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The Phoenicians Middle East

Europe

Middle East

Europe
Contents
Middle East
Overview of the Phoenicians
Europe
Language of the Phoenicians
Middle East
Phoenician Art

Phoenician Trade

Decline of the Phoenicians

History Time Maps of the Phoenician Civilization

Overview
Phoenicia was an ancient civilization in Canaan which covered most of the western, coastal part of the
fertile Crescent. Several major Phoenician cities were built on the coastline of the Mediterranean. It was
an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550 BCE to 300 BCE.
They established colonies in Sicily an North Africa (where the great trading city of Carthage became
famous as one of Ancient Rome‘s most formidable foes), and as far west as Spain (the port of Cadiz is
the ancient Phoenician city of Gades).

The Phoenicians were famed in Classical Greece and Rome as ‘traders in purple’, referring to their
monopoly on the precious purple dye of the Mrex snail, used, among other things, for royal clothing, and
for their spread of the alphabet, upon which all major modern alphabets are derived.

Language
The Phoenician alphabet was one of the rst alphabets with a strict and consistent form. It is assumed
that it adopted its simpli ed linear characters from an as-yet unattested early pictorial Semitic alphabet
developed some centuries earlier in the southern Levant. The precursor to the Phoenician alphabet was
likely of Egyptian origin as Middle Bronze Age alphabet from the southern Levant resemble Egyptian
hieroglyphs, or more speci cally an early alphabetic writing system found in central Egypt.

The oldest known representation of the Phoenician alphabet is inscribed on the sarcophagus of the King
of Byblos, dating to the 11th century BCE at the latest. Phoenician inscriptions are found in Lebanon, Syria,
Israel, Cyprus and other locations, as late as the early centuries of the Christian Era. The Phoenicians are
credited with spreading the Phoenician alphabet throughout the Mediterranean world. Phoenician traders
disseminated this writing system along Aegean trade routes, to Crete and Greece. The Greeks adopted the
majority of these letters but changed some of them to vowels which were signi able in their language,
giving rise to the rst true alphabet.

Art
Phoenician art lacks unique characteristics that might distinguish it from its contemporaries. This is due
to its being highly in uenced by foreign artistic cultures: primarily Egypt, Greece and Assyria. Phoenicians
who were taught on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates gained a wide artistic experience and nally
came to create their own art, which was an amalgam of foreign models and perspectives.

Trade
The Phoenicians were among the greatest traders of their time and owed much of their prosperity to
trade. At rst, they traded mainly with the Greeks, in wood, salves, glass and powdered Tyrian purple.
Tyrian Purple was a violet-purple dye used by the Greek elite to color garments. In fact, the
word Phoenician derives from the Ancient Greek word phoinios meaning “purple”. As trading and
colonizing spread over the Mediterranean, Phoenicians and Greeks seemed to have unconsciously split
that sea in two: the Phoenicians sailed along and eventually dominating the southern shore, while the
Greeks were active along the northern shores. The two cultures clashed rarely, mainly in Sicily, which
eventually settled into two spheres of in uence, the Phoenician southwest and the Greek northeast.

In the centuries after 1200 BCE, the Phoenicians were the major naval and trading power of the region.
Phoenician trade was founded on the Tyrian Purple dye, a violet-purple dye derived from the shell of the
Murex sea-snail, once profusely available in coastal waters of the eastern Mediterranean Sea but exploited
to local extinction. The Phoenicians established a second production center for the dye in Mogador, in
present day Morocco. Brilliant textiles were a part of Phoenician wealth, and Phoenician glass was
another export ware. They traded unre ned, prick-eared hunting dogs of Asian or African origin which
locally they had developed into many breeds. To Egypt, where grapevines would not grow, the 8th-century
Phoenicians sold wine, the wine trade with Egypt is vividly documented by the shipwrecks located in 1997
in the open sea 30 miles west of Ascalon. Pottery kilns at Tyre produced the big terracotta jars used for
transporting wine and from Egypt they bought gold.

From elsewhere, they obtained other materials, perhaps the most important being silver from Iberian
peninsula and tin from Britain, the latter of which, when smelted with copper (from Cyprus), created the
durable metal alloy bronze. It is also apparent that there was a highly lucrative Phoenician trade with
Britain for tin.

Decline
Cyrus the Great conquered Phoenicia in 539 BCE. The Persians divided Phoenicia into four vassal
kingdoms. They prospered, furnishing eets for the Persian kings. Phoenician in uence declined after this.
It is likely that much of the Phoenician population migrated to Carthage and other colonies following the
Persian conquest. In 350 or 345 BCE a rebellion in Sidon led by Tennes was crushed by Artaxerxes III.

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