…they built for you a fleet of senile cypresses,
they took the cedar of Lebanon, raised masts for you;
they carved oars for you out of oak wood from Bashan,
they made a deck for you from ivory and ebony from the Kitian islands!
They made your sails from Egyptian linen, embroidered.
And they adorned your roofs with crimson and scarlet from the Elisha islands.
The inhabitants of Sidon and Arvad were your rowers,
and your wise men, Tyre, were your helmsmen!
(Ezekiel, 27)
The Phoenicians are one of those mysterious, almost lost people about whom we know very little. And when the material evidence is scarce, it is difficult to create an objective picture of a distant life. Today, we mostly know them through the accounts of their neighbors and the peoples who came into contact with them, sometimes even in hostility. Therefore, much of it needs to be taken with a grain of salt because it is said that they were either loved or despised.
The name Phoenicians, which we use today, was given to them by the Greeks. Phoiniki or Φοίνικες means purple and is associated with the production of purple dye. The people were known and respected for several reasons. According to historical sources, they were commonly referred to by the name of the city they came from, which were Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, or Arvad.
Unfortunately, their written history and mythology did not survive. They were lost in the destroyed libraries of Tyre and Carthage during the Macedonian and Roman conquests. Therefore, we have to rely on the testimonies of others and sources such as the Bible, Greek and Roman authors, as well as Egyptian and Assyrian writings.
In earlier periods, the names of Phoenician deities were generic, and the gods did not have specific characteristics. The main male and female deities were called Baal (El) and Baalat, meaning Lord and Lady, respectively. They gained their identities when associated with specific cities or local populations. In Tyre, they were Melkart and Astarte, in Sidon, Eshmun and Astarte. The most significant god in Byblos was Adonis, the son of Baal and Astarte, who transforms into a tree and gives birth to Adonis, a god of extraordinary beauty. It symbolizes death and rebirth.
The Sidonian Eshmun was revered as the god of medicine. His temples were associated with springs and healing waters. The Greeks connected him with Asclepius.
The Tyrian god Melkart (Milk-qart – king of the City) was an example of the ideal Phoenician king, considered the archetypal founder of the city and guardian of colonial interests. He played an important role in the founding of western colonies (Carthage, Cadiz). His divine qualities encompassed both agriculture and maritime affairs, which were the cause and consequence of this people’s travels.
They lived in the area of the eastern Mediterranean, present-day Lebanon and neighboring parts of Syria and Israel. They settled in this area in the 3rd millennium BC, and it is believed that they migrated from the Red Sea. Their roots are presumed to be Semitic, but we know little else about them as we encounter them as a confederation of trading communities rather than a country with territorial boundaries. The golden age of their culture is the period from the 12th to the 3rd century.
BC.
Considering that they lived in a narrow coastal area with limited agricultural possibilities, faced with the population growth, they turned to a new source, which was the sea. The sea became their “new grain field”, not only in an existential sense, but also a field where they would develop all their potentials as shipbuilders, sailors, traders, and colonizers.
By descending to the sea, they founded port harbors on the coast that grew into cities that would become the most powerful cities of that time: Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Byblos. They used their natural wealth, cedar wood, for shipbuilding. They built short and stout, extremely durable merchant ships, and these were the first ships in recorded history with keels, ribs, and raised decks.
Over time, they acquired maritime skills and traveled beyond the borders of their country. The sea became their transportation route, trade route, and the base for the development of certain industries. Shipbuilding, fishing, the production of purple dye flourished. Urns of various colors, glass, fine fabrics, and precise metalwork, especially in gold and silver.
They traded with Egypt and the entire Eastern and Western Mediterranean. They were true artists in trade. Not only did they trade goods but also provided various services. An example of such trade is the agreement between the Jewish King Solomon and the Phoenician King Hiram of Tyre regarding the construction of the Jerusalem temple. King Hiram provided Solomon with construction materials, services, and the knowledge of his people in cutting and transporting wood and preparing the temple structure. In return, the Phoenicians secured through the contract that King Solomon would supply them with necessary agricultural products for the next 20 years: …twenty thousand measures of wheat and twenty thousand measures of pressed olive oil…
Over time, they began building port docks for loading and unloading and storing goods throughout the Mediterranean. These ports gradually became new cities and ultimately colonies of Phoenician traders. The central place of each city was always the port.
a, the commercial and economic heart of the city. They thus developed a whole network of colonies, expanding westward into the Mediterranean. Their restless spirit, entrepreneurship, and insight constantly led them into the unknown.
The first of these cities was probably Citium in Cyprus, founded in the 9th century BC. Later, in the 8th century BC, they established a series of colonial cities, firstly on nearby islands and later on the coasts of North Africa and the western Mediterranean. This was the century of Phoenician international expansion. Cities such as Cadiz and Malaga in Spain, Utica, Lixos, and Cyrene in North Africa, and the most significant of all cities – Carthage, founded in 814 BC – emerged. Carthage became the capital of all western colonies and grew even more powerful than Tyre and Sidon.
Modern reconstruction of Carthage
Hannibal ad Portas
Hannibal, whose name means beloved by Baal, was one of the greatest military strategists in history. He was the son of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca and eventually became the commander of the Carthaginian army. He joined the military at the young age of 26. He lived in the 3rd – 2nd century BC, a time when Carthage, after conquering the territory of Spain, became, as the Greek historian Polybius says, a “very unpleasant and dangerous neighbor” to the Roman Empire.
One of his greatest feats was an almost unimaginably long march through Spain and Gaul and crossing the Alps with 60,000 soldiers and about forty elephants to defeat the Romans. Along the way, he lost almost a third of his soldiers, but his army eagerly awaited the Roman army and in the Battle of Cannae (Apulia), Hannibal’s army destroyed the nearly twice as numerous Roman army. This is considered one of the most devastating defeats of the Roman army.
Although Hannibal approached the unprotected city of Rome, just 6 kilometers away, and literally hours decided who would be the ruler of the then-known world between these two nations, he never entered Rome. The Greek historian Appian writes that divine providence intervened in this or Hannibal hesitated before the greatness and good fortune of Rome.
History continues to follow… He shaped his own destiny and ultimately suffered the defeat of Carthage, which was completely destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC.
However, Hannibal is remembered as a great tactician, strategist, and logician, to the point that Rome itself used his military strategy afterwards. The breadth of his vision, and the vision of that entire nation, demolished all boundaries and obstacles, opening up new paths of human potential.
Since the Mediterranean became their second homeland, they developed increasingly specific skills in shipbuilding and navigation. They began constructing ships suitable for long voyages across open seas. These ships were long and narrow, stable vessels that were much faster and more stable on waves than the previous wide riverboats. As far as is known, they were among the first to use anchors and sails, ship tracks for ropes, and the night sky for orientation at sea. For long voyages, they devised ways to maintain food supplies in leather bags for dry goods and clay amphorae for liquids.
We can only speculate on how much and where they traveled outside the Mediterranean. However, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, Egyptian pharaoh Necho II in the 7th century BC hired a Phoenician fleet with the task of circumnavigating the African continent, which took them a full three years: They set sail from the Red Sea to the Southern Sea; and whenever late autumn came, they would disembark in Libya wherever they happened to be, sow the land where they stayed, and wait for the harvest. After the harvest, they would embark and sail further, and after a voyage that lasted two full years, in the third year they passed through the Pillars of Hercules and returned to Egypt. They also claim, among other things, something I find hard to believe, that during their voyage around Libya the Sun was always on their right side.
Herodotus also states that they traveled along the Atlantic coast of Spain and Morocco, and even reached England. The question remains open as to how far they traveled across the Atlantic, in other words. Oh, have they reached one of the Americas, as suggested by some unverified archaeological findings.
The Conquest of Tyre
In the middle of the 10th century BC, Tyre became the main Phoenician center. The city expanded from the coast to a nearby island fortified by high walls. Friendly relations were established with the Hebrews and Persians. The Phoenicians supplied the Persian fleet used by Darius and Xerxes in their attacks on Greece.
In his campaign against Persia, the city was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BC after a dramatic ten-month siege, during which he built a 1 km long stone causeway. But despite immense efforts and losses, his efforts would have been in vain if he hadn’t dealt a serious blow to the Persians and their navy for the first time in the battle of Issus, which enabled him to finally conquer and destroy Tyre.
The developed trade also required bookkeeping, the signing of trade agreements, and various correspondence, so it was in the field of written language that the Phoenicians made a significant contribution to the world. A glimpse of history. The previous script used was pictorial and not suitable for fast trade activities. Because of this, they devised a simple 22-character alphabet where each character represented a sound, without having characters for vowels.
This method of writing quickly spread beyond the country’s borders and by the 9th century BC, it was adopted in all neighboring countries and Phoenician colonies, just like any other trade commodity. The Greeks later adopted the alphabet and adapted it to their language, as did the Romans later on, forming the Latin script which is used by a large part of humanity today.
The Greeks learned many useful things from these Phoenicians who arrived with Cadmus and settled here… Above all, they learned from them the script which, in my opinion, the Greeks did not know before. At first, they wrote just like the Phoenicians, but later, parallel to the changes in the language, the shape of the letters also changed. Around them, at that time, the Ionians lived in almost all regions and they learned from them. The Phoenicians knew how to write letters, so they used them, slightly modified, and rightfully called them Phoenician letters because the Phoenicians brought them to Greece.
For over a thousand years, the Phoenicians were the strongest maritime people of ancient times, hundreds of their ships sailed throughout the entire Mediterranean. And these ships did not only carry trade goods, but also spread the skills of sailors, shipbuilders, craftsmen, and artists throughout the known world. They were seafarers who mastered the sea routes, conquered the winds and reefs to mark uncharted paths, in a time long before the invention of the compass.
The way of life of this people, their shrewdness, resourcefulness, and desire for new knowledge, marked them as those who brought a new impulse in their time.