Trade routes alone, however, were not enough: particularly in faraway places, the Phoenicians needed warehouses where they could store goods for later sale as well as trading posts where they could conduct business with the local peoples. For this reason, they established a number of overseas colonies in the period from about 900 to about 600 b. c.
To call a place a colony means that it is a territory belonging to another country. When people from the ruling country go to a foreign place in large numbers and begin to bring that place under their control, they are colonizing. For instance, the Egyptians colonized Kush, and the British colonized North America in the 1600s and 1700s a. d. Phoenician colonization was somewhat unusual because, as always, the Phoenicians' main concern was not political or military power, but business. They were not interested in making foreigners speak their language or worship their gods; all they wanted to do was conduct trade.
The most famous of all Phoenician colonies was Carthage (KAHR-thej), located in what is now the nation of Tunisia (too-NEE-zhuh) in North Africa. Established some time after 800 b. c., Carthage possessed a fine harbor that made it a favorite port of call for trading ships. Eventually it would become a great city, so great it challenged the most powerful empire of the ancient world: Rome.
Across the Mediterranean, Phoenician traders founded cities on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia (sar-DEEN-yuh) off the coast of Italy. They also established cities on the European continent, including Marseilles (mar-SAY) in France, as well as the Spanish cities of Barcelona (bar-suh-LOH-nuh), Cadiz (kah-DEEZ), Malaga (muh-LAH-guh), and Algeciras (al-juh-SEER-uhs). Farther away, at the edge of the known world, were
What the Phoenicians called “the tin islands”: Britain, as well as the region of Britanny (BRIT-uh-nee) on the northwest coast of France. The Phoenicians brought in purple cloth and traded it with the locals for tin, essential for making bronze.
Drawing of Vasco da Gama.
Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.
To appreciate the vast distances covered, and the bravery of mariners (MARE-uh-nurz) or sailors who crossed the Mediterranean to parts beyond, it is important to remember how little ancient people knew about the Earth.
As far as most people knew, the entire world consisted of what can now be identified as the Middle East, southern Europe, and northern Africa. Some had guessed that the Earth was spherical (S'FEER-ih-kul)—that is, shaped like a ball—but nobody had any idea what lay on the other side of the planet.
Beyond the farthest edge of Spain, at the rock of Gibraltar (ji-BRAWL-tur), lay an ocean, known today as the Atlantic, which was so wide that many believed it surrounded the entire world. The modern equivalent of Phoenician mariners would be astronauts, who likewise go bravely into unexplored regions.
The greatest of Phoenician voyages took place in about 600 B. C., when the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II (NEE-koh; r. 610—595 B. C.) hired a group of Carthaginians (kar-thuh-GIN-ee-unz) to sail around the coast of Africa. For some time, the Phoenicians had been trading with Africans, but this voyage took them from Carthage all the way around the continent. Hugging the coastline as they went, the Phoenician sailors rounded the southern tip of Africa and came back up the coast along the Indian Ocean. They sailed around the “Horn of Africa” to the east, and up the Red Sea coast of Egypt and Ethiopia. It would be more than 2,000 years before anyone else would make such an extraordinary voyage, when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sailed around the African continent in the a. d. 1400s.
To use an alphabet, by contrast, one only had to remember a small number of symbols—twenty-six in the alphabet used by English-speakers. Thus the alphabet led to a great increase in learning, because ordinary people were able to become literate as well. Eventually almost all the civilizations of the Western world began to use some form of alphabet. Today only the peoples of the East, such as the chinese and Japanese, use pictograms and phonograms.
World History
