The third reviewee, in our series on Tarshish, Prof. Timothy Champion, is the Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. Champion writes about Tarshish only once in his paper, “The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology”, in Nations and Nationalism, Vol.7, Issue 4, 2001, pp.451 – 465.1
Champion’s working life, as a UK academic, has been mainly divided between the study of Ancient Egypt and that of the Iron Age Prehistory of the South-East of Britain. Other than that, he has co-edited a book on Iron Age Britain [a general study, in 2001], wrote a section in a book on the Celts, in 2006, and a section in another book, detailing the Archaeology of Kent, in 2007.
In his personal Southampton University self-evaluation, he lists his interests as being as I have described them, above, and does not refer to Britain and Phoenicia, Phoenicia, the Ancient Tin Trade, the Ancient Middle East, the Bible or any other related topic, at all.
By 2001, Champion, already a senior academic in the UK circuit, was known to have individual, not to say idiosyncratic, views on the use, and appropriateness, of a sociological approach to archaeological subjects. Thus, any attempt to review Champion, when he is writing in this vein, is a little like trying to assess the approach of an international cricketer, whose background and training were in All-in Wrestling: that is, Champion feels to the reader as if he is ‘mangling’ the matter, not playing it with a straight bat. This is because he has a whole host of background assumptions in play, whenever he makes a comment. As the senior academic he is, he was given license to , well, just launch forth, and he does: there is little pretence at Champion feeling any need to ‘prove his point’; he is very assertive – thus making at one and the same time, quite insightful and very excruciatingly crude remarks.
From the viewpoint of someone wishing to ‘beg to differ’ – and I do! – it is almost impossible to get properly to grips with Champion, especially as his essay is very short [approximately 4,500 words]. At one point, I wrote in the margin of my copy of Champion, in utter frustration, “There is, in all this, the sniff of undergraduate ‘clever-clever’, rather than an earnest and ‘savvy’ whiff of wishing knowledgeably to seek out the truth of the matter”: you will see, as we go, what Champion is like.
Using the criteria we developed when reviewing Smith (Jan 2015 issue), involves reviewing Champion’s identification of Tarshish, and the reasoning behind this labelling. He says:
“The direct archaeological evidence for the presence of Phoenician or Carthaginian traders as far north as Britain is non-existent, and the most recent review of Phoenician activity in the west does not even bother to consider the question [Aubet 1993].”
I was unable to find space for a separate and dedicated review of Professor Maria Aubet’s book, in this series. However, it is true, and is worth adding here, that Prof Aubet, a field archaeologist, of great repute in Tyre, but with limited knowledge of the Bible and its widely -spread related fields, herself relies on other scholars for the adjudication of the award of a label to Tarshish [e.g. Prof Mario Liverani of Rome University, on p.126]. Thus, for Champion to rely on Aubet’s own professed uncertainty “Let us say that the term Tarshish evolved with time – a destination on the Red Sea, a type of merchant ship, a precious stone – and its original meaning was lost as the centuries passed until it met up with another equally vague term – Tartessos – in the Hellenistic-Roman period”, [Aubet, op. cit. pp.205-206] we are back-pedalling from the concrete, factual resolution of the matter. Indeed, this is a procedure reminiscent of the rabbis, in Jesus’ day: quoting one another ad nauseam, and generating an enormous bureaucracy of uninformative literature. Champion’s comments about ancient sources and the identity of Tarshish are in similar vein: ‘dismissive’, if not ‘derisory’, and, to be as blunt as he prefers, simply ‘uninformed’.
The ancient authorities Champion knows about, on this issue, are severely restricted: his knowledge of Phoenician, he gleans from Aubet alone; Diodorus Siculus, he can only read in translation. Of the ancient authorities referred to by the savants of yesteryear – Smith, Professor George Rawlinson, or his elder brother Sir Henry, who, between them could speak fluently not only Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but Persian, Elamite and Assyrian, and in several of their varied dialectical formats, Champion knows nothing at all. Thus, our other Smithsonian criteria, [which were the knowledge of Ancient Authorities; of Ancient History; of Phoenicia, in especial, even of the Bible ]… do not apply to Champion. Instead, Champion treats us to a sociological round-up of swashbuckling interpretations of the past, applying criteria, similar to the general notion of Whig History,2 to dismiss much earlier scholarship, and concludes, rather lamely, that there are no lessons to be learned from the Past. Rather, like Arnold Toynbee3, he asserts the cyclical nature of the Past – which, of course, allows him to dismiss the need to analyse “Purpose” or “Direction”, since we are simply going ‘Round the Bay’, once again.
The standard of Champion’s scholarship is possibly well-measured by his comments on George Rawlinson. On p.4 of his brief essay [p.454 of Nations & Nationalism], Champion states:
“There was a persistent belief that the Phoneticians had reached Britain, and these passages [from Diodorus Siculus] were often used in support of that idea. Thus Canon George Rawlinson … wrote… ”
Champion goes on to quote 7-8 lines from Rawlinson.
In fact, Rawlinson was Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford for 28 years, a major contributor to Speaker’s, Ellicott’s, and The Pulpit Commentaries, and to the Encyclopaedia Britannica4. Rawlinson’s History of Phoenicia, his magnum opus, dedicated
“To The Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, and Scholars Of The University Of Oxford… His Last as Occupant of a Professorial Chair… As a Token of Respect and Gratitude”5 is thorough, well-argued and balanced, and not just a “belief” of his; nor did Rawlinson, an opinion-former, follow the intellectual fashions of his day.
Hearing the above, and knowing me to be fully-conversant with Rawlinson’s writings, as indeed is she, the only surprise here, is, perhaps, that Dr. Sheldrake troubled me to read Champion at all. My rejoinder to that self-doubt would, I think, be that it is always beneficial to be aware of the breadth of extant opinion: the good, the bad and the ugly, and that, having read Champion’s piece only serves to show what a tour de force Rawlinson’s work really is.
- The Inter-Library Loan Scheme can arrange for off-prints of Champion’s 13-page essay [+ 2 pages of Bibliography, much of which is unreferred to!] for £3 or £4.
- This term was invented, in 1931, by Professor Herbert Butterfield, in his The Whig Interpretation of History.
- Prof A. J. Toynbee’s 12-volume A Study of History [1934-1961] was renowned for perceiving circular patterns in the Past.
- Rawlinson, having translated and commentated upon the writings of Herodotus, in the fullest and most authoritative edition to this day, was asked to provide the Encyclopaedia’s article on the Greek Historian for its 9th edition in the 1870s, at a time when the Britannica was recruiting the most eminent scholars, since it was acquiring the status of a world-authority itself.
- Prof. Rawlinson’s book is more than the length of two full-length novels, is fully-footnoted, replete with references in English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, various Ancient oriental Languages, as well as to the Scriptures, and to the latest in scholarship at the time of his resignation, so that he could devote himself, then in his 80s, to spiritual matters.”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One