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Phoenician :: Phoenicia
 

Phoenicia was an ancient civilization in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal plains of what is now Lebanon. 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 Tyre seems to have been the southernmost. Sarepta between Sidon and Tyre, is the most thoroughly excavated city of the Phoenician homeland. Although the people of the region called themselves the Kena'ani, the name Phoenicia became common thanks to the Greeks who called the land Phoiniki - Φοινίκη (Phoiníkē; see also List of traditional Greek place names). This term had been borrowed from Ancient Egyptian Fnkhw "Syrians". The Greek word for Phoenician was synonymous with the colour purple/red or crimson, (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 often traded by means of a galley, which is a man-powered ship.

The Phoenicians, most likely a Semitic people, spoke the Phoenician language. 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 knew at least a smattering of Punic and occasionally uses it to explain cognate words found in Hebrew. The name of his mother, Saint Monica, is said to be of Punic origin as well.

Origins

Herodotus's account (written c. 440 BC) 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 Kenaani or Kinaani (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 Melungeons are also sometimes claimed to be descendants of the 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 trade

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. The Phoenicians also traded cedar for making ships and other things. 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, a civilization 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 BC.

From elsewhere they got many other materials, perhaps the most important being tin and silver from Spain and possibly even Cornwall on Great 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 strategically important ones being Carthage in North Africa, and directly across the narrow straits in Sicily — carefully selected with the design of monopolizing the Mediterranean trade beyond that point and keeping their rivals from passing through. Other colonies were planted in Cyprus, Corsica, Sardinia, the Iberian Peninsula, and elsewhere. They also founded innumerable small outposts a day's sail away from each other all along the North African coast on the route to Spain's mineral wealth. (The name Spain comes from the Phoenician word I-Shaphan, meaning, thanks to an early double misidentification, 'island of hyraxes'.)

The date when many of these cities were founded has been very controversial. Greek sources put the foundation of many cities very early. Gades (Cadiz) in Spain was traditionally founded in 1110 BC, while Utica in Africa was supposedly founded in 1101 BC. However, no archaeological remains have been dated to such a remote era. The traditional dates may reflect the establishment of rudimentary way stations that left little archaeological trace, and only grew into full cities centuries later. (The World of the Phoenicians, Sabatino Moscati, 1965). Alternatively, the early dates may reflect Greek historians' belief that the legends of Troy (mentioning these cities) were historically reliable.

Phoenician ships used to ply the coast of southern Spain and along the coast of present-day Portugal. The fishermen of Nazaré and Aveiro in Portugal are traditionally of Phoenician descent. This can be seen today in the unusual and ancient design of their boats which have soaring pointed bows and are painted with mystical symbols. It is often mentioned that Phoenicians ventured north into the Atlantic ocean as far as Great Britain, where the tin mines in what is now Cornwall provided them with important materials, although no archaeological evidence supports this belief. 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 down the Red Sea by pharaoh Necho II of Egypt (c. 600 BC) even circumnavigated Africa and returned through the Pillars of Hercules in three years.

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 one. The alphabets of the Middle East and India are also thought to derive, directly or indirectly, from the Phoenician alphabet. Ironically, the Phoenicians themselves are mostly silent on their own history, possibly because they wrote on perishable materials, papyrus or skins. Other than the stone inscriptions, Phoenician writing has largely perished. There are a very few writers such as Sanchunathion quoted only in later works, and the Phoenicians were described by Sallust and Augustine as having possessed 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; however the city of Tyre, situated just off the mainland and protected by powerful fleets, proved impossible to take for the Assyrians, and many others after them. The Phoenician cities were later dominated by Babylonia, 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.

Map Of Phoenicia's Trade routes: *

Decline

Cyrus the Great conquered Phoenicia in 538 BC. Phoenicia accepted rule by the Persians, and Phoenician influence declined after this. It is also reasonable to suppose that much of the Phoenician population migrated to Carthage and other colonies following the Persian conquest, as it is roughly then (under King Hanno) that we first hear of Carthage as a powerful maritime entity.

Later, the rise of Hellenistic Greece eventually ousted the remnants of Phoenicia's former dominance over the Eastern Mediterranean trade routes, and Phoenician culture disappeared entirely in the motherland. However, its North African offspring, Carthage, continued to flourish, mining iron and precious metals from Iberia, and using its considerable naval power and mercenary armies to protect its commercial interests until it was finally destroyed by Rome ca. 149 BC at the end of the Punic Wars.

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 (see Siege of Tyre), 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 and 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 including some unimportant ones (this list may be incomplete):

Language and literature

The Phoenicians are credited with developing the Phoenician alphabet. They are known to have created the first syllabic language that used phonics. The Phoenician alphabet arose around 1400 BC from a need to communicate with the diverse languages of their trading partners that encircled the Mediterranean Sea. Their 22-letter alphabet based on sound was widely received, as opposed to the myriad of symbols in cuneiform or hieroglyphics prevalent at the time. The Phoenician alphabet served as the origin of the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Arabic alphabets. Phoenician traders disseminated the concept along Aegean trade routes, to coastal Anatolia (Turkey), the Minoan civilization of Crete, Mycenean Greece, and throughout the Mediterranean. Classical Greeks remembered that the alphabet arrived in Greece with the mythical founder of Thebes, Cadmus.

The Phoenician alphabet has been termed an abjad or a script that contains no vowels. A cuneiform abjad originated to the north in Ugarit, a Canaanite city of northern Syria, in the 14th century BC. Their language, Phoenician, has been considered by some authorities as 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.

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 there, 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.

Phoenicians in the Bible

In the Old Testament there is no reference to the Greek term Phoenicia; instead, the inhabitants of the coastal are identified by their city of origin, most often as Sidonians (Gen. x. 15; Judges iii. 3; x. 6, xviii. 7; I Kings v. 20, xvi. 31). Early relations between Israelites and the Canaanites were cordial: Hiram of Tyre, a Phoenician by modern assessment, furnished architects, workmen and cedar timbers for the temple of his ally Solomon at Jerusalem.

Of course there is another Hiram (also spelled Huran) associated with the building of the temple. "2Ch 2:14 The son of a woman of the daughters of Dan, and his father * a man of Tyre, skilful to work in gold, and in silver, in brass, in iron, in stone, and in timber, in purple, in blue, and in fine linen, and in crimson; also to grave any manner of graving, and to find out every device which shall be put to him..." This is the architect of the Temple, Hiram Abiff of Masonic lore.

Later, reforming prophets railed against the practice of drawing royal wives from among foreigners: Elijah execrated Jezebel, the princess from Tyre who became a consort of King Ahab and introduced the worship of her gods.

Long after Phoenician culture had flourished, or Phoenicia had existed as any political entity, Hellenized natives of the region where Canaanites still lived were referred to as "Syro-Phoenician", as in the Gospel of Mark 7:26: "The woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth..."

The word Bible itself ultimately derives (through Latin and Greek) from Byblos, the Phoenician city. Because of its papyruses, Byblos was also the source of the Greek word for book and, hence, of the name of the Bible.

See also

References

  • Johnston, T. C. 1913 * Did the Phoenicians Discover America? J. Nisbet, London.

  • Sanford Holst, "Phoenicians, Lebanon's Epic Heritage." Cambridge and Boston Press, Los Angeles, 2005.

  • 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 Rawlinson's 19th century text needs updating for modern improvements in historical understanding.

External links

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Phoenicia".

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