I was in Lebanon for x-mas and saw that we had a new 1000 Lebanese Lira note. That’s sort of the basic unit of currency and it is worth around 66 USD cents. Interesting things about money: 1- you can never have enough of it, 2- the paper it’s printed on says a lot of things. Now the weird thing about the new note, though it is visually interesting, is that it forsakes the “usual” symbols of Lebanon (where’s Baalbeck?) and relies quite heavily on the Phoenician alphabet imagery on both sides. Why repeat the visual when we have a lot of other things that can be shown? Now, on every possible occasion, the Lebanese are proud to say that Lebanon is the place “from which the alphabet spread” and this is true. But there is a bigger question at hand here, are we Phoenician?
The questions is a tricky one, because you can’t be both Phoenician and Arab. Something that many forget to mention: According to my history teacher in highschool, our constitution defined Lebanon as a country with an Arab face up until the end of the civil war, but when the consitution was rectified in Al-Taa’ef accord, we suddenly became an Arab country. Many in Lebanon prefer to be Phoenician, while many other do not doubt that they are Arab. If this is not identity crisis on a national level, I don’t know what is.