Antonella Spanò Giammellaro
Phoenician Agriculture and Its Produce
The land of Canaan, the geographical area that became Phoenicia at the beginning of the Iron Age, was originally occupied by the Canaanites, a group of Semitic origin. During the third and second millennia B.C.E., it was divided into small city-states with close political and cultural links to the great powers of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt.
In the twelfth century B.C.E., political equilibrium in the Near East was disturbed by a progressive deterioration in social and economic organization and the migratory flows of large numbers of groups known as the Peoples of the Sea. As a result, the land of Canaan broke up into a number of nation-states, including Phoenicia.
Phoenician civilization was rooted in the vast cultural world of the Near East. The Phoenician people occupied a narrow strip of territory between the sea and the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges, where the land available for cultivation was limited but fertile.
CEREALS The Bible refers to cereal consumption in Phoenicia and nearby regions. Barley and wheat were traded between Israel and the Phoenician city of Tyre during the reign of Solomon. Egypt was also mentioned by the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 23:3) as an important supplier of wheat to the city. This would imply that, despite the great fertility of the soil, Phoenician production was insufficient as a result of the scarcity of farmable land and the density of the population.
Cereals were eaten either boiled (a familiar practice in Near Eastern cooking from prehistoric times) or, very often, in the form of bread or flatcakes of various kinds. The widespread use of these products in the regions around Phoenicia and, in particular, in Ugarit is shown by the many terms used to describe cereal-based porridges and breads. The fact that the Carthaginians, the heirs to the Phoenicians in the west, were still eating these Near Eastern traditional foods in Roman times is further proof of their popularity.
PULSES AND VEGETABLES Cereals were integrated by pulses such as peas, lentils, chickpeas, and broad beans. These were either divided into their component parts (pods, seeds, leaves) or dried and ground into flour. Phoenicians also appear to have eaten large quantities of vegetables. Texts from Ugarit mention vegetable gardens and orchards, while the Bible also refers to well-kept vegetable gardens in Palestine. This is hardly surprising since the area, like that of the entire Syrian-Palestinian coast, was ideally suited to the cultivation of fruit trees and vegetables.
OIL Syria and Palestine began to produce oil from both olives and other seeds in the third millennium. Excavations in Ugarit, at the level of the Bronze Age, have revealed the remains of equipment used to extract oil as well as numerous fragments of large jars intended to contain the precious liquid.
According to the Bible, among the foodstuffs sent by Solomon each year to Hiram, king of Tyre, in exchange for materials and craftsmen for the construction of the temple were “twenty thousand kors” (each kor being 450 liters) of “beaten oil” (1 Kings 5:11).
FRUIT The cultivation of fruit trees was widespread. Dates, figs, apples, pomegranates, quinces, almonds, limes, and lotus are mentioned in Assyrian and Babylonian texts, the Bible, and, in more recent times, by classical authors.
There is considerable literary and archaeological evidence for the popularity of pomegranates. The fruit, a symbol of fertility owing to the quantity of seeds it contains, appears in the Bible as a typical product of Palestine alongside figs and grapes. There are at least fifty biblical references to figs, indicating their popularity, while the “Phoenician fig” was considered a delicacy in Egypt until Greek times. Given their sweetness, fresh or dried figs were frequently used in poorer diets instead of more expensive foods such as honey, which was reserved for the rich and aristocratic.
Dates must have been one of the most popular fruits at all levels of society, providing valuable sugars and vitamins. There is no need to list the many regions in which palm trees were cultivated from the fourth millennium on, given that they were present throughout the ancient Mediterranean Near East.
GRAPES AND WINE Grapes were eaten both fresh and dried and were also used to make wine. Raisins were an ingredient in cakes, as can be seen from the royal texts of Ugarit. Egyptian annals refer to “wine running like water in the presses” at Ullaza. The fact that winemaking was highly developed during the second millennium B.C.E. is shown by texts from the cities of Ugarit and Alalakh, both sited just to the north of Phoenicia.
Wine belongs to a venerable tradition. It is known that the marzeah, a religious organization also found in Carthage and linked to the cult of certain divinities and the dead, made considerable use of wine during its rites. In biblical tradition, the first references to winemaking and the effects that wine can have are in the story of Noah (Gen. 9:20–21). The soil and climate of Syria and Palestine were so well suited to vine cultivation that nearby countries such as Egypt and Assyria imported their wine.
MEAT Meat was obtained from sheep and cattle, smaller animals such as rabbits, chickens, and doves, and game. Hunting could only have been a secondary source of meat, since it is rarely mentioned in the Bible. Furthermore, the tale of Sinuhe the Egyptian refers to game as a great delicacy, reserved for the rich.
Goats and sheep, on the other hand, were kept throughout Phoenicia, whose mountainous areas provided ample grazing land. Their meat, however, was only rarely eaten, either at the royal tables or following ritual sacrifices.
MILK AND HONEY Quite apart from the many literary and allegorical interpretations that have been made of the phrase, the biblical definition of Canaan as a “land flowing with milk and honey” (Exod. 3:8, 17; 13:5) shows, first and foremost, that milk was highly appreciated.
Honey was one of the products that Tyre and the surrounding region imported from Judah and Israel. There is no doubt that it was also used in the making of cakes.
FISH From the earliest times, fish was an essential element in the basic Phoenician diet, and fishing played an important role in the economy as well. Whales, too, were caught, and an Assyrian inscription refers to a nakhiru (a small whale or dolphin?) as one of the gifts presented to Assurnasirpal II by the kings of the Phoenician coast.
Salt extraction complemented the fishing industry. The royal texts of Ugarit refer to salting as the only means of preservation, and saltpans are also likely to have existed in Phoenician cities.
TRADE The Phoenicians played a decisive role in the trading of food and wine in the Mediterranean, which in turn was central to their own economy. Numerous documents testify to the vitality of these commercial links. In the second lament for the fall of Tyre, for example, the prophet Ezekiel mentions the exchange of grain, honey, and oil with Judah and Israel, and of wine with Damascus, in order to illustrate the flourishing trading activities of the city. Archaeological evidence exists in the form of amphorae discovered in Tyre and intended for trade with Palestine.
Homer describes how Phoenician sailors exchanged their produce with foodstuffs (Od. XV.403–81), while a cuneiform tablet from Nineveh, dating from the sixth century B.C.E., records a delivery of grain and barley made by two Phoenicians and an Assyrian.
The consumption of beer and drinks made from fermenting cereals, although not widespread, is nonetheless proven not only by the sources but also by the discovery of jars with filters in the Phoenician area.
Agriculture in Carthage
Following the rise of Carthage and the Punic empire in the sixth century B.C.E., agriculture in the western colonies of Sardinia, Spain, and Sicily was controlled by provincial centers, endowed with their own land and resources and operating independently of the main cities.
Cereals appear to have constituted their staple diet. Plautus calls the Carthaginian protagonist of his play Poenulus (l. 54) a “big soup-eater” (pultiphagonides), suggesting that the puls, a porridge of boiled mixed cereals, was the main daily meal and guaranteed a simple basic diet.
The puls punica was a nutritious dish. Containing cereals, cheese, honey, and eggs, it provided sugars, fats, proteins, and, to a lesser degree, vitamins. Cato (Agr. Orig. 85) recorded the following recipe, adding that a new terracotta cooking pot should be used: “Add a pound of flour to water and boil it well. Pour it into a clean tub, adding three pounds of fresh cheese, half a pound of honey, and an egg. Stir well and cook in a new pot.”
Hecataeus of Miletus (fr. 351) calls the peoples of northern Africa “grain eaters,” suggesting that cereal production must have been the prevalent feature of the region’s noncoastal areas, which are known to have been occupied by Carthage. Cereals were also the main ingredients of a flatcake called punicum, which, according to Sextus Pompeius Festus (see Punicum), was delicious.
The presence in numerous houses of small terracotta ovens, similar to the tabunas and tannur that are still used in Near Eastern and North African regions, testifies to the widespread consumption of both leavened and unleavened bread. A number of votive steles in Carthage bear representations of ears of grain, as do series of Punic coins found in Sardinia.
PULSES AND VEGETABLES Classical sources describe the verdant gardens and orchards of Carthage and the nearby region of Cape Bon, listing a variety of products that range from cabbages and artichokes to cardoons and garlic. At Cartagena, in Spain, highly prized cardoons were cultivated, most of which were destined for export and the tables of the rich.
“Here underneath palms of exceptional size there are olives, under the olives figs, under the figs pomegranates, and under those vines; and underneath the vines is sown corn, and later leguminous plants, and then garden vegetables, all in the same year, and all nourished in the shade of something else.” This is how Pliny (HN XVIII.188) described the area of Tacape, now Gabes. The largest trees, after palms, were therefore olives. Those called miliarii, because they produced approximately 327 kilos of oil each year, were famous in Africa (XVII.93). Mago provides a series of precepts on planting olive groves and cultivating olives (Columella, Rust. 17.1; HN XVII.128), which, according to some scholars, was first practiced in North Africa by the Phoenicians of Carthage.
FRUIT Numerous documents refer to the cultivation of fruit trees. Different species of pear and apple trees are mentioned by Pliny (HN XIII.112), who also defined the pomegranate as malum punicum as a tribute to the quantity and quality of Carthaginian production, celebrated by many authors. Mago the farmer offers many recipes for their preservation.
Mago the Carthaginian recommends that seawater should be made exceedingly hot and that the pomegranates, tied with flax or rush, should be let down into it for a short time until they are discolored and then taken out and dried for three days in the sun; afterward they should be hung up in a cool place and, when they are required for use, soaked in cold, fresh water for a night and the following day until the time when they are to be used. The same writer also suggests daubing the fruit, when it is fresh, thickly with well-kneaded potter’s clay and, when the clay has dried, hanging it up in a cool place; when it is required for use, the fruit should be plunged in water and the clay dissolved. This process keeps the fruit as fresh as if it had only just been picked.
Mago also recommends that sawdust of poplar wood or holm-oak wood should be spread on the bottom of a new earthenware pot and the fruit arranged so that the sawdust can be trodden in between them; when the first layer has been formed, sawdust should be again put down and the fruit similarly arranged until the pot is full; when it is full, the lid should be put on it and carefully sealed with thick clay (Columella, Rust. 12.46.5–6).
Two- and three-dimensional images of the pomegranate can be found throughout the Punic world, above all on steles in northern Africa up to the end of the Phoenician period. The fruit continued to be linked to religion and death in the iconography of sculptors and painters in Africa and Sicily, even under Roman rule.
Figs were also eaten in every part of the western world, Carthaginian figs being so well known that they were exported to Greece and Rome. It is indicative that Cato, in order to demonstrate how close the Punic enemy was, showed the Roman Curia a fig that had been picked in Carthage only three days earlier.
Walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds, the shells of which have been found in several tombs in Carthage and Lilibeum, must have been a significant source of calories. Pistachios and chestnuts were also known, and large quantities of dates were consumed.
GRAPES AND WINE Grapes were eaten fresh or dried. Raisins were used to produce passum, a wine that was highly prized in imperial Rome (HN XIV.81). Columella describes how it is made, following Mago’s instructions:
Gather the early grapes when they are quite ripe, rejecting the berries which are mouldy or damaged. Fix in the ground forks or stakes four feet apart for supporting reeds and yoke them together with poles, then put reeds on the top of them and spread out the grapes in the sun, covering them at night so that the dew may not fall on them. Then when they have dried, pluck the berries and throw them into a barrel or wine-jar and add the best possible must thereto so that the grapes are submerged. When they have absorbed the must and are saturated with it, on the sixth day put them all together in a bag and squeeze them in a wine-press and remove the raisin wine. Next tread the wineskins, adding very fresh must, made from other grapes that you have dried for three days in the sun; then mix together and put the whole kneaded mass under the press and immediately put this raisin-wine of the second pressing in sealed vessels so that it may not become too rough; then, twenty or thirty days later, when it has finished fermenting, strain it into other vessels and plaster down the lids immediately and cover them with skins.
(Columella, Rust. 12.39.1–2)
According to Pliny, however, the quality of Carthaginian wine (HN XXXVI.166) was anything but high, owing to the lime that was added to sweeten it.
MEAT Goats, sheep, and cattle provided milk and other dairy products and, perhaps on special occasions, meat. Alongside rams and short, fat-tailed sheep, still found in Tunisia, votive steles of northern Africa show small animals such as rabbits, chickens, and doves, which were certainly the most common source of meat.
Classical sources reveal that Carthaginians did not eat pork, while they appear to have eaten dogs. Eggshells found in tombs show that eggs were eaten, and this is confirmed by the mention of eggs in a recipe for puls punica. It is also possible that ostrich eggs were eaten in those areas where the bird was found, especially if one considers that an ostrich egg was equivalent to between twenty-four and twenty-eight hen eggs.
FISH In many cities along the western Punic coast, fishing and its related industries were the main occupation, representing one of the most flourishing sectors of the economy. The main center was Cádiz, famous among classical authors for its fish-salting plants and the production of garum, a highly regarded sauce destined for the tables of Roman gourmets. Many recipes for the sauce have been handed down, but it was basically made by leaving fish innards and flesh of different qualities to ferment in salt water for one or more months with aromatic herbs. The liquid that was produced was collected and preserved in specially made amphorae for exportation.
The most common fish to reach the table, apart from the molluscs and crustaceans whose shells have often been found by archaeologists, were sea bream, red mullet, mackerel, sturgeon, moray eel, sole, and tuna. Numerous representations of these species exist. Images of tuna on several series of coins from Cádiz, Sexi, Abdera, and Soluntum are a clear reflection of the fish’s economic importance to those cities. Saltpans were established in these fish-salting centers, and many of those still in use in Sardinia, Sicily, Spain, and northern Africa are near Punic sites.
The honey of Carthage was highly prized, and the hives in the area also produced excellent wax.
FOOD PREPARATION AND CONSUMPTION As we have seen, a picture, albeit incomplete, can be drawn of the food that was available in the regions of Syria-Palestine and the western Phoenician world. However, the scarcity of information makes it almost impossible to talk about the daily diet, the way food was prepared and served, and the circumstances in which it was eaten.
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