Phoenicia
Less than precise scholarship has led to the confusion of Phoenicians with Canaanites of the lands they occupied. Consequently much that may be read about them may not actually refer to the Phoenician conquerors themselves but rather to the peoples who inhabited the Canaanite coasts which they conquered. The reader is advised to approach this entry with caution.
Ancient Sources
The Phoenicians (a Greek name for them) were known to the Hebrews as Phut, a mercantile, sea-going people, the ancient Mediterranean Sea's best navigators (their talents hired by Egyptians and Persians alike). They are classified as one of the nations in the four directions from Israel Gomer being the north, Persia to the east, Cush to the south, and Put to the west.
Language & Literature
The Phoenicians spoke an Afroasiatic language and inherited an alphabet from the Ugarit Canaanite culture of northern Syria; they disseminated the concept along Aegean trade routes, to coastal Anatolia, Crete and eventually Mycenean Greece. Classical Greeks remembered that the alphabet arrived in Greece with the mythical founder of Thebes, Cadmus.
During the early Iron Age, when powers that had previously dominated the area like Egypt and the Hittites were weakened or destroyed, a number of northern Phoenician cities established themselves as significant maritime powers. The city of Byblos was originally predominant, but this was attacked by successive invaders, and by around 1000 BC Tyre and Sidon had taken its place. The collection of city-kingdoms which constituted Phoenicia came to be characterized by outsiders as Sidonia or Tyria and Phoenicians & Canaanites alike have been called Zidonians or Tyrians as one Phoenician conquest came to prominence after another.
In the following centuries, the Phoenicians formed the major naval and trading power of the region. In Hebrew the word kena'ani ('Canaanite') has the secondary, and apt, meaning of "merchant".
Phoenician trade was founded on the violet-purple dye 'Tyrian purple', derived from the Murex sea-snail's shell, once profusely available in coastal waters but exploited to local extinction. Excavations at Sarepta in Lebanon revealed crushed Murex shells and pottery containers stained with the dye that was being produced at the site. Brilliant textiles were part of Phoenician wealth.
Phoenician glass was another export ware. Phoenicians seem to have first discovered the technique of producing transparent glass. From their own mountainous hinterland came the famous wood of the cedars of Lebanon.
From elsewhere they got many other materials, perhaps the most important being tin from Spain and Cornwall in Britain, which together with copper (from Cyprus) was used to make bronze. Trade routes from Asia converged on the Phoenician coast as well, causing the Phoenicians to also govern trade between Mesopotamia on the one side and Egypt and Arabia on the other.
The Phoenicians established commercial outposts throughout the Mediterranean, the most notable being Carthage in North Africa, with others in Cyprus, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Spain (the name Spain came from a Phoenician word, which means 'rabbit coast'), and elsewhere. The Lebanese, Maltese and some Somalians still consider themselves descendants of Phoenicians, along with certain other island folk in the Mediterranian. Their ships ventured out into the Atlantic ocean as far as Britain, where the tin mines in modern Cornwall provided them with important material. They also sailed south along the coast of Africa. A Phoenician expedition led by Hanno the Navigator explored and colonized the Atlantic coast of Africa as far as the Gulf of Guinea.
The Phoenicians exerted considerable influence on the other groups around the Mediterranean, notably the Greeks, who later became their main commercial rivals. They appear in Greek mythology. Traditionally the city of Thebes was founded by a Phoenician prince named Cadmus when he set out to look for his sister Europa, who had been kidnapped by Zeus.
With the rise of Assyria, the Phoenician cities one by one lost their independence, and afterwards were dominated by Babylonia and then by Persia. They remained very important, however, and provided these powers with their main source of naval strength. The stacked warships like triremes and quinqueremes were probably Phoenician inventions, though eagerly adopted by the Greeks. Phoenicia lost its influential role after the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great, who besieged and destroyed the dominant city of Tyre in order to cripple the enemy navy. However, by that time the western Phoenician colony Carthage had not just gained its independence, but had become a major power in the Western Mediterranean in its own right, until it was conquered by the Romans.
The Phoenician alphabet, which was developed around 1500 BCE, was very important because it was the first true alphabet consisting of single letters. From this alphabet the Greek alphabet, which forms the basis of all European alphabets, has been derived. The alphabets of the Middle East and India also derive, indirectly, from the Phoenician alphabet. Ironically, the Phoenicians themselves are largely silent on their own history, because Phoenician writing has largely perished, since their characteristic writing material was papyrus from Egypt, which has distintegrated. What we know of them comes from their competitors, Greeks and Hebrews.
In the Bible, king Hiram I of Tyre is mentioned as co-operating with Solomon in mounting an expedition on the Red Sea and on building the temple. The temple of Solomon was built according to Phoenician design, and its description is considered the best description we have of what a Phoenician temple looked like. Phoenicians from Syria were also called Syrophenicians.
One modern origin theory asserts that the Phoenicians were Afro-Asiatic Sea Peoples who in ancient times conquered many of Canaan's (Syria-Palestine's) coastal cities (roughly the area that is now Lebanon and northern Israel). Egyptologists have established that the name comes from their Puntianian origin. The Greek term Tyrian purple derives from the dye which they were especially famous for and their port town Tyre which may have been named after their ancestral island of Tyros/Dilmun (Bahrain). They are 'not' to be confused with the Biblical Canaanites which actually applies to the pre-Israelite Ugaritic inhabitants of Palestine.
Phoenicia & Canaan in Archaeology
In archeological terms Phoenecian refers to a period of cultural dominance along the coasts of the Levant. After a period of Egyptian domination in the area, the high point of Phoenician power is usually placed ca 1200 - 800 BCE (orthodox chronology). However, the first appearance in archaeology of cultural elements clearly identifiable with that period is sometimes dated as early as the third millennium BCE. Thus archaeology seems to show that Phoenician culture developed out of Late Bronze Age Canaanite culture without a severe break. Even the pantheon of gods apparently adopted by the Phoenicians seem to have originally been Ugaritiic deities. Accusing such finds as driven by foreign agendas, nations claiming descent from Phoenicians are consistent in their own legends describing origins from the coasts of the Arabian sea. The Empire
Phoenicians established independent city-states like Sidon and Tyre, as well as Tripolis and Byblos and Berytus along the coast of what is now Lebanon and northern Israel. This league of ports was then ideally suited for trade between the Levant area rich in natural resources and the rest of the ancient world. The Lebanese, Maltese and some Somalians still consider themselves descendants of Phoenicians along with certain other island folk in the Mediterranian. Power seems to have been stabilized because it derived from three power-bases: the king, the temple and its priests, and councils of elders. Phoenician traders
Trade with Egypt was already established in the Old Kingdom. Cedar wood from Lebanon was exported to the timber-poor Nile Valley in exchange for the gold that came up the Nile from the south. Mysterious origins
The tradition that the Phoenicians were not indigenous to the area where they flourished, had an early start, with Herodotus and the geographer Strabo. Pliny mistook Phoenician colonies in the Red Sea for the cultural homeland. Where they came from and just when they arrived and under what circumstances have long been argued among archaeologists. With the rise of ethnic nationalism in the 19th century and the destructive clashes of ethnicities in the Phoenician homeland during the 20th century, these theories of foreign or autochthonous ethnic origins of Phoenicians have tended to be misapplied to further modern agendas and sometimes have taken on rabid urgency.Phoenician cities
Important Phoenician colonies
From the 10th century BCE, their expansive culture established colonies throughout the Mediterranean. Phoenician deities like Baal and Astarte were being worshipped in Cyprus Sardinia, Malta, Sicily, and most notably at Carthage in modern Tunisia.Sources
External links
Reference
The History of Phoenicia, first published in 1889 by George Rawlinson is available under Project Gutenberg at: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=2331
Please note that Rawlinson's text was written in the nineteenth century, and needs updating for modern improvements in historical understanding.
