 objects mostly based on museum objects that are labeled as Phoenician. And I've decided to start my presentation by showing you this object, which is a traditional fashion did to a cosmetic container. That was found in Vunci in Italy. And I first encountered it on the cover of a catalogue of a very important exhibition about the Phoenicians that were done in Paris in 2007. But however, this object belongs to the collection of the British Museum, and it's not currently displayed at the British Museum. And if you look it up on the online catalogue, you'll see that it's labeled as Phoenician slash Etruscan slash Eastern Mediterranean. So I hope it's a bit problematic it is that this object, which is not labeled definitely by its current institution, was sort of the flagship object of a big exhibition on the Phoenicians. And that's actually quite representative of a lot of Phoenician material in a lot of museums. Hopefully this will make more sense as I go, but better back on first. So today in academia we define the Phoenician as the people who occupied the central 11th coast, I don't have a pointer, so that's mostly here, and the Iron Age of that period, 1200 to 300 BC. And the Phoenicians are famous for having expanded into colonies and trading posts all over the Mediterranean, most famously for campaign cartage, which developed its own material culture from the 6th century that we refer to as Punec today. And the Phoenicians are often associated with many stereotypes, notably that there were great navigators and maritime traders that invented the alphabet and there were great customers developing many techniques from purple dye to glass blowing. And some of these stereotypes are actually inherited from very old traditions. So for example, on the coin you can see a Greek legend, which is that of Katmos, who is a mythical Phoenician prince, and the founder of Thebes and Greece, both of them, giving the gift of the alphabet to the Greeks. But then some of the stereotypes are also encountered on much less traditional forces. So this collectible cart that you could win if you bought a certain brand of packaged meat in the early 20th century, and it's part of a series on the evolution of trade and industry, showing cartaging and erections. So there's many kind of places where these attitudes come from. And my aim and my project is to understand where all these attitudes come from and how they affect the actual material culture that's exhibited in museums. So in order to do this, I have two main steps. First of all, I look at the literature from ancient sources like Homer, like the Bible, or the Latin authors, to archaeological accounts starting from the 19th century up until today, but also more pop culture literature, things like blogs, and novels. So for example here, the image is the cover of the novel Salambo by Faber, which is a French novel from the 19th century telling the story of a cartaging in princess. And you can see another sort of depiction of the Phoenician prince, this very decadent population on it. And then the bulk of my research is based in museums. So what I do, it's quite fun, is I go visit museums that have Phoenician collections, meet with curators, and just look at the displays and ask questions such as what kind of objects are called Phoenician in these museums? What is the rationale behind the displays? And how does the interpretation differ from one museum to the next? And this way, I build a comparative approach between museums, but also if I can within museums, because I try to look at old guides and archives to see if things would have changed in the display over time. And then what I try to do is to link that back with the literature and see if some of the stereotypes that we find in the literature are repeated in museums, or if, for example, attitudes would have changed in archaeology, this is reflected in museums as well. So before I talk about museums, I just want to talk a little bit about the image that we have of Phoenicians today. In very recent scholarship, we tend to believe more and more that the Phoenician identity is fabricated one, and it's coming from external images. And we think that, mostly because we have 10,000 approximately inscriptions in Phoenician that are deciphered. They're not properly literature, because most of them are funerary or dedicatory inscriptions, but they do mention some identity markers. But none of them, out of 10,000, mentions the word Phoenician. Rather, people tend to identify on them with their cities or some family groups dating back several generations. So we think that these people that we group together in one bag as Phoenicians actually thought of themselves in a much smaller scale in terms of group identity, unlike the Greeks, for example, who had this sense of common child identity. And because of this, and because we've always had this attitude through scholarship and we got the word Phoenician from the Greeks and started using it, we have this little characterized image of the Phoenician today, I put up there, and that's actually a real character when Greek. He's a character that exists in real life from the comic book series Asterix, and he's a Phoenician merchant who is very cunning and sly and greedy and he always tries to lure you to sell you as a slave. And this image comes from a lot of different perception and attitudes that just have fed in ultra histories. So starting with the Greeks, which just gives us the word, Romans who invented Punica Fides, and that's understandable, I guess, because famously the Romans are big enemies of the Carthaginians as we know from the Punic Wars. So they were not going to talk about the Phoenicians as peaceful traitors. They were going to depict them as savage and barbaric. But then if we jump to 19th century England, for example, we have much more favorable views of the Phoenicians there, because actually when the British Empire was expanding at the time, they saw themselves as a fraction of the Phoenicians because they thought the Phoenicians were pioneers of civilisations and that they just gave the alphabet and didn't conquer any cities the way the Romans did, for example. They just peacefully went and traded and civilised the word. And in the eyes of the British Empire, this is what they were also doing. So that was that image. But at the same time, this is contrasted by Orientalism, which is becoming very prevalent in the 19th century. And the fact that the Phoenicians are seen as shown in the cover of Salambo, which has very decadent mystical, you know, they sacrifice children, so do they really want to associate themselves with that so much? So basically the associations that people had with the Phoenicians are very selective over time and over space. And another example of that is in Lebanon in the 1920s, you have the political movement called Phoenicianism and that movement claims that the Lebanese population is directly descended from the Phoenicians and rejects any Arab identity. So this, as a political power, doesn't have any prevalence in Lebanon today anymore, but this idea is very present in the mind of the people. So if you visit me in Lebanon, I can guarantee that you will meet people who will tell you, we're not Arab, we're Phoenicians. We invented the alphabet, we're better than the Arabs. So people just pick the aspects that they like and they sort of identified with them. But what do museums say about that? So if we stay in Lebanon and we look at the National Museum in Beirut, this is a map of the first floor where they put all the small things. So in blue I've highlighted the Iron Age phase, so where you would expect to find Phoenician material. And the little puzzle represents the instances of the word Phoenician. So in red you have them on large explanation panels and in yellow you have them on individual object labels. You can see it not a lot. And you can see that the large panel isn't about the Phoenicians, it's about the Iron Age and it just mentions the Phoenician and actually the individual object labels are only for inscribed objects in the Phoenician language. The museum seems like it doesn't really want to put more emphasis on one culture over the other, and it just goes by sort of the absolute ages. But staying in Lebanon, if we look at the AB Museum, which is a regional museum, and I'll come back to that later, you can see that there's much, much more emphasis based on the Phoenicians, and actually this whole area is just dedicated to the Phoenician and you have this big explanation panel with the alphabet like trade and navigation. And they have this big table showcase, which is on the Phoenician farmers that have one on the alphabet and have one on their religion. So even in the same country, you can see that museums can have very different attitudes to those collections. And an interesting one is the Vallarta Museum. The National Museum is also used a lot, but it's not used in the same way that it's used at the Arabian Museum. Because my feeling at Vallarta Museum was that it was much more focused on interpretation and on the sort of narrative display. There are a lot of large explanation panels, and it tries to tell you that actually we don't... This is the state of our knowledge currently in academia about the Phoenicians. So it's not just, oh, we met the alphabet that said... So even if there is a lot of insistence in the case of the end, the galleries are painted purple, which is a little funny because purple died and all of that. It's not reiterating like stereotypes just blindly. It's more focusing on interpretation. What I'm trying to say with this is the frequency of use and the emphasis placed on the Phoenicians in museums is not the same thing. You can use the word Phoenician a lot, but not make it more prominent over other parts of your museum. Or you can not use it much and still make it important. For example, at the Bardot Museum in Tunis, they don't use the word Phoenicians that much, but that's because they're a few kilometers from Carthage, so they prefer to put their emphasis on the Carthaginian. So they just use the Phoenician for a little bit to explain this transition, and then they move on to Carthaginian. That's not the only thing I look at. I trust on that because I'm at the time. But I also look at things such as how the word Phoenician is defined in the museum, and that differs from one museum to the next. So this is where I come back to the Arabian Museum, being regional. In a lot of museums, but in some of them, at least the word Phoenician is used to determine a geographical space, which is the one I showed on the map earlier. So because the Arabian one is a regional museum, it helps put a place on object, I think, to use the word Phoenician, and so it helps distinguish them from other contemporary material that might be quite similar from Syria or from Palestine, that they also have on display. And the Louvre does the same thing. They use the word Phoenician for convenience rather than anything else. And that also makes sense because the Louvre is huge. It has so many collections. Even within the Department of Oriental Antiquities, the galleries which have Phoenician material are not continuous, so you would have, say, Phoenicians in Room A and Phoenicians in Room F, and then BCDE would have something completely unrelated. So if they just call them Phoenicians, it makes it easier for people to locate themselves within the museum. And then the chronological delineation of these objects is also not the same from one museum to the next. So, again, think of the Louvre. This is a bust from the 11th century BC. So it fits within the traditional time period of the Phoenicians. But it's displayed in a gallery with brown-page objects from Syria and Lebanon. I'm still trying to figure out why it's there. But it is. And then the other object is T-men. It's from the second century. So that's outside the traditional day trench that we put. But because it's from Sydonne and the mainland of Phoenicia, they call it Phoenician. And it's like that. And I think part of the reason for this is that our current delineation of the time frame of Phoenician material is quite recent. And it dates from the 1970s. And the works of Sabatino Moscati, actually, who imposed this time mark. So if you look at literature three prior to 1970, Phoenicians could mean anything and everything that came from that region. The Louvre maybe hasn't matched all of its displays to adhere to that time period. And then something else I look at, but I don't think I'll spend for it here, is how the museums are organized and how this affects the presentation of those collections. So for example, like what I said, if the galleries are pretty nice or not, if the museum is working chronologically or if it's separating between thematic collections or if there are any sort of architectural restrictions, because a lot of time they have open spaces and they don't want to restrict them. That's the case at the Beirut National Museum, for example. And at the Louvre they have a huge vase from Cyprus, the Amatose vase, which they can't move because it was twice down. So they have to work around how to organize the material around that. And if you actually read some old guys the Cypriot material at the Louvre, you'll see that people are aware of this issue, but they just haven't found a way to work with it. It's like, oh, we have these vases in this room. Can't do anything about it. And then we have the relief from Portia, but can't do anything about it. So everything else goes in the other rooms. So we do a lot more research to reach. But so far what I've noticed is that museums obviously have very different definitions for their combination. But the perceptions of these objects vary greatly, and that can be to a certain extent matched to the literature. Not like a bit, but there are some things that come back, and that finally some museums seem to monetize themselves from stereotypes and be objective, whereas others reify them and then others take completely different approaches. So hopefully I get to do some more fieldwork this year and reach more inclusive conclusions. Thank you.