Motya: Unearthing a Lost Civilization [Hardcover]

While there is much to like in Gaia Servadio's "Motya," there are important points to dislike, or at least be suspicious of.

Motya deserves to be better known, but it is remote and dangerous, which no doubt reduces the incentive for writing popular books about it for visitors. Servadio's seems to be the only one in English. Technical publications are scarce, too.

It is perhaps the most intact Phoenician settlement, although Servadio calls the residents "Punics." It was destroyed by Dionysus the Tyrant and the survivors moved to a more defensible spot, so that what was left, was left.

The rediscovery of Motya, as related by Servadio, is as romantic and thrilling as any other of the more famous classical and preclassical ruins. She first visited the place in the 1960s but waited four decades to write her book. Frequent revisits gave her insights to the place and its story that no merely reportorial account could have achieved. It also made her a partisan.

That story involves English wine merchants in Marsala, notably Joseph "Pip" Whitaker, who managed to purchase the entire island of Motya from suspicious peasants. He then resurrected an important chapter in Sicily's history, for which the Italians were not only not grateful but also unpleasantly vengeful.

The combination of fascism, Catholic obscurantism, Sicilian poverty, the mafia and general Italian sloth and slovenliness has not been kind to Motya, another reason why it is less known than it should be.

Although the Phoenicians gave us writing as we know it, they did not give us many writings, so what we know of them is skimpy. Thus archaeology at Motya is relatively even more important than at Greek or Latin sites.

The results are not showy but interesting all the same.

As a sensitive account of what the stones say -- they never speak distinctly -- Servadio's book is superior and beautifully written. There are, however, some odd things in it.

The most sensational and controversial is the question of child sacrifice, particularly of the first born.

As we know from other cultures (Hawaii, for example), human sacrifice did not necessarily involve murder. Sometimes the gods were offered the already dead.

Phoenician graveyards give special prominence to neonates, but exactly what this indicates is uncertain. One theory is that they were stillbirths. The Hebrews, bitter enemies of the Phoenicians, labeled them baby-destroyers, but despite Servadio's touching faith in the historicity of the historical books of the Old Testament, they are no more reliable a guide to what the neighbors of Israel were like than, say, "Doonesbury" is to what George Bush is like.

The particularly gruesome way the prophets said the Phoenicians roasted their first-born is a confabulation, written by perverts to impose on the gullibility of people like Gaia Servadio.

Her theory about why a people might sacrifice its first-born is internally incoherent. She relates it back to sacred prostitution (the status of which in the Near East she mischaracterizes). In her view, since men did not marry girls until they had served their temple duty, they would not have been sure of the parentage of the girls' first children, so less interested in preserving them. However, since Servadio says (based on what evidence she does not say) that the girls were usually prepubescent when deflowered, that cannot be it.

Her suggestion that interest in the Phoenicians has been slighted because of an anti-Semitic bias among Europeans seems to be mere petulance. Anti-Semitism is universal in Europe, though that did not prevent historians and prehistorians from becoming enthusiastic about other Semites. The lack of material about the Phoenicians is more easily explained by a lack of material to work with. The corpus of Latin inscriptions has occupied hundreds of paleographers for centuries. The corpus of Phoenician inscriptions could be comfortably reprinted in a book smaller than Servadio's.

Since "Motya" was published in 2000, resumed excavations have disproven her belief that the site was never reoccupied after its sack in the 5th century BC. No surprise there.