““Mine is not, however, so much an argument from silence as an argument for silence: a silence that can open up other spaces of investigation. I cannot demonstrate that no one in the ancient Mediterranean ever thought of her- or himself as Phoenician, nor will I try to do so. But without positive evidence for such a collective identification, I will insist that we cannot arbitrarily adopt one as our working assumption. We don’t have to plaster over this gap in our knowledge by applying an arbitrary label according to our own taste: we can choose instead to attend to the evidence that we do have and to the stories it tells.””
