“Destroying the myth of Greek Marseille”, Gabriel Chakra has made it the quest and investigation of his life. Journalist for forty years Southern (journal which disappeared in 1997), the octogenarian devoted twenty years of his retirement to bringing together the elements necessary for his ambition, punctuated by the publication of Phoenician Marseille (Maïa editions).
The author maintains that the founding of Marseille would be the work of the Phoenicians, a people originally from present-day Lebanon, and would be located “between that of Rome (-753 BC) and Carthage (-820)” , where historiography places it around -600, affirming that it was built by the Greeks who arrived from Phocaea, present-day Turkey.
So that’s enough to make Marseille two centuries older, change its cultural origins and revive “an idea that resurfaces from time to time”, smiles Jean-Philippe Sourisseau, professor of archeology at the University of Aix-Marseille, specialist in Greek colonization in the Western Mediterranean. If for the professor of archeology, the Greek origins of Marseille suffer from “no possible doubt”, the former journalist does not budge and denounces a centuries-old imposture. We take stock.
A legend as original sin?
For Gabriel Chakra, all this misunderstanding “is the fault of Justin”, a historian of the Roman Empire who lived during the 3rd century AD. Let’s start with this Justin to whom we owe the written transmission of the myth of the founding of Marseilleinitially reported by Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, some 600 years before him (around 300 BC if you follow).
A story of a princess, named Gyptis, from a local tribe of Ségobriges – people of our shores at the time – has the difficult task of choosing a husband at a banquet to which Protis, the chief of an expedition of Greek sailors. Without suspense, she chooses him. He also gains land on which to create his colony. And, although history does not say whether the young couple lived happily and had many children, Marseille was born – at least according to legend – around 600 BC.
This is the myth as reported by Justin who based himself on ancient stories. A sort of bad Arabic telephone, denounces Gabriel Chakra.
A stone and prices
To age Marseille by two centuries, the journalist relies on the discovery of an old stone that appeared in 1845 in the city. On this stone (today exhibited at the Vieille Charité) are 21 lines written in the Phoenician language which detail the price of different sacrifices (a cow, a pig, a hen, etc.) that priests can perform to obtain the favors of Baal, god of the Phoenician pantheon. From then on baptized “Marseille tariff”, “this stone is proof of a Phoenician presence prior to that of the Greeks”, maintains Gabriel Chakra.
According to his research, it was extracted by a mason who, in 1845, was digging the ground near the current Cathedral of the Major, a site which housed the temple of Diana and which, thus, would have previously been dedicated to Baal. A first study of this stone concluded in 1867 that it had been taken from the quarries of Cassis, today a seaside resort near Marseille.
A few years later, a second petrographic analysis (the study of rocks) established its provenance from Carthage. But the results were published too late to appear in the 1885 work, History of art in Antiquity by Georges Perrot, a book which will be authoritative among historians and archaeologists throughout the first part of the 20th century, indicates Antoine Hermary, professor emeritus of Greek archeology and civilization at the University of Aix-Marseille in a scientific article entitled Phoenician Marseille: a 19th century myth.
“Phenicomania” or “political reason”?
From then on, the myth of Phoenician Marseille was able to flourish for a time, driven by an ambient “phoenicomania” in the 19th century. “The 19th century rediscovered the Phoenician world and Carthage,” resituates Jean-Philippe Sourisseau. “Carthage, the Phoenicians, they smell of sulfur, they sound like the mysterious Orient. This excites people and academics feel compelled to follow. This is the time when Flaubert leaves to travel to North Africa, just to make himself forgotten a little after his scandalous Madame Bovary. He took the opportunity to publish Salammbô a historical novel which takes ancient Carthage as its setting. All of this is part of this “phoenicomania”. At the same time, landowners in North Africa are starting to get things out of the ground. This is how “the Marseille tariff” arrived: in a boat containing looted antiquities,” explains the archaeologist.
A version which is “a fable” for Gabriel Chakra. He sees political manipulation in the contradictory analyzes and theories about the stone: “Greece was emerging from its war of independence (1821-1828) against the Ottoman Empire. Greece is the cradle of democracy, the beacon of the West. The Phoenicians are a people from North Africa, from the Near East. There is a political reason and a background of xenophobia in this story,” says the former journalist.
Greek remains and Semitic etymology
This argumentative dialogue does not quite end here. The archaeologist Jean-Philippe Sourisseau underlines that “the material reality of the remains exhumed in Marseille reveals nothing other than a Greek material culture” and that “the Phoenicians did trade in the western Mediterranean but without explicit trace of traffic on the coasts of Gaul.
Gabriel Chakra then relies on onomastics [l’étude des noms propres] to support his thesis. Thus, in the Phoenician language “Marsa means the port,” he says. Which we therefore find in Marseille, but especially in numerous Phoenician colonies, such as Mers el-Kébir (present-day Algeria), Marsala (present-day Sicily) or even Marsaxlokk (present-day Malta).”
If the former journalist thus intends to age Marseille by two centuries, everyone agrees on the fact that the human occupation of the city’s shores is at least 30,000 years old, as evidenced by the cave paintings discovered in the Cosquer cave. And that at that time, there were neither Greeks nor Phoenicians in the Mediterranean, but many penguins and seals.