'''Phoenicia''' was an ancient
civilization in the north of ancient
Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal plain of what is now
Lebanon and
Syria. Phoenician civilization was an enterprising
maritime trading culture that spread right across the Mediterranean during the first millennium BC. Though ancient boundaries of such city-centered cultures fluctuated, the city of
Sarepta, between
Sidon and
Tyre the most thoroughly excavated city of the Phoenician homeland seems to have been the southernmost. Although the people of the region called themselves the
Canaani, the name
Phoenicia became common thanks to the Greeks who called them the
Phoiniki -
Φοινίκη (''Phoiníkē''); the Greek word for Phoenician was synonymous with the colour purple/red or crimson,
φοινίξ (''phoinix''), through its close association with the famous dye
Tyrian purple (cf also
Phoenix). The dye was used in ancient textile trade, and highly desired. The Phoenicians became known as the
Purple People.
The Phoenicians spoke the
Phoenician language, later called
Punic since the Roman word for purple was
Puniceus. In addition to their many inscriptions, the Phoenicians, contrary to some reports, wrote many books that have not survived.
Evangelical Preparation by
Eusebius of Caesarea quotes extensively from
Philo of Byblos and
Sanchuniathon. Furthermore, the Phoenician Punic colonies of
North Africa continued to be a source of knowledge about the Phoenicians. Saint Augustine (who spoke Punic, and calls it "our language") refers to their books as containing much wisdom.
Origins
Herodotuss account refers to a faint memory from 1000 years earlier, and so may be subject to question ('History,'' I:1):
:"According to the
Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began to quarrel. This people, who had formerly reached the shores of the
Erythraean Sea, having migrated to the Mediterranean from an unknown origin and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the wares of Egypt and Assyria..."
But this is merely a legendary introduction to Herodotus' brief retelling of some mythic Hellene-Phoenician interactions: he follows directly with succinct accounts of the abduction of
Io from Pylos, and the retaliatory abduction of
Europa by the Cretans. "The Cretans say that it was not they who did this act, but, rather, Zeus, enamored of the fair Europa, who disguised himself as a bull, gained the maiden's affections, and thence carried her off to Crete, where she bore three sons by Zeus: Sarpedon, Rhadamanthys, and Minos, later king of all Crete." Few modern archaeologists would confuse this myth with history.
In terms of archaeology, language, and religion, there is little to set the Phoenicians apart as markedly different from other local cultures of
Canaan. However, they are unique in their remarkable seafaring achievements. Indeed, in the
Amarna tablets of the
14th century BC they call themselves
Kinahhi or
Kinahni (Canaanites); and even much later in the
6th century BC,
Hecataeus writes that Phoenicia was formerly called
χνα, a name Philo of Byblos later adopted into his mythology as his eponym for the Phoenicians: "Khna who was afterwards called Phoinix".
To many archaeologists therefore, the Phoenicians are simply indistinguishable from the descendants of coastal-dwelling Canaanites, who over the centuries developed a particular seagoing culture and skills. But others believe equally firmly, like Herodotus, that the Phoenician culture must have been inspired from an external source. All manner of suggestions have been made: that the Phoenicians were sea-traders from the
Land of Punt who co-opted the Canaanite population; or that they were connected with the Minoans; or the
Sea Peoples or the Philistines further south; or on the other side of the fence, that they represent the activities of supposed coastal maritime
Israelite tribes like
Dan.
While the Semitic language of the Phoenicians, and some evidence of invasion at the site of Byblos, suggest origins in the wave of Semitic migration that hit the
Fertile Crescent between 2300 and 2100 BC, many scholars, including Sabatino Moscati believe that the Phoenicians evolved from a prior non-Semitic people of the area, suggesting a mixture between the two populations. Historian Gerhard Herm further asserts that, because the Phoenicians' legendary sailing abilities are not well attested before the invasions of the
Sea Peoples around 1200 BC, that these Sea Peoples would have merged with the local population to produce the Phoenicians, who seemingly gained these abilities rather suddenly at that time. This idea is backed up by archaeological evidence that the
Philistines, often thought of as related to the Sea Peoples, were culturally linked to
Mycenaean Greeks, who were also known to be great sailors even in this period.
And so the debate has persisted. Professional archaeologists have now been at work on the origins of the Phoenicians for generations, basing their analysis in the mainstream of excavated sites, the remains of material culture, contemporary texts set into contemporary contexts, and the even more slippery slopes of
linguistics. Modern cultural agendas, both personal and national, have been brought to bear. But ultimately, the origins of the Phoenicians are still unknown: where they came from and just when (or if) they arrived, and under what circumstances, are all still energetically disputed.
Some Lebanese, Syrians, Maltese, Tunisians, Algerians and a small percentage of Somalis, along with certain other island folk in the Mediterranean, still consider themselves descendants of Phoenicians.
The cultural and economic "empire"
Fernand Braudel remarked (in
The Perspective of the World) that Phoenicia was an early example of a "world-economy" surrounded by empires. The high point of Phoenician culture and seapower is usually placed ca 1200 – 800 BC.
Many of the most important Phoenician settlements had been established long before this:
Byblos,
Tyre,
Sidon, Simyra, Aradus and
Berytus all appear in the Amarna tablets; and indeed, the first appearance in archaeology of cultural elements clearly identifiable with the Phoenician zenith is sometimes dated as early as the third millennium BC.
This league of independent
city-state ports, with others on the islands and along other coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, was ideally suited for trade between the
Levant area, rich in natural resources, and the rest of the ancient world. Suddenly, during the early
Iron Age, in around 1200 BC, an unknown event occurred, historically associated with the appearance of the
Sea Peoples. The powers that had previously dominated the area, notably the
Egyptians and the
Hittites, became weakened or destroyed; and in the resulting power vacuum a number of Phoenician cities established themselves as significant maritime powers.
Authority seems to have stabilized because it derived from three power-bases: the king; the temple and its priests; and councils of elders. Byblos soon became the predominant centre from where they proceeded to dominate the Mediterranean and Erythraean (Red) Sea routes. However, Byblos was attacked by successive invaders, and by around 1000 BC Tyre and Sidon had taken its place. The collection of city-kingdoms constituting Phoenicia came to be characterized by outsiders and the Phoenicians themselves as
Sidonia or
Tyria, and Phoenicians and Canaanites alike came to be called
Zidonians or
Tyrians, as one Phoenician conquest came to prominence after another.
Phoenician Merchantry
In the centuries following 1200 BC, the Phoenicians formed the major naval and trading power of the region. Perhaps it was through these merchants that the Hebrew word
kena'ani ('Canaanite') came to have the secondary, and apt, meaning of "merchant". The Greek term "Tyrian purple" describes the dye they were especially famous for, and their port town Tyre. Phoenician trade was founded on this violet-purple dye derived from the
Murex sea-snail's shell, once profusely available in coastal waters but exploited to local extinction.
James B. Pritchard's 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 a part of Phoenician wealth. Phoenician
glass was another export ware. Phoenicians seem to have first discovered the technique of producing transparent glass. Phoenicians also shipped tall
Lebanon cedars to Egypt, that consumed more wood than it could produce. Indeed, the Amarna tablets suggest that in this manner the Phoenicians paid tribute to Egypt in the 14th century.
From elsewhere they got many other materials, perhaps the most important being
tin from
Spain and from
Cornwall in
Britain, that together with
copper (from
Cyprus) was used to make
bronze. Trade routes from
Asia converged on the Phoenician coast as well, enabling the Phoenicians to 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, and elsewhere. (The name
Spain comes from the Phoenician word
Sapan, meaning
what is hidden - reflecting their penchant to guard the locations of their mines and sources of wealth jealously as trade secrets.) Their ships ventured into the Atlantic ocean as far as Britain, where the tin mines in what is now Cornwall provided them with important material. They also sailed south along the coast of
Africa. A Carthaginian expedition led by
Hanno the Navigator explored and colonized the Atlantic coast of Africa as far as the
Gulf of Guinea; and according to Herodotus, a Phoenician expedition sent out by pharaoh
Necho II of Egypt even
circumnavigated Africa.
The Phoenicians were not an agricultural people, because most of the land was not arable; therefore, they focused on commerce and trading instead. They did, however, raise
sheep and sell them and their wool.
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.
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 is considered to be built according to Phoenician design, and its description is considered the best description of what a Phoenician temple looked like. Phoenicians from Syria were also called
Syrophenicians.
The
Phoenician alphabet was developed around
1200 BC from an earlier Semitic prototype that also gave rise to the
Ugaritic alphabet. It was used mainly for commercial notes. The
Greek alphabet, that forms the basis of all European
alphabets, was derived from the Phoenician. The alphabets of the
Middle East and
India are also thought to derive, indirectly, from the Phoenician alphabet. Ironically, the Phoenicians themselves are largely silent on their own history. Other than inscriptions on stone, Phoenician writing has largely perished. They are described by
Sallust and
Augustine as possessing an extensive literature, but of this only a single work survives, in Latin translation:
Mago's
Agriculture. What we know of them comes mainly from their neighbors, the Greeks and Hebrews.
With the rise of
Assyria, the Phoenician cities one by one lost their independence, and were afterwards dominated by
Babylonia and then
Persia. They remained very important, however, and provided these powers with their main source of naval strength. The stacked warships, such as
triremes and
quinqueremes, were probably Phoenician inventions, though eagerly adopted by the Greeks.
Persian and Hellenistic Phoenicia
Information on Phoenician cities and their hinterlands under the Achaemenid Persians is sparse. The famous event is the revolt of Sidon against Achaemenid rule in
345 BC and its destruction, dramatically (perhaps
too dramatically) described by
Diodorus Siculus. The arrival of
Alexander the Great in
333 –
332 BC is the main turning point, for Hellenistic Phoenicia lost its influential mercantile role, and the distinctive culture of its cities was Hellenized under Alexander and his Macedonian successors. The responses of the individual Phoenician cities to Alexander's conquest of Persia varied: the ruler of Aradus submitted; the king of Sidon was overthrown (perhaps by internal plotters who valued the city more than their king). Tyre resisted with the most energy. It was captured after a prolonged siege, one of the most famous sieges in Antiquity, and Alexander was exceptionally harsh. He executed 2000 of the leading citizens, but maintained the king in power. A popular king who owed everything to Alexander, made for a more secure city than a deeply-rooted local oligarchy. If Tyre was meant to set an example, it was effective: the Phoenician resistance was utterly broken, and no Phoenician city thereafter seems to have resisted occupation. In the following decades, shifting frontiers between Ptolemaic armies, and Antigonid or Seleucid forces, required some flexible diplomacy and alacrity in accepting a new alliance. This is the period when the cult of
Tyche, goddess of Fortune, reached a prominence it had never enjoyed before.
In
287 –
225 BC, after decades of meaningless violence and small empty victories that simply ravaged the countryside, the Ptolemies regained some stabilized control of the cities (except for Aradus), and the last of the old Phoenician city-kings disappeared. In their new forms, the cities were scarcely different from the Greek cities interspersed along the coastal plain - all nominal republics with a very limited suffrage, and autonomy that was formal and local, while they were ruled from a distance by a great king at Alexandria. The center of Phoenician power had shifted westward to the Tyrian colony of
Carthage, that had not merely gained its independence, but had become a major power in the Western Mediterranean in its own right. At the beginning of the
2nd century BC, the Seleucid monarchy had finally reasserted its primacy on the former Phoenician coast, but the last Seleucid kings' local power was increasingly a fiction, as the cities, now thoroughly Hellenistic, regained local independence.
Important Phoenician Cities & Colonies
From the
10th century BC, their expansive culture established cities and colonies throughout the Mediterranean. Canaanite deities like
Baal and Astarte were being worshipped from Cyprus to Sardinia, Malta, Sicily, and most notably at Carthage in modern Tunisia.
In the Phoenician homeland:
Phoenician colonies (this list is very incomplete):
Language & Literature
See main articles: Phoenician language, Phoenician alphabet, Alphabet.
Though the Phoenicians are credited with developing the
Phoenician alphabet, their alphabet is actually what is termed an
abjad (different from an alphabet, in that it contains no vowels). The Phoenician
abjad, first making its appearance in the
11th century BC, evolved out of the proto-Canaanite
abjad, that originated around the
17th century BC. A cuneiform
abjad originated to the north in
Ugarit, a Canaanite city of northern Syria, in the
14th century BC. Phoenician traders 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.
Their language,
Phoenician, was a Northwest
Semitic language of the
Canaanite subgroup. Its later descendant in
North Africa is termed
Punic.
The
Amarna letters, dated to the 14th century BC, although written in
Akkadian, the language of diplomacy at the time, contain solecisms that are not
mistakes, but actually early Canaanite words and phrases. Because of their Lebanese provenance, some identify these as Phoenician; however, most scholars reserve that term for a later era.
The earliest known inscriptions in Phoenician come from Byblos and date back to ca. 1000 BC. Phoenician inscriptions are found in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Cyprus and other locations, as late as the early centuries of the Christian Era. Punic, a language that developed from Phoenician in Phoenician colonies around the western Mediterranean beginning in the
9th century BC, slowly supplanted Phoenician, similar to the way Italian supplanted Latin. Punic Phoenician was still spoken in the 5th century CE: St. Augustine, for example, grew up in
North Africa and was familiar with the language.
External link
Phoenicians in the Bible
The Bible refers to the Phoenicians as Canaanites. In fact, the New Testament mentions the same woman from the Sidon and Tyre area as being a Syro-Phoenician and/or Canaanite woman. Writers of the Old Testament did not like it when a princess from Phoenicia became Queen
Jezebel of Israel and introduced the
worship of her gods. Queen Jezebel was the great-aunt of
Dido-Elissar, who founded Carthage, out of which came Hannibal.
See also
External links
References
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