Five years ago, David Graeber and David Wengrow made a big stir with a simple claim: democracy is inherent to the human condition and was no special invention of the Greeks.[1] Their argument was not unprecedented.[2] Still it felt refreshing. Some theorists in the 2000-2010s had doubled down on the Greek exception, tracing a direct lineage from ancient Athens to Euro-American democracy.[3] Finally, someone was pushing back. Neither side of this debate—the Greeks invented democracy vs. no they did not—is provable. Nonetheless, the exercise was a useful reminder of how difficult it is to be a premodernist. Our evidence is spotty; debates have carried on for centuries; few theories are falsifiable. The search for origins is really a search for ourselves. If objective truth is possible (or even a worthy goal, which we can debate) we should not be too eager to plant a flag in the past.
Brett Kaufman’s new book is an exercise in flag-planting. Kaufman also makes a bold claim: the people of ancient west Asia invented democracy and the Phoenicians carried it to Europe. Kaufman’s Phoenician history follows well-received work by Josephine Crawley Quinn (2017), Carolina López-Ruiz (2021), and Denise Demetriou (2023), who cast the Phoenicians as the stars of the first millennium BCE. Parts of Kaufman’s argument ring true, for instance his critique of ancient history’s Hellenocentric bias. But much cannot be endorsed. Phoenicia, Carthage, and Popular Government in the Pre-Classical Mediterranean hinges on the fallacy of origins, the idea that every historical innovation comes about exactly once and then disseminates. Archaeological theorists call this ‘cultural diffusionism,’ a major school of thought in the 19th century with few adherents now.[4]
Kaufman’s argument goes as follows. Democracy was invented in Mesopotamia. Ancient west Asian cities operated along the principle of “constitutional monarchy,” “shared governance,” or “popular government” (p. 18), splitting powers between monarchs and local elder councils, judicial boards, popular assemblies, etc. Kaufman calls this package “Sumero-Akkadian statecraft,” a term repeated throughout (pp. 99, 108, 111, 113, 121, 144, 166, 170). The Sumero-Akkadian package was transplanted into the Mediterranean by Phoenician sailors in the early first millennium (p. 68). In the absence of royal power, they founded the world’s first true democracy, Carthage. Carthage’s primacy is very important for Kaufman. Already on p. 2, Kaufman introduces the claim that “for Carthage, Athens would have been the later, upstart, other democracy.” Though Kaufman states that that he “does not find the contest over ‘who came first’ intellectually compelling” (p. 2), he is in fact deeply invested. He repeats his claim that Carthage was the world’s first true democracy at least four more times (p. 4, 79, 195, 230).
Before going any further, let me explain why this review is so negative. Kaufman’s rhetoric is shockingly bellicose. The first time Kaufman calls someone an Islamist is on p. 4. Why? Overly critical ancient historians have “stripped past peoples of their very identities” by “denying the very existence of Phoenicians as a coherent group.” Kaufman has a bone to pick with the critical study of identity in the ancient Mediterranean, which he regards as an exercise in “denialism” that threatens modern-day peoples (pp. 4, 39). Kaufman calls anyone even remotely critical of the term ‘Phoenician’ a “colonizer” and “jihadist” who is “now doing the bidding of Islamists” (pp. 36-37). Now, whether the ‘Phoenicians’ recognized themselves as a collective is up for debate. ‘Phoenician’ is a famous Greek exonym and scholars still disagree whether Tyrians, Sidonians, etc, situated themselves within a larger, self-nominating group.[5] No matter. The Phoenicians are “indigenous” to west Asia and deconstructing identity makes you a “settler colonist.” (Kaufman actually prints a list of everyone that he recognizes as “indigenous” to west Asia, with curious omissions).[6] All of this is really unfortunate. Is the critical study of identity in the Iron Age Mediterranean really an Islamist plot? Kaufman’s bold talk made me examine what followed very closely.
Let us approach Kaufman’s outlook towards evidence. The challenge in writing a Phoenician history of democracy is the proof. To his credit, Kaufman prints a corpus of 46 translated inscriptions that mention political bodies or titles as an appendix to foreground Phoenician or Punic testimony. But as Kaufman admits (pp. 34, 129, 206), the Phoenician epigraphic record has been badly disturbed and evidence remains an intractable problem. This means that Kaufman inevitably bases much of his institutional history on Greek and Roman sources. By far the most important is Aristotle’s description of the Carthaginian politeia in Politics 2.1271b-73b. Aristotle had praised Carthage for blending sober elite governance with popular assemblies.[7]
What makes Aristotle’s account so important? Kaufman mobilizes Aristotle to argue that American constitutionalism draws profoundly from an ancient Semitic heritage. This claim is not exactly untrue. Caroline Winterer finds that Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Franklin often referenced Aristotle’s praise of Carthage as they sought ancient precedents for a mixed constitution in the 1780s.[8] But asserting direct lineage is probably wrong. Like most people in the 18th century, the American founders read the classics as a storehouse of disarticulated wisdom from which you could freely pick and choose.[9] No American founder actually cites a text written in Phoenician. Kaufman introduces his claim of Carthaginian origins on p. 1 and repeats it uncritically (pp. 3, 79, 84). No American founder is actually cited or quoted until p. 195.
Kaufman draws on his epigraphic corpus in Chapter 2 to argue that Phoenicians understood their own political institutions as democratic. His argument hinges on the meaning of the word ˁm, usually translated as ‘people’ or ‘nation’ but here translated as “people’s assembly” (p. 52). (This interpretation has good vintage but Kaufman pushes it very far).[10] Kaufman bases this equivalence on bilingual KAI 60 = IG II2 2946, which records proceedings of the Sidonian association in Hellenistic Athens. This inscription translates ˁm ṣdn (‘the people of Sidon’) as τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Σιδωνίων. Additionally, Kaufman notes that Aristotle calls the popular assembly of Carthage a δῆμος (Politics 2.1273a10-13). Should ˁm thus be interpreted as a constitutional term like δῆμος and πόλις are in Greek? Kaufman says yes: members of the Carthaginian ˁm had rights and duties equivalent to an Athenian citizen (p. 54).
Maybe? There can be no doubt that Hellenistic Phoenician inscriptions use ˁm in ways that resemble δῆμος or πόλις in Athenian decrees. KAI 62 is a law passed by “the people of Gaulos” (ˁm gwl). KAI 43 suggests a division of power at Lapethos between “the people of Lapethos” (ˁm lpṭ) and a king. But hanging a longue durée theory of Phoenician constitutionalism on a word usage found in fewer than ten inscriptions, some undated and most late, seems daring.[11] Anyway, we are still handcuffed to Greek sources. KAI 60 = IG II2 2946 is written in an Athenian social and legal context. Its authors were at very least bilingual, and might even have spoken Greek as a first language.[12] Meanwhile, Aristotle’s approach to government is notoriously schematic and holds Athenian institutions as normative.[13] Kaufman might be right, but shouldn’t be so confident.
Chapter 3 is short. Here, Kaufman centers Phoenicians as “agents of cosmopolitanism” (p. 71) who export Mesopotamian theories of statehood to the west. Kaufman lays the groundwork for Chapter 4, which explores how urban space in Phoenician cities reflects political ideology. Kaufman’s theory is simple:
Public plazas can be considered an archaeological proxy for popular government. Is it anachronistic to project onto the ancient past the American notion of the town square as a gathering place where the people can voice their dissent, at least, or be a part of policymaking at, best? The answer is no . . . democratic government, or popular government by consensus, had its roots in Mesopotamia . . . the Phoenicians were the agents of its spread to the rest of the Mediterranean, including Greece. (pp. 78-80).
Kaufman interprets urban plans for almost 100 pages (99-194). His paradigm is diffusionist. When urban plazas appear on Minoan Crete, they must be borrowings from the east. Crete was well-connected with the Levant—but the Mycenaeans were not, which is why they lacked public squares. From this, Kaufman infers that Greece has no “indigenous” tradition of democracy. This evokes the early 20th century debate between Arthur Evans, Carl W. Blegen, Alan Wace, J. Penrose Harland, Georg Karo, and others over whether Greek civilization was Indo-European, Semitic, or something in between.[14] Kaufman is out-of-date elsewhere, for instance stating that Late Bronze Age Greece was dominated by palace states that allowed little personal initiative (p. 146).[15] Kaufman is emphatic that the Greek noun ἀγορά (which he calls a verb) came from a west Asian language—a claim that is probably true but has limited value as historical evidence. The chapter ends with Carthaginians implanting democracy in Sardinia and Iberia.
Chapter 5 retreads ground covered in Chapter 2, using Aristotle Politics 2.1271b-73b as a frame to reconstruct Carthaginian democracy. Like Chapter 2, Kaufman draws from his epigraphical appendix to outline the offices of the Carthaginian state, which he gives the formal name “the Great Judiciary of Carthage.” (This is based on his translation of the phrase špṭ hšpṭm bqrthdšt in CIS I.5632; justification is outlined on p. 16 and not explained in Chapter 5 itself). Offices include members of judicial boards, known as špṭ, an elders’ council (’drm) that Aristotle (Pol. 2.1272b38) called a γερουσία, and the ambiguous office of the mlk, or ‘king.’ These are balanced by a popular assembly, Aristotle’s δῆμος. Kaufman interprets Greek and Roman accounts of wartime unrest in Carthage as evidence of people power at work against elites.
Phoenicia, Carthage, and Popular Government is frustrating because Kaufman is right: Greek democracy wasn’t unique. He correctly identifies the interpretive issues we face when we talk about the ancient Phoenicians—and repeatedly observes how 19th century scholarly antisemitism marginalized the Phoenicians from Classical Studies. Kaufman correctly identifies that the Iron Age is a critical moment when the city-state and participatory government seems to pop up everywhere in the Mediterranean (p. 229). And, Kaufman is totally correct to argue that political ideas must have formed part of what López-Ruiz calls the “Phoenician kit” that reached Greece in the 8th century BCE.[16]
At this point it should be obvious that my politics are different than Kaufman’s. That is fine: Aristotle calls man a φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον (Pol. 1.1253a3) and Kaufman is entitled to structure his argument around a Phoenician ‘right to exist’ if he can make it compelling. The problem is that the evidence does not add up, the argument is ponderous, and Kaufman drags his book across the line by threatening his readers. Premodernists write good books based on speculative evidence all the time: as long as your attitude is something like Lincoln’s “malice towards none . . . charity towards all,” you can capture readers by posing your thesis as a question. (This is what made Graeber so exciting). Kaufman hectors critics in a time when getting called a cheap slur like “jihadist” and “Islamist” is enough to have your name put on a list. So let me be clear that Kaufman’s idea is plausible and should be investigated further. But not like this.
Works cited
Demetriou, Denise. 2023. Phoenicians among Others: Why Migrants Mattered in the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Vaux, Roland. 1964. “Le sens de l’expression « peuple du pays » dans l’ancien testament et le role politique du peuple en Israël.” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 58.4: 167-72.
Duray, Anne. 2025. “‘The Peculiar Hellenic Alloy:’ Carl Blegen’s Narrative of Greek Racial Development in Context.” American Journal of Archaeology 129.2: 149-80.
Graeber, David and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Faber, Straus, and Giroux.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press.
López-Ruiz, Carolina. 2021. Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ma, John. 2024. Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Morris, Ian. 2004. “Economic Growth in Ancient Greece.” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 160.4: 709-42.
Nakassis, Dimitri. 2013. Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos. Leiden: Brill.
Ober, Josiah. 2015. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Schemeil, Yves. 2000. “Democracy before Democracy?” International Political Science Review 21.2: 99-120.
Quinn, Josephine Crawley. 2017. In Search of the Phoenicians. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Trigger, Bruce. 2008 [1996]. A History of Archaeological Thought. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Winterer, Caroline. 2010. “Model Empire, Lost City: Ancient Carthage and the Science of Politics in Revolutionary America.” William and Mary Quarterly 67.1: 3-30.
Notes
[1] Graeber and Wengrow 2021: 1.
[2] Schemeil 2000.
[3] Morris 2004: 736, Ober 2015: 16, 162, etc.
[4] Trigger 2008 [1996]: 217-22.
[5] Opposing perspectives can be found in Quinn 2017 and López-Ruiz 2021.
[6] “Indigenous” is one of Kaufman’s favorite words, appearing 60 times in the text. He never defines it. The passage on p. 37 is worth quoting in whole: “This denial of agency extends to indigenous and descendant communities in Lebanon and Tunisia who are proud of their Phoenician and Punic heritage, a heritage they use to define their own political futures, in some cases after years of war, and a heritage that is again under the threat of certain Euro-American revisionism and disenfranchisement emanating from the academy itself. This trend is especially damaging as national movements of the pre-Islamic indigenous minority descendants of Ancient Near Eastern and North African populations are increasingly falling victim to Islamist settler colonialism, denialism, and jihadist violence, such as the Phoenicianist Maronites of Lebanon, the Zionist Jews of Israel, the Pharaonist Copts of Egypt, and the Zoroastrians of Iran, as well as Kurds, Mandaeans, Chaldeans, Yazidis, Assyrians, and Amazigh… [references omitted]. In other words, through their blunt attempts to decolonize the field, Western classicists have again become the colonizers, now doing the bidding of Islamists.”
[7] Kaufman never actually quotes or discusses this passage in depth. In Kaufman’s citation system, “Aristotle 2.7.5” (p. 18) means Aristotle Politics 2.1272a. Kaufman does not cite Aristotle by the standard Bekker numbers.
[8] Winterer 2010: 5.
[9] Koselleck 2004: 27.
[10] De Vaux 1964.
[11] Kaufman argues for his translation of ˁm in CIS 1.269, 1.270, 1.291, KAI 43, 60, 62, 71, 170
[12] Demetriou 2023: 84-85.
[13] Ma 2024: 18-19.
[14] Duray 2025.
[15] For corrective, see Nakassis 2013: 3.
[16] López-Ruiz 2021: 84.