““A lack of evidence for collective identity is not evidence for its absence, especially when we have no surviving Phoenician literature and relatively little material evidence at all. Some would argue that the loss of the kind of literary sources in which Phoenicians would have more naturally expressed and explored larger communal identities gives us a false impression of their self-understandings, although there is no positive indication that such literature ever in fact existed in Phoenician, and I suggest in this book that a lack of shared identity may even explain why it never developed.””
