian Islands (e.g. Lipari) in the Middle Bronze Age, being active in the central Mediterranean. They may also have plied the waters further to the west. Mycenaean pottery was imported c. 1400-1190 BCE in Iberia and during successive phases, as shown by ceramic finds at the well-stratified site in Montoro, Cordoba. These pertain to wheel-made Late Helladic IIIA2 or IIIB, spanning the period from 1400 to 1200 BCE, mineralogically traced to a workshop in Berbati, Argolid that exported types to various centres in the Levant, also found in Montoro. Argolid, after all, was the heartland of the Mycenaeans (Nikolopoulos 2009; Pappa 2019).¹²³ As shown by contemporary Hittire records, the 13^th c. BCE brough famine in the Hittite region, probably due to drought and Ugaritic letters refer to armies of Sikels (probably originating in southern Italy) just before the latter’s destruction. It is tempting to connect the abandonment and destruction layers of the 13^th c. BCE on the Lipari to the general destruction and abandonment attested throughout the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. Palatial correspondence from the Hittites is explicit over crop failures and famine which is attributed to drought, corroborated by scientific studies (Podany 2022, 399). This would have not left unaffected the Aeolian islands. Interestingly, some of the names of the so-called Sea Peoples in Egyptian accounts record ethnonyms that may pertain to Sardinians and Sikels. If so, this general population movement would not have left unaffected the central Mediterranean. Thus, “a new border” opened by the Mycenaeans in the central Mediterranean, predating those centuries of turmoil at the end of the Late Bronze Age, could have been communicated through a Hittite transmission route to the Canaanites, who may have adopted the toponym, Imyrhakinai, themselves. If the volcanic islands west of Tigge are not the Aeolian islands situated west of some Tigge long forgotten in the mist of time, then there is a mass of data to connect the Imyrhakinai with the Canary Islands, which is the most plausible scenario.

For the toponym Tigge (6.5; Τέγγα), the most parsimonious explanation is that it refers to Tangier (Morroco), turning under the appellation Θρίγκη in Hecataeus’ (Perieg.) geographical work of 6^th c. BCE, as Θυμιατήριον (‘incense-burner’) (Hanno, Per.) in the Greek translation of a 5^th c. BCE Phoenician sailing account, as Τίγγις/Τίγγα in the later work of Strabo (Geog. 3.1.8; 17.3.2), and also in the plural as Θυμιατήρια (Steph. Ethn), drawing on the work of Ephorus.¹²⁴ The latter name (‘incense burners’) designated a core implement of Phoenician religious ritual, at least in Cyprus, with specimens discovered at Phoenician and Tartessian sites across the Mediterranean, but primarily in Cyprus and Iberia. From a nautical perspective, Lipiński (2004, 426) postulated that the meaning of ‘incense-burner’ as a toponym was a reference to lighthouses, functioning with braziers, which Greek sailors encountered during their voyages. While this suggestion is not inconceivable,¹²⁵ a likely hypothesis derives from the Kerne case described above: in Greek Phoenician toponyms were not merely adopted as loan-words; rather a phonological approximate was chosen, with a specific meaning in the Greek language.

North Africa west of the later Greek Cyrenaica was settled by Phoenicians of various origins. Influence is arguably direct over the local populations of Tangier by the 8^th-7^th c. BCE, as shown by the extensive Phoenician cultural elements in the necropoleis of Tangier, which may have been linked to metal trade (Pappa 2009). A comparable orientation towards an eastern Mediterranean cultural influence emerges from the local Roman-era historiographers, heirs to Phoenician legacy in Iberia. Pomponius Mela (Chor. 1.22), a native of Tingentera, in the Straits of Gribraltar region (Batty 2000), refers to a cavern (specus) in honour of Hercules close to Tinge and a promontory called by the Greeks Ambelusia, evidently the Latin version of Ἀμπελουσία, cognate with ἄμπελος, ‘vine’, meaning a place of vines. The promontory is identified with the present-day Cape Spartel (Ras-el-Shukkúr).¹²⁶ Cape Spartel has yielded a Phoenician tomb in ashlar masonry, comparable with finds from the elite Phoenician necropolis of Trayamar in Malaga (8^th-7^th c. BCE) (Pappa 2013: 91-93). Beyond Ampelusia, Mela continues with a foundation myth concerning Tinge/Tangier, allegedly founded by Antaeus (a giant adversary of Herakles in Greek myth), whose cult was still in existence in Mela’s day. The wider region shows pervasive evidence for Phoenician and Punic culture, dating at least to the 8^th c. BCE, explained though the foundation of colonies such as Gadir. If the “winter cave” in the MF was Cape Spartel, then the archaeological evidence offers additional support - Phoenician presence, early but pointing to a temporary or seasonal nature.

The Imyrhakinai islands, described as volcanic in nature, and partially abandoned after a lengthy period of wars, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, were populated by a society organized into a centralized royal authority. They spoke neither Tartessian nor Phoenician, save for an old man who learned Phoenician in Tartessos. These volcanic western islands located off Tigge, one may assume, are the Canary Islands. Due to Greco-Roman works that equated the Isles of the Blessed and the Hesperides’ Gardens of the Greek mythology with the Canary Islands, eastern Mediterranean connections to this archipelago have long been envisaged in modern scholarship. Although the setting of the myths of Herakles in the West has been approached as a later cartographic transposition of mythical geography, the MF outlines a world in which western-eastern interconnections were conceivable, if not exactly routine.

Recent advances into the past of the Canary Isles, refute that this account is a fabulistic tale of geographical dislocation, akin to Iambulus’ or Euhemerus’ descriptions of imaginary worlds in the Hellenistic literature. The view that the Isles of the Blessed of the Greek myth were inspired by the Canary Isles had been previously expressed both on archaeological and literary grounds, with different views as to the systematic nature or not of the trips involved (Nikolopoulos 2009, 307-311), depending on the extent to which one credited the identification of the Isles of the Blessed and the Hesperides’ Garden with the archipelago (Santana & Arcos Pereira 2016).

Substantiating this trend in the history of the islands vis-à-vis Greek mythological narratives, contemporary archaeological investigations demonstrate that contrary to received wisdom, the Canary Islands were in fact inhabited at some stage between the 2^nd and the 1^st millennium BCE, with most evidence suggesting that settlement was initiated on Lanzarote (Atoche Peña et al. 2016; García-Talavera Casañas). Near Eastern wheel-made pottery dated to 1090 BC has been found in La Graciosa in the Canary Islands (Nikolopoulos 2009, 307-310). Archaeological excavations of settlements on this archipelago and a series of calibrated dates (C14 and AMS) by various contexts in multiple settlements, undertaken by three laboratories, have shown beyond doubt that the Canary Isles were inhabited, at least two of them, by the 10^th c. BCE. Settlements with oval houses and other structures, domestication of sheep and goats and wheel-made pottery at several locations have been dated with cross-referencing of sequences from several laboratories and on different samples. Together, the evidence shows a low-scale settlement at the end of the 2^nd millennium BCE and contacts with the eastern Mediterranean. There are grounds to consider that the Madeiras were also inhabited (Seglins 2016). In the Canary archipelago, the move towards social complexity stalled and stagnated as suggested by archaeological investigations (Atoche Peña et al. 2016), a discontinuity of settlements on the islands that matches the account of the MF. In addition, in the narrative, they are referred to as islands west of a cape where Phoenician wintered out, and that they were accidentally reached by a vessel led off course by an incompetent captain, though they were not altogether cut off the ambit of their networks - after all, an old man had been sent to Tartessos and learned Phoenician as a child, in which he communicated with the desolate Byblian crew. This is consistent with the archaeological evidence, allowing the identification of the Tiborsypha Cape with Cape Spartel, where an elite Phoenician tomb has been excavated.

The two penultimate Books (7; 8) contain information on the Periplous of a Phoenician fleet to the Indian Ocean. The narrative concerns the deeds of a king of Tyre, Ioramos, son of Bartophas. As a king, he had been embroiled in wars in Phoenicia and over the colonies, and ruled over Tyre yet not “all of Phoenicia”, while upon his death was succeeded by his son Ἰώραμος (Ioramos), whom the Tyrians called Ἰέρβας (Ierbas) and went on to rule for 57 years (7.5):

The account of the Periplous in Book 7 (7.13) is taken to come from the text inscribed on a stele at the sanctuary of Melqart, which “fell down during last year’s earthquake but which did not break so that the treatise could be read”. By contrast, another source is given for the same Periplous in the following Book (8.1-2), where it appears that the text of the stele had been destroyed but of the four copies made, one survived in Byblos and provided the account. Specifically, Ioramos had ordered that a complete census of all cities of Phoenicians, colonies and the land of the ‘barbarians’ be set down in writing, remarking on the need for this Periplous, since the trip eastwards of which he was responsible was something new, and that their forefathers had until then only sailed to the islands (8.1-2).This periplous was to be redacted into a story, inscribed on a stele at the temple of Melqart in Tyre and copies of it be sent to Sidon, to Byblos, to Arados and to Beirut. Essentially a narrative composed by the priest of Melqart, Ioramos, son of Madynos, at the behest of the king, written by the scribe Sydyk, it is the account of a Phoenician fleet reaching the Indian Ocean that also describes the cities of Phoenicia, their colonies and their armed forces. While the stele was burnt and the three copies sent to other cities were lost, the copy kept at the temple of Baalat in Byblos was said to survive and provide the verbatim account that follows straight after this introduction. Some discrepancies emerge from these accounts. It is bizarre but not impossible that both the king of Tyre and the priest of Melqart were named Ἰώραμος. It is also strange that the verbatim account of the inscribed text given in Book 8 did not contain the Periplous east as narrated in Book 7. A positivistic solution to the conundrum would be to assume that Sanchuniathon found no need to reduplicate the account.

For such Phoenician practices of inscribing tablets and depositing them at temples there are historical and archaeological comparanda. The Periplous of Hanno states explicitly that it was the Greek translation of a Phoenician account of a maritime voyage that was originally inscribed in a plaque and deposited at the temple of Kronos. Along with this historical attestation, there is also a material one. The inscribing of an important document and its deposition at a temple of Melqart, as is narrated in the MF finds its parallel in the discovery of a bronze plaque, inscribed on both sides in the Phoenician language and alphabet, with votive texts, deposited at the entrance of the sanctuary of Es Culleram on Ibiza in the Balearic Isles (Spain), which cave sanctuary is considered to have been dedicated to Reshef-Melqart and to Tinnit (Zamora 2023). Egyptian topographic lists were also inscribed on temple columns, such as that commissioned by Pharaoh Shishak for the topography of the Levant, following a military expedition, which was inscribed on a column at the central temple at Karnak (Kilani 2020b: 140-141).

The Tyrian periplous was a narrative of a voyage described in part in the previous book. In Book 7 (7.8-7.10), Ioramos king Tyre, wishes to undertake a commercial expedition to the East having heard of populous and rich lands. Petitioning the king of Babylonia Νατάμβαλος (Natambalos) to permit him establish trade connections in his lands, an impasse is reached. While initially the request is granted by the Babylonian ruler, he later retracts his consent after being blackmailed with abandonment of commerce by Ethiopian merchants active in plying these routes in Babylonia, given that they viewed Phoenician competitors as a threat to their trade. The Phoenicians eventually succeed in their commercial expedition via an alternative but more distant departure point, offered to them by Eirenios (Greek for ‘Solomon’), king of the Jews (7.9). Setting off from Eilat, sailing east along the coast, leaving behind them the land of Arabs and reaching an island in what can only be the Indian Ocean. The commentary on the environment, the use of the elephant and instances of court life is extensive. Once on this island called Rachios, the crew were escorted to the local king after arriving in a town called Rozzapatta. While there, some members of the Phoenician crew and “a man from Jerusalem” played a game on the sand involving cow dung and were chastised by a local priest who informed them of their sacrilege. They laughingly ignored him but both dropped suddenly dead soon after, their perishing supposedly caused by divine wrath. The island’s political organization in several kingdoms under a supreme king and their respective resources, pearls, cinnamon etc are described in detail.

On geographical grounds Rachios can be identified with Sri Lanka. Had the MF been a forgery, the episode of the sacrilegious nature of interfering with cow dung would require Wagenfeld’s familiarization with the Sanscrit epic Mahabharata, some of the source material of which dates to Vedic times (1500-500 BCE), in which corpus of texts instruction for the sanctity of cows and bovine dung is given in the 13th book Anushassana Parva (‘Book of Instructions’).¹²⁷

Even if Wagenfeld knew of these Vedic precepts, which is a stretch, why include it in his narrative? As early as 1793, Hereen’s multi-volume work on ancient civilization began with the Phoenicians and their trade in the Indian Ocean, referring to Phoenician settlements on the eastern coast of Arabia and on the Bahrain islands, used for ship-building as narrated in the MF. Writing in the 1790s based on Herodotus’ (Hist. 3.111) exposition of the Phoenicians as the importers of cinnamon, and other textual indications of a spice trade, as well as Ptolemy’s description of the antiquity of Red Sea trade ports in commerce with India, Hereen described Phoenician trade with Sri Lanka on aromatics and other articles, placing emphasis on “Indian spices especially cinnamon from Ceylon”. Additionally, the German historian remarked that the story of Phoenician trade in Sri Lanka was heard in Ceylon itself in modern times (1).¹²⁸

With Mediterranean archaeology being a field that as it expands in scientific methods, it contracts in outlook having disengaged itself from the historical records of the period, as if an unimportant and distracting blip to the affair of understanding the past, only recently have these long-documented historical connections of the Mediterranean region with the Indian Ocean begun to resurface based on archaeobotanical studies on the spice remnants contained in Phoenician jugs, juglets and amphorae. And yet some of the recent archaeological advances establishing pre-Roman interregional contacts between the Levantine coast and the Indian Ocean were already part of the narrative on Phoenicians in the 1790s. This shift in the study of the past, whereby the inflection towards the material record does not merely result in the side-stepping of ancient authors, but in their direct discounting as irrelevant and ‘constructed’ histories, has led to the paradoxical situation whereby in the 2020s archaeologists tout ‘discoveries’ by reconstructing through archaeo-scientific research a history already written 230 years ago. Such is the case regarding the contacts of Phoenicians with parts of the Indian Ocean, sailing off from ports in the Persian/Arabian Gulf.¹²⁹

Taking the opposite stand, as a hypothetical purveyor of fanciful but borderline credible stories, Wagenfeld would have had access to a limited range of Hellenistic and Roman-era geographical works that could have proven influential upon an account of Indian Ocean communities hovering ambiguously between truth and falsehood, given from the perspective of Mediterranean visitors. But these would not suffice for the historically accurate account given in Book 7. Although the preservation of Aramaic and Phoenician texts is exceedingly rare in general in order to be able to give a credible witness testimony of India by Phoenicians, Greek works were not singularly reticent on India, with a small sample of texts surviving. Famously, the first explorer of the eastern regions was Herakles who however reached only as far east as the Aornos mountain and failed to reach its summit. Including this tale, Strabo’s (Geog. 16) treatment of eastern lands elaborated on Hinduism and Buddhism, yet omitted any mention of sacred bovines or their dung. Greek and Roman historians, among whom Diodorus of Sicily, and Arrian (Anab.), drew on the geographical work of Megasthenes (350-290 BCE) entitled Indika, who as an envoy sent to India by king Seleucus I had first-hand knowledge of the country. Other works dealing with India at that time fall within a philosophical ambit. The “Questions of King Milinga” were used by Strabo and Pompeius Trogus.¹³⁰ An awareness that such extant works do not suffice to fill the gaps of historical knowledge documented in Book 7 prompts an archaeological and historical investigation of the information contained therein.

Archaeological research has proven beyond doubt that there was systematic commerce between Uruk and other Mesopotamian cities with Syria in the 3^rd millennium BCE, as well as between the Indus Valley and the Persian Gulf from Tell Abraq (ancient Magan) in Arabia. The Indus valley and southern Mesopotamian culture had been in contact at least through the second half of the 3^rd millennium BCE, when the Harrapan civilization reached its floruit (2600-2000 BCE). Trade roues already from the Neolithic show the importation of lapis lazuli from Iran and Afghanistan while marine shells from the Arab Gulf document trade connections with those areas too, increasing incrementally in the following period, with the circulation of metals, minerals and animals. Gold, silver copper, carnelian, lapis lazuli, ivory and aromatic oils flowed west, towards Mesopotamia as indicated by script and measurements weights, which has led scholars to assume that there were maritime trips along the coast of the Gulf as well as overland routes via the Iranian plateau. In particular, on the basis of this bi-directional flow of commodities, Wilkinson (2014) showed that the Indus valley was fully engaged in trade with the Mediterranean by land and by sea c. 2600-2300 BCE (the 4^th to the 6^th dynasties of the Old Kingdom). Accordingly, the waters of the Persian/Arabian Gulf towards the Indus Valley were plied in previous millennia, with lapis lazuli and etched carnelian beads transported via maritime routes to southern Masopotamia. Between 2300 and 2000 BCE (Dynasties 6^th-11^th), the same maritime routes were plied with copper and textile trade linking the Indus directly with southern Mesopotamia. All these maritime routes presuppose a regular pattern of a maritime culture linking the Indus Valley with southern Mesopotamia, which involves a maritime culture, over a millennium prior to the period under investigation here. By the Aegean Late Bronze Age, the importation of lapis lazuli into Greece reflects continuing maritime commercial patterns (Bajema 2013).

Evidence for contacts between India and Phoenicia (Regev 2021: 132-135) on spice trade concern the identification of cinnamon and nutmeg in Iron Age I juglets from the site of Dor, interpreted as a Phoenician commercial port. Regev (2021: 134) considers additional evidence on Phoenician trade between the Mediterranean and Sri Lanka where an 8^th-4^th c. BCE Egyptian scarab was found, along with the attestation of a group of wine-importing foreigners termed javanas (Ionians?) in Tamil literature (Regev 2021: 134). Spices imported through long-distance trade, were also found at Philistine sites. Among the plants archaeobotanically identified at two consecutive and superimposed temples located at Gath (Tell es-Sâfī), a city belonging to the Philistine Pentapolis, in the Shephelah, dating to the 10th and 9th c. BCE, was cinnamon, which was used in cultic rites along with a horde of pharmacological plants (Frumin et al. 2024).The above may not constitute evidence for regular trade with the Indian Ocean, but after all it is not described as regular but as a remarkable event in the MF, in need of commemoration at the temple. Departing from an analysis of the South Asian pottery found at different sites (Sumhuram in the Sultanate of Oman and Tissamaharama in Sri Lanka), Pavan and Schenk (2012) argued for the longevity of long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean connecting Sri Lanka and the Arab/ Persian Gulf. It should be emphasized that this is precisely the route the Phoenicians had initially intended to follow when petitioning the Babylonian king as narrated in the MF: sailing from southern Babylonia to the Indian Ocean. After all, it is well known that urban life was well flourishing in the Ganges River Valley ca 1100 BCE.

Finally, the passage provides a terminus post quem for the redaction of different sources by Sanchuniathon. That Ἰώραμος, transliterated here as Joram, is the Tyrian king Hiram known from the Bible to have forged an alliance with Solomon (1 Kings) over the fleet of Tarshish is certain. Extra-biblical sources on this alliance, involving a marriage alliance with Hiram’s daughter and the shipment of wood to Solomon’s kings, consist in a passage by Menandrus of Ephesus (FGrH 783 T3-ac) and in a reference to Hiram as Εἴραμος in Laitius’ Phoenician Events, a work said to contain translations of historical studies by Phoenician men (Mochos, Hypsikrates, Theodotos) (FGrH 784 F1b) (Whitmarsh 2014, 404).

In itself, the required downdating of Sanchuniathon’s compilation of sources, based on its inclusion of a 10^th c. BCE alliance, is no proof of forgery. Philo may have assigned Sanchuniathon to distant antiquity, but if Sanchuniathon lived in the 10^th c. BCE and not in the Late Bronze Age, he still predated Philo by well over a millennium. So, to Philo too, Sanchuniathon was a man living in the remote past. The chronological placing of this original compiler of the Phoenician History in the Late Bronze Age is easily amenable to revision, for this factoid of modern scholarship originates in a single comment made by Porphyry (Con. Crist.) in his polemical treatise with an explicitly anti-Christian agenda, quoted along with Philo’s passages by Eusebius (P.E. I.8). The attribution of a pre-Troyan-War date to Sanchuniathon rests on Porphyry’s flippant remark that dated Sanchuniathon by reference to Semiramis (P.E. I.8), a semi-legendary Syrian woman, queen of Assyria, fictionalized in the Persian Affairs of Ktesias of Knidos (FGrH 688 F 1), physician to the court of Artaxerxes II (436-358 BCE). While Ktesias’ works were not ‘plasmatic’ as Whitmarsh (2014, 401-402) underlined, in the sense that Semiramis was not an entirely fictional person, they were not intended or received as pure historical works either, and could never serve as chronological foundations. Thus, Porphyry’s linking of Sanchuniathon, in his anti-Christian propaganda, to a semi-mythical queen immortalized in the quasi-fictional accounts of Ktesias, is no yardstick by which to date Sanchuniathon. Thus, in itself, a post-10^th c. BCE date for Sanchnuniathon is not an argument of forgery, but demands down-dating Sanchuniathon’s era.

Such a lower chronology ameliorates several problems of historical enquiry related to the transmission of Philo’s Phoenician History. If written down at the turn of the millennium, the script used would have been an evolved Phoenician abjad still readable by later generations and thus accessible to Philo. Furthermore, the narrative of the Babylonian king backing down after the threat of foreign merchants to desert commercial enterprises in his kingdom should he allow Phoenician competition, rests more comfortably in 10^th c. BCE Babylonia, a period of disintegration and instability. In the conventional Babylonian dynastic chart, the first king of Dynasty VIII (974-732 BCE) is Nabu-mukin-apli (974-932 BCE). In the neo-Babylonian onomasticon, Nabû is abundant as a theophoric element of personal names of Aramaeans from Aramaic records found in Elephantine, Egypt (Porten et al. 2016). Behind this Hellenization of Philos’ Natambalos hides in plain sight a three-component Babylonian name revealing common theological phraseology, as standard in theophoric names.¹³¹ It seems that such three-component Akkadian names, once adopted in Aramaic, appeared as a two-component name. For example, Ša-Nabû-damqa (“The one of Damqu is good”) becomes in Aramaic Nabû-danqu (Porten et al. 2016, Table 3). Babylonian names undergoing a phonological change when transcribed in Canaanite and then again through a transcription into Greek would give a pattern onto which the three-component Nabu-mukin-apli in Akkadian contracts into a two-component Phoenician name, and ends as Natambal (minus the Greek ending -os) in Greek. This Natambal may not be other than the historically attested Babylonian king Nabu-mukin-apli, whose life overlaps with those of Solomon and Hiram. What one observes here is a morpho-phonological shift from Babylonian to Greek. This constitutes another indication of the authenticity of the Mf.

Of special interest is a colourful narrative (Book 9), purporting to be part of an autobiographical account that reads like a novella on the mischievous antics of the adolescent pupils of a school attached to the sanctuary of Sidon. The school was founded by Beliros, elsewhere named as king of Sidon for 45 years and son of Raboth (4.10). Given the identification of Raboth with Rib-Addu, the account must concern the late 14^th c. BCE or the early 13^th c. Close to the city of Sidonians, Beliros erected a school where the sons of the priests were taught sacred matters, the laws and medicine. But when the directorship of the school came under a certain Daephos, who in his advanced age was guileless, the pupils’ foolery and knavish tricks multiplied, as related by the former student Barmirhabas who had entered the school at the age of 18 and was taught there for 4 years (9.1).

In one protracted narrative that follows this introduction, the students frequent port taverns having donned sailors’ clothes and imitate the speech of mariners. Seeing through their buffoonery and deceit, the tavern master blackmails them into offering him a rich banquet to avoid revealing their identities to the rugged patrons of his establishment. Through an intrigue involving shared attentions to a slave girl, the students play a trick on an inebriated peer among their own, persuading him that he is the tavern master. Yet the tone of the rumpus falters when the tavern master schemes to exploit the prank played on the hapless student by his peers in order to unburden himself of his debts. Summoning his creditors on the pretext of recovering past debts owed to them, he points to the drunken student made to believe he was the tavern master as the debtor. Justice in the end is delivered at the city gates where the debt collectors drag the student, in a case of mistaken identity, to face justice. With the pinnacle of the tale reached (9.8), an aetiology is presented for the Tyrian king Sydyk’s decision to move the scribal school population back to Tyre adjacent to the sanctuary of Kronos, and to build a robust wall around it as a physical obstacle to students’ fooleries.

Life in the Phoenician port towns assumes a luminous vivacity in the text through this purportedly autofiction, describing with wit social life, from the anti-conformist scribal students, the sons of the priestly elite, to sailors’ frequenting of port taverns, the latter’s disdain towards men of higher social classes, giving a sense of the threat posed by debt collectors and briefly mentioning an assembly of judges delivering justice at the city gates that could only be imagined through what is known of Phoenician socio-economic life.

Despite the plot’s comic element of identity theft, one may not be sure what narrative register this tale was meant to occupy in its contemporary context. In the Sidonian scribal school story, the tavern master is regaled with a banquet through extortion but ultimately pays back his misdeeds even if the ending here is humorous. In the end, the inebriated scribal student, originally in a drunken stupor that conduces the trickery of the identity swap, manipulates and outwits the tavern master who had tried to cast him out and lade him with his own debts. Certainly, it comes closer to a comic novella of school life rascals that finds its Mesopotamian counterparts in Mesopotamian humorous tales produced within the ‘academic’ milieu of scribal schools, probably for internal ‘consumption’, though the practice of composing satirical literary tales in scribal schools existed in Late Bronze Age Egypt too.¹³² This genre probably constitutes the only example from within the long literary traditions of Mesopotamian societies of anything that may approximate the contemporary notion of humorous or comic, even if its purpose was ultimately didactic, with humour serving only as one element as a vehicle for the story's aims. To the category of comic tales for the scribal class belongs a narrative known as ‘The Physician from Isin’ (one of the conventional titles by which it is known), a late 9^th c. BCE Akkadian text found in Uruk, deemed as humorous even by the most reserved scholars, as discussed by d’Agostino (1998), who expressed reservation with suppositions on humorous texts intended as comic in Mesopotamia. Humour in this tale functions as a pivot for learning Sumerian, eased by its content revolving around a poor woman, a street vendor of vegetables who despite her lowly trade speaks in lofty Sumerian, a language dead for 1,5 millennia by then, while the educated doctor, reciting incantations in Sumerian during his exorcisms, is otherwise unable to use the language as a vernacular. Recent leaps into the study of Mesopotamian cuneiform corpora forces one to think more incisively on comic as a literary genre, extending its study to later periods, which show similarities with extant literary fictions from Mesopotamian narrative literature as preserved through Hellenistic transmission. In the so-called ‘Poor man of Nippur’ tale, the trickster Gimil-Ninurta who was disgraced by the mayor of his hometown, obtains help from the king and pays back the ill-treatment threefold (in a variety of disguises, he swindles the mayor of a large sum of money and beats him 3 times). Although the oldest Akkadian copy of this tale dates to 701 BCE, it was by then of substantial antiquity (Knippschild 2014, 453). The prevalent motifs of a false identity following mistreatment until justice is served appear to share topoi with those employed by the MF novella, where identity swap results in ill-treatment but ends with the restitution of justice.

That scribal schools existed in the Canaanite region and its orbit of influence is revealed by the recent identification of a locally-made clay tablet inscribed with alphabetic cuneiform writing in Ugaritic and found at Beth-Shemesh in the Shephelah region (Israel). The non-sensical writing and the imprint of a child’s finger, as well as the non-standard shape of the tablet, suggest a scribal school exercise, probably pertaining to a school located in the region and operating in the 13^th c. BCE (Fossé et al. 2024), i.e. prior to the region coming under the control of the Philistines. With Ashdod the closest port to Beth-Shemesh, the maritime distance to Sidon would have been some 100 nautical miles, an easy trajectory for Canaanite shipping capabilities of the time. This simply gives an indication of a near-contemporary preparatory school in a still Canaanite region, to the south of that attended by those students, fictional or real, described in the MF, thus allowing us to integrate the information transmitted by Philo in Wagenfeld’s edition into the cultural nexus of the region sketched by modern archaeological research.