The following is an Encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sometime around 3,200 years ago, a new civilization became ascendant on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. This group wasn't like the empires that surrounded them. They weren't focused so much on land acquisition and conquest, so much as they were focused on commerce and trade. For centuries, they ruled over commerce and trade in the Mediterranean, until they finally succumbed to their more powerful neighbors.
Learn more about the Phoenician civilization and what set them apart from other ancient civilizations on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The origins of the Phoenicians is somewhat shrouded in mystery. The Phoenicians lived in the area which is known as Canaan, which is today the area along the Mediterranean coast consisting of northern Israel, Lebanon, and the coast of Syria.
If you're familiar with the term Canaan, it probably comes from the Bible and the people known as the Canaanites. There is a great deal of debate as to if the Phoenicians were separate from or were the same as the Canaanites. The term Phoenicia is actually a Greek term that was used to describe the people from the area. It could be that the Phoenicians are the equivalent to Canaanites, or it could be that the Phoenicians are a subset of a larger group of people who had the label of Canaanites.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus claimed that they came from the Arabian Peninsula, but other modern scholars say that they didn't migrate from anywhere. What we do know is that they were definitely a Semitic people from the Levant, and they lived close to the sea.
The first we hear about the Phoenicians comes from the Egyptians in the 15th century BC. The Phoenicians traded with the Egyptians, and Phoenician goods were highly prized. The Phoenicians appear to have been the route that many goods took from Mesopotamia to Egypt. Likewise, Phoenician cities were an important source of bronze. If you remember back to my episode on the three-age system, this time period was smack dab in the middle of the Bronze Age.
One of the notable things about the Phoenicians, and this was even evident at this time, was that they weren't a top-down empire like many of the civilizations around them. The Phoenicians organized themselves more like the Greeks into smaller city-states that competed with each other.
The major Phoenician city-states in the eastern Mediterranean were Bilbos, Tyre, Sidon, Baalbek, and Beirut. While the Phoenicians were on the map at this point in time, what really brought the Phoenicians to prominence was an event known as the Bronze Age Collapse. The Bronze Age Collapse is one of the most important events in the ancient world, and it's very high on my list of topics to do a future episode on. Sometime between the years 1200 to 1150 BC, with the date usually given as 1177 BC,
all of the great civilizations around the Mediterranean collapsed. They were invaded by a group known only to history as the Sea People. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Mycenas, Hittites, and Assyrians either totally disappeared from history or were significantly weakened. Trade, literacy, and standards of living around the region collapsed.
What's relevant for the purposes of this story is that in the aftermath of the Bronze Age collapse, the Phoenicians appeared as a fully mature civilization. The Phoenicians filled the gap which was left after the Bronze Age collapse in terms of trade and commerce.
and some historians have dubbed this the Phoenician Renaissance. The Phoenicians, in a very short period of time, developed a mastery of the sea and of sailing. This allowed the Phoenicians to become the overwhelming naval and trade power of the Mediterranean. However, if you look at a map of the areas that the Phoenicians controlled, it actually isn't very big. If you notice, at no point did I ever call the Phoenicians an empire, because they weren't. There was no Phoenician king or emperor.
The Phoenicians were traders. If the ancient Mediterranean was the world of Star Trek, the Phoenicians would have been the Ferengi and not the Klingons. Instead of conquering territory, they established colonies. Trading colonies.
The Phoenicians were, in this sense, very similar to the Greeks. In fact, they seemed to have come to an understanding with the Greeks and divided up the Mediterranean. The Greeks settled and set up colonies along the northern coast, and the Phoenicians set up colonies along the southern coast.
The Phoenician city-states became centers not for just trade, but also manufacturing. As I mentioned before, they made bronze, which required the importation of tin, most of which came from what is today Afghanistan. They also were exquisite glass makers, producing most of the glass in the region, everything from glass beads to cups and statues. They also had notable metal workers and ivory carvers.
They might have been the first people to develop large-scale production of goods and could have been the first to adopt a widespread division of labor for manufacturing. Their location in Lebanon gave them access to one of the most important commodities in the region, the Lebanese cedar.
The cedar trees made it possible for the Phoenicians to create some of the most advanced ships of the era. The Phoenicians invented the keel as well as the bimarine, which is a ship with two rows of oars on each side. The Phoenicians also developed the amphora.
As I mentioned in a previous episode, they were the clay containers that were used for shipping liquids such as wine and olive oil. The Phoenicians may have been one of the first people to cultivate grapes, and if they weren't the first... they almost certainly were the first to develop large-scale production of wine. Likewise, they were some of the finest makers of textiles. However, the one thing that they were best known for, and they had a literal monopoly on, was purple dye.
There's very little purple in nature. It's a color that couldn't be created by normal means using common dyes. The Phoenicians had developed a purple dye from a sea snail found along the coast of Lebanon. Tyre was the center of purple dye production. and the dye became known as Tyrian purple. Some think that the word Phoenician may actually mean purple. The dye was difficult and expensive to create, and it was literally worth its weight in silver.
The Phoenician city-states eventually spread out to seek other markets and access to goods. They created a network of small colonies all throughout the southern Mediterranean. The first outposts they established were on the island of Cyprus. However, they eventually expanded westward, establishing colonies all the way to what is today Morocco. There were colonies on the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Mallorca.
They also established mainland colonies along the north coast of Africa in what is today Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, and as well as in the southern coasts of Spain, Portugal, and France. The Greeks set up their system of colonies around the Aegean, Black Sea, Adriatic, and southern Italy. There was some competition between the settlements in Sicily, but for the most part, the competition between the Phoenicians and the Greeks wasn't violent.
Most of the Phoenician colonies were actually rather small, with few having populations over a thousand people. Over time, the dominant Phoenician city-state became Tyre, which was actually an island right off the coast of Lebanon. Many of the colonies established around the Mediterranean were established by Tyre. For the most part, the colonies had autonomy, but they were required to send a tribute back to Tyre every year. While most of the colonies were small,
there was one that eventually grew into a power in its own right, Carthage. Carthage was located in modern-day Tunisia and eventually took control over most of the Phoenician colonies in the western Mediterranean. Carthage is going to be worth its own episode. but I will note that the three wars Carthage had with Rome were known as the Punic Wars. The word Punic refers to Carthaginians, but it comes from the Latin word Punicus, which means Phoenician.
Even after Carthage surpassed Tyre, they still sent a token tribute to the city every year. In addition to trade, there were other notable achievements of the Phoenicians as well. A big one was their alphabet. About 3,000 years ago, they developed their own system of writing for their language, and it consisted of 22 letters without any vowels. The Phoenician system was later adopted by the Greeks to form the Greek alphabet, which in turn was used by the Romans to create their alphabet.
The Latin alphabet, which much of the world uses today, can directly trace its origin to the Phoenicians. One of the most peculiar religious practices of the Phoenicians was documented by several of their neighboring cultures, and it's actually mentioned in the Bible. Child sacrifice. Not only did other people make note of it because they found it barbaric, but there's archaeological evidence to support that it actually happened.
It might only have been practiced by the elites, and it isn't clear if it involved killing living infants or if it was just offering children who died in infancy. The other thing that requires a mention is their seafaring abilities. The Phoenicians were unquestionably the best maritime ancient civilization in the West, and we know that they had colonies that were past the Strait of Gibraltar. There's a great deal of speculation as to how far they might have gotten.
It's pretty reasonable that some Phoenicians may have gotten as far as the Canary Islands and Great Britain. These islands can be seen from the shores of Africa and Europe respectively, and sailing there was well within the capabilities of the Phoenicians. As far as we know, they didn't establish any colonies, but they easily could have gone there. There is speculation as to if they may have made it as far as the Azores. This would have taken them a third of the way across the Atlantic Ocean.
into deep oceanic waters which was generally avoided by Mediterranean ships. This theory is generally not accepted, although there are a few archaeologists who believe it. There are also some on the fringes who think that the Phoenicians may have made it as far as the Americas. This is really just speculation because there is zero evidence to support this theory. Although, if anyone from that part of the world at that time could have done it, it would have been the Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians had a run of about 400 years where they were the dominant trading culture in the Mediterranean. However, their city-state system didn't provide much defense to larger empires. In 858 BC, the Phoenician city-states fell under the control of the Assyrian Empire.
and then over the next several centuries, the Babylonians and then the Persians. Tyre was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BC after a seven-month siege where he filled in the channel between the island of Tyre and the coast. To this day, 2,000 years later, Tyre is still not an island. After the conquest of Tyre, many of its citizens fled to Carthage, which itself was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC. The Romans finally conquered the Levant and Phoenicia in 62 BC.
and that was pretty much the end of the Phoenicians as a separate civilization. Almost everything we know about the Phoenicians comes from archaeological discoveries and from what was written about them by other cultures. There's little in the way of first-hand accounts from Phoenicians themselves. While the Phoenician culture disappeared, the Phoenician people did not. Genetic testing shows that people in Lebanon today and parts of Cyprus are the most direct descendants of the Phoenicians.
And many Phoenician genetic markers have also shown up in people in Spain and Portugal. Many of the Phoenician settlements are still occupied today. Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Biblios are still inhabited by humans after almost 3,000 years. In many ways, the Phoenicians were ahead of their time. Their mark on the ancient world didn't come through conquest or military expansion. It came through trade, production, and commerce.
The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters.
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