Gadir archaic foundation. An historiographic construction of a city: Real or invented?

Abstract

The research on the ancient Phoenician city of Gadir has been historically conditioned by the lack of urban material evidences. This circumstance has led for centuries to the developing of an extremely idealized image of the city based on the uncritical reading of classical literary testimonies and their (re) interpretation by subsequent historiography. However, the situation have changed after the new findings of materials, contexts and stratigraphic sequences of the Archaic period, since they allow us to reconstruct, from a scientific basis rather than from the “imagined”, what it might be the Phoenician city. Nevertheless, the tendency to recreate a city more imaginary than real is still alive in certain sectors unwilling to abandon this secular “invented tradition”, in the sense of the expression coined by Hobsbawn.