The Phoenicians were the Iron Age successors of the Bronze Age Canaanites, such as the Ugaritians examined in Chapter 9, continuing earlier cultural traditions without a break. Indeed, they called themselves Canaanites and their land Canaan. Thus, our modern division between Bronze Age Canaanities and Iron Age Phoenicians, separated at 1200 BC, is artificial.
Our term “Phoenicia” comes from the Greek “phoinix,” whose meaning is uncertain. One common explanation derives it from the word for a dark red color, connected with the luxurious purple dye, a Phoenician specialty. A related term, “Punic,” from the Latin words for Phoenician (poenus, punicus, and poenicus), is used to denote Phoenicians of the central and west Mediterranean from the sixth to the second centuries BC, the period when Carthage was the dominant Phoenician city of the region.
The Phoenicians flourished in a small geographical area, the narrow coastal strip of the central Levant, ca. 200km in length, today the modern Lebanese coast with extensions north into Syria and south into Israel. This territory was considerably smaller than that of Bronze Age Canaan. Agriculture was limited by this geography; prosperity came instead from trade. Valuable local resources included cedar from the mountains of Lebanon, a wood internationally prized for shipbuilding and architecture, and the murex, a shellfish from which costly purple dye was made. In addition, the Phoenicians became renowned for making luxury goods. Masters at seafaring, they set out across the Mediterranean to procure the necessary raw materials, notably metals. This search took them north to Cilicia and west to Cyprus, North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain, and even to the Atlantic coasts of Morocco and Iberia. Independent in the first centuries of the Iron Age, the Phoenicians were conquered by the Assyrians in the eighth century BC, and later, in the sixth century BC, first by the Babylonians and then by the Achaemenid Persians. But their maritime and commercial skills were important to their conquerors. Despite ongoing conflicts with their overlords, the Phoenicians remained autonomous, serving as an important cultural bridge between inland Asia and the Mediterranean world of Greeks, Egyptians, Etruscans, and the early Romans. Although their own written records have largely disappeared, other cultures have borne witness to their achievements. The Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet in the eighth century BC, and the Hebrew Bible attests to the skill of Phoenician craftsmen in the great building projects of Solomon, king of Israel (see above, Chapter 10).
The Phoenicians, never politically unified, were organized in independent city-states, ruled by kings. Their cities were located on promontories with a bay, or on small offshore islands — situations favorable for defense and for shipping. The two main island cities were Tyre and Arwad (also known by its Greek name, Arados) (Figure 11.1). Major cities situated on mainland promontories were Sidon, Byblos, and Beirut. Despite the historically attested significance of these cities, the physical characteristics of Phoenician urbanism are elusive. Because of continuing habitation of these sites through Hellenistic and Roman antiquity, then from medieval into modern times, their appearance from the twelfth to the fourth centuries BC is poorly known. Our understanding of Phoenician cities must be assembled from features discovered at a variety of sites spread throughout the Mediterranean, supplemented by information from ancient documents.
Figure II. I Phoenician and related cities in the eastern Mediterranean
World History
