Melita in Milwaukee: the Milwaukee Public Museum’s Leopardi Collection

Abstract

ABSTRACT MELITA IN MILWAUKEE: THE MILWAUKEE PUBLIC MUSEUM’S LEOPARDI COLLECTION by Stephan Noureddine Hassam The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2017 Under the Supervision of Professor Bettina Arnold The Phoenician/Punic occupation of Malta is an important period in the nation’s history. The Phoenicians first settled the Maltese islands sometime in the early to late seventh century B.C., and their material culture left a lasting influence on the island for nearly a millennium. Beginning in the early 1600s, Phoenician material culture began to be recognized as such upon discovery. Following wider trends in the Enlightenment era in Europe, Maltese nobility and clergy began collecting antiquities. Much of this material culture is now known through museum and private collections that have recently been published. Despite a very early implementation of cultural heritage laws that forbid removing antiquities from the nation, a private collection of this material with links to a noble family and at least one sister collection in Malta made its way to the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM). This thesis presents a preliminary analysis of a collection of predominantly Phoenicio-Punic and Punico-Roman materials that was exported to the Milwaukee Public Museum in the late 1960s. The research is split into two phases, beginning with biographical research on the collection’s donors to provide provenance for the museum’s documentation. The second phase updates the outmoded terminology since the collection first arrived at the museum and provides a preliminary attribution of context for the material.