““This interpretation of the Phoenicians as a people has also informed recent literature on nationalism. One of most influential recent studies of communal identity in the ancient world is Anthony D. Smith’s magisterial Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986). Smith is no “primordialist,” arguing for the timeless existence of natural nations, nor does he accept the “modernist” position that sees the construction of ethnic identity as inextricably bound up with the rise of the modern nation-states. Instead, he argues that since antiquity people have been constructing themselves as what we would now call ethnic communities, “collective cultural units and sentiments” that “form the models and groundwork for the construction of nations.”111””
