Tal A. Ish-Shalom (Columbia University)
The late and post-Seleucid coins of Tyre and Sidon (second –early first century B.C.E.), featuring bilingual legends in Phoenician and Greek, offer fruitful case studies for the potentials and challenges of studying numismatic bilingualism. At first glance the picture might appear to merely confirm trends long known or suspected: the earliest quasi-municipal bronze coins (coins ostensibly produced by the authority both the Seleucid king and the local city) show productive use of long Phoenician legends, alongside Greek imperial legends. Later coins however feature only the briefest fossilized ethnics in Phoenician, with only the Greek remaining as a productive written language. This would appear to reflect a trend of linguistic Hellenization in Phoenicia and the decline and suspected “death” of the Phoenician language in the Levant in the late Hellenistic period (cf. F. Briquel-Chatonnet, Rivista di Studi Fenici 19 [1991] 3–21). Interpretations in this vein could similarly be advanced to explain a discrepancy in the denominational system: bronze coins feature Phoenician legends while silvers were introduced as monolingual Greek. Assuming bronze coinage was meant for local circulation, the initial presence of Phoenician legends could be explained by assuming a local Phoenician-reading audience as the legends’ target. Silver coinage circulated more widely, and this fact could account for the exclusive use of a lingua franca, Greek, from the start.
In this paper, however, I look more carefully into the details and challenge these assumptions. Changes in Phoenician legends from productive to “fossilized” coincide with the shifts in Seleucid kingship before 150 B.C.E. By contrast, Phoenician itself continues to be used as a productive written language in non-numismatic contexts at least a generation later, as attested by an extant religious dedication (KAI 18). This suggests the potential in exploring a politically-motivated change in the linguistic domain on the coinage, rather than assuming a shift in the linguistic identity or literacy of the audience (on domain cf. J. Fishman, La Linguistique 1 [1965] 67–88).
These complexities are apparent in later periods as well. While Phoenician does not reappear as productive written language on later coins, the minters of civic coins in Tyre introduce, for the first time, Phoenician letters on the silver denominations. Together with the initiation of an autonomous era in Tyre, the presence of Phoenician letters and the shift to civic coinage more generally suggest a political motivation for language use. Phoenician letters on these coins, always the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet (aleph and bet) have been interpreted to represent the two semesters of the Phoenician year, corresponding to traditions Phoenician semi-annual magistracies. If so, one may consider that the choice to add their markings on the coins may reflect perhaps neither change in messaging and audience, nor in language use, but perhaps in institutional settings, and the choice to mark the presence of a traditional-Phoenician institution with Phoenician letters. By going beyond the audience-message heuristic framework, we may discover more nuanced motivations to understand these and other bilingual coins.