The Phoenicians

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Crush ten thousand sea-snails and there remains, at the end, a single gram of dye — a crimson going to violet that no other color in the ancient world could match and that no washing would fade. The Greeks who bought it called the cloth, and then the people who made it, by one word: Phoinikes, the purple folk. The name they gave themselves was different and plainer. In their own inscriptions they are men of Tyre, men of Sidon, men of Byblos, and their land is Canaan — the same Canaan the older records of Egypt and Mesopotamia had known for a thousand years. Phoenician is a label fitted from outside onto a people who never wore a single name, and almost everything that can be said about them has come down through the mouths of others.

They were the Iron Age Canaanites of the narrow coast — the seaboard of what is now Lebanon, with reaches into Syria and northern Israel — and they were, above all, a people of the sea. From a ribbon of land no more than a few days’ sail end to end, hemmed between the water and the cedar mountains, their ships went out to the whole circuit of the Mediterranean and came back with metal. They planted harbors from Cyprus to the Atlantic. And they carried, almost as an afterthought of trade, a row of twenty-two signs that became, in time, nearly every alphabet now in use. The purple named them; the letters outlived them.

A people without a center

To begin with the Phoenicians is to give up the expectation of a nation. There was no Phoenician state, no capital, no king of the Phoenicians. There were cities — Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, with Arwad and Beirut and Sarepta beside them — each on its own promontory or offshore island, each with its own harbor, its own dynasty, its own patron god, and its own quarrel with the next. They competed for the same markets and fought over the same waters; at moments one fell under another’s hegemony, but no Tyrian or Sidonian ever ruled the coast as a whole. What bound them was not a government. It was a language, a script, a set of gods, and a livelihood drawn from the sea.

The language was Northwest Semitic, close to Hebrew and to the older tongue of the Bronze Age city of Ugarit just to the north, and all but a dialect of the Canaanite of the inland Levant. The Phoenicians were not a fresh arrival on that coast; they were its continuation. They are the same coastal Canaanite stock the Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribes had recorded for a millennium, the population that came through the catastrophe at the close of the Bronze Age and inherited what it left behind. Around 1200 BCE the eastern Mediterranean came apart: the Hittite empire dissolved, the Mycenaean palaces burned, the seaborne coalitions the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples broke against the Nile delta, and Ugarit itself was destroyed and never rebuilt. The southern harbors — Byblos, Sidon, Tyre — survived. Into the vacuum left by the fallen empires they sailed, and the people who had been one coastal culture among many became the masters of a sea that had lost its old masters. The Phoenician florescence is the inheritance of a ruined age.

The Greeks fixed the outsider’s name on them. Phoinix meant the purple-red of the dye their cities sold, so that in Greek mouths the purple people and the people of the coast were very nearly the same phrase — though whether the dye named the people or the people the dye is no longer recoverable. The two were fused from the first. It is a fitting accident that the people best known for giving the world a way to write its own words down should themselves be known forever by a word that was not theirs.

The cities and the trade

Byblos was the oldest and the most bound to Egypt — for most of the Bronze Age an Egyptian dependency, the port through which the pharaohs drew the cedar of Lebanon for their temples, barges, and coffins. When Egyptian power receded in the eleventh century, the bond loosened, and the Egyptian tale of Wenamun — a temple official sent north around 1050 BCE to buy cedar and made to wait, haggle, and be lectured by the prince of Byblos — catches the turn exactly: the envoy who once commanded now negotiates, and the Byblian knows it. Sidon and Tyre rose after. Tyre climbed from a satellite of Sidon to the foremost of the cities under its tenth-century king Hiram, whose alliance with David and Solomon of Israel — cedar and craftsmen sent south for the building of the Jerusalem temple, in exchange for grain and oil — the Hebrew scriptures record as the model of a profitable friendship. Tyre’s peculiar strength was its geography: the main city sat on an island a half-mile offshore, walled by the sea, and that island would defy siege after siege for centuries.

Two commodities made the name. The first was the dye itself — Tyrian purple, wrung from the glandular mucus of murex sea-snails, Hexaplex trunculus and Bolinus brandaris, that divers raked from the seabed by the boatload. The yield was almost absurdly small, on the order of ten to twenty thousand crushed snails for a single gram, and the spent shells piled into mounds outside the dye-works that can still be traced at Sidon, Sarepta, and Tyre. The result was a fast, brilliant, fade-resistant crimson that the courts of the Near East, and later Rome, would pay almost any price to wear. Purple became the color of kingship for the same reason it was the color of Phoenicia: a near-monopoly on the only good source, so that a pound of double-dyed Tyrian wool could cost more than its weight in silver.

Hexaplex trunculus, the banded dye-murex from which Tyrian purple was wrung. Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).

The second commodity was timber — the cedar of Lebanon, which grew in the mountains directly above the ports and which the treeless river-civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia could obtain almost nowhere else. Around these two staples clustered the rest: fine linen, Sidonian embroidery, worked metal, carved ivory, wine, and salt fish — and the glass for which the Phoenicians were among the great early makers, blown and cast into vessels and beads that traveled wherever their ships did. But underneath the manufactures lay the deeper trade, the reason the keels ranged so far: metals. Silver, tin, copper, and gold were what the eastern markets craved and the eastern Levant lacked, and the search for them drove Phoenician ships the length of the sea.

The reach of the ships

This is the genius that built the western Mediterranean. From the tenth and ninth centuries BCE, Phoenician — overwhelmingly Tyrian — ships pushed past the familiar eastern waters toward the metal sources of the far west: the silver of southern Spain, the tin routes that ran up the Atlantic coast. To service the long hauls they planted way-stations and then full colonies along the route — Kition on Cyprus, Motya off Sicily, posts on Sardinia and Malta and the North African shore, Gadir (modern Cadiz) beyond the strait the Greeks would call the Pillars of Herakles, and, greatest of all, Carthage on the Tunisian coast, founded by Tyrian settlers in the tradition dated to 814 BCE. They did this a century or more before the Greeks began their own colonizing age, often arriving first at the very harbors the Greeks would later contest.

Phoenician and Punic trade routes and colonies, from the Levant to the Atlantic. Map via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).

The seamanship behind this network was formidable, and one report makes the claim that they took it to its limit. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century, tells in his Histories (4.42) that the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II sent out a Phoenician crew from the Red Sea with orders to sail south and not return until they had come back to Egypt by way of the strait at the western end of the sea. Two or three years later, he says, they did — having rounded the whole of Africa. Herodotus records, and disbelieves, the sailors’ own detail: that as they sailed west around the southern end of the land, they had the sun on their right hand, to the north of them. The detail he could not credit is precisely the one a modern reader recognizes, for below the equator the noon sun does stand to the north; an invented tale would not have stumbled into it. Whether the voyage truly happened cannot be proved from a single ancient line, and it is properly held as a reported claim rather than a settled fact. But the report fits the people: a merchant marine that took the sea for granted as its road, and that no other power of the age could follow.

The colonies were Phoenicia transplanted. Carthage — Punic Qart-ḥadašt, the new city — outgrew its parent, and as Tyre fell under the weight of the eastern land empires, the center of the Phoenician world drifted west until Carthage stood as an independent power that would rule the western basin and contend with Rome for it. Its own pantheon, its own long history, and the bitter wars that ended it belong to its own account. What matters here is the kinship: a daughter of Tyre carrying west the same language, the same gods, the same script, and the same instinct for the water.

The gift of the letters

The deepest thing the Phoenicians left behind weighed nothing and raised no monument. It was the alphabet.

They wrote with a set of twenty-two signs, each standing for a single consonant — a script of the kind linguists call an abjad, with no signs for vowels, which a reader supplied from knowledge of the language. It was small, learnable, and supremely portable, nothing like the hundreds of signs that the cuneiform of Mesopotamia or the hieroglyphs of Egypt demanded of a trained scribe. Its roots lay in the earlier alphabetic experiments of the second-millennium Levant — the Proto-Sinaitic and Canaanite signs that had already broken from the syllabaries — and what the Phoenicians did was stabilize that inheritance into a fixed, ordered, linear sequence of letters and carry it everywhere their ships went. A merchant who needed to keep accounts and seal contracts did not require a scribal caste. He required a fast hand, and the alphabet was a fast hand.

The earliest substantial monument of the script is the inscription on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, a king of Byblos, found in 1923 by the French excavator Pierre Montet in a rock-cut tomb of the Byblian royal necropolis and now in the National Museum of Beirut. Its lid carries a curse against any later ruler who would disturb the coffin — already the developed Phoenician alphabet, nineteen of its twenty-two letters present and formed.

The sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos, whose lid carries one of the earliest substantial Phoenician alphabetic inscriptions; National Museum of Beirut. Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).

Its date is genuinely disputed, and the dispute is not a quibble. The traditional reading places the inscription around 1000 BCE; a school of epigraphers, Benjamin Sass prominent among them, argues for the ninth or even eighth century, in part because securely dated inscriptions from the eleventh century are simply missing — a gap in the record rather than a presence in it. The argument turns on letter-forms, archaeology, and the company the inscription keeps, and it remains open: the published response to Sass’s low chronology shows the question still being worked. What is not in dispute is that by the ninth century the script was fully formed and in wide use, and that the world’s standard of dating early alphabetic writing rests, in part, on how one reads this single Byblian coffin.

From the coast the letters traveled. Sometime in the ninth or eighth century BCE, Greeks in contact with Phoenician traders took the script and adapted it to their own very different language — and in doing so made the one decisive change that separates the Greek alphabet from its parent. Phoenician had signs for several consonants Greek did not use; the Greeks repurposed those idle signs to stand for vowels, so that aleph became alpha, he became epsilon, and the writing of vowels, absent from every Semitic abjad, entered the world. The Greeks remembered the debt openly. They called their letters phoinikeia grammata, the Phoenician letters, and told the legend of Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who sailed west and brought writing to Thebes — a figure of Greek myth, not of Phoenician record, but a story that preserves, in the shape of a legend, an accurate memory of where the signs came from.

From the Greek adaptation descend the Latin letters of this page and the Cyrillic of the Slavic world. From the parent Phoenician stock, by another line, descend the Aramaic script and through it Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, and ultimately many of the writing systems of Asia. Few inventions have propagated so widely from so small a seed. The order in which a child still recites the letters — a, b, c against aleph, bet, gimel — is the order the dye-merchants set.

Gods carried as cargo

The Phoenicians took their gods to sea with their goods, and the gods traveled as well as the purple did. Each city had its own divine patron, its other self and the guarantor of its public oaths: Tyre belonged to Melqart, whose name means king of the city and whom the Greeks read as their Herakles; Sidon to the healer Eshmun; Byblos to its Lady, the Baalat Gubal. Behind these civic patrons stood the older Canaanite high god El, the gray-bearded father at the source of the rivers, and the storm-lord Baal — baʿal, lord, less a name than a title that attached to many local gods — and the great goddess Astarte, the morning and evening star, the lady of love and war whom the Greeks would meet across the Phoenician harbors and reshape as Aphrodite. The Bronze Age literature that lies behind these figures, recovered from the tablets of Ugarit, gives them their stories: the divine assembly, El presiding, Baal contending with the Sea and then swallowed by Mot, Death himself, before the cycle turns again.

Where the Phoenicians settled, the gods went with them and put down roots in foreign ground. In the western colonies the pantheon shifted — at Carthage, Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit came to stand at the center, and the urn-fields of their precincts, the tophets, raised a question that has not been put to rest: whether these were dedicated infant-cemeteries or the sites of vowed child sacrifice, a charge the Greek and Roman sources pressed and that modern archaeology has argued in both directions. The matter is genuinely contested, and it belongs with the account of Carthage and of the tophet itself. Eastward, the traffic ran the other way too: from the ordinary Semitic word adon, lord — the same root as the Baals — the Greeks made the proper name of Adonis, the beautiful dying youth mourned by the women of their festivals, a Levantine title received into a foreign ritual and given a face. The motif of the god who dies and is mourned and returns runs through this world — Baal swallowed and disgorged, Adonis cut down and wept for — and later eyes have traced its resemblance forward into other mournings and other returns. The resemblance is a matter of motif and not of demonstrated descent; the thread can be followed, but it should not be mistaken for a proof of lineage. What is certain is the structure: the Phoenicians sent their gods west with their cargoes, and the west renamed what it received.

A people read through other people’s pens

Almost everything written about the Phoenicians was written by someone else, and this is the central fact of their afterlife. They left inscriptions in abundance — vows, dedications, the funerary curses of their kings, like the Sidonian sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II now in the Louvre, which names the dead king, records his temple-building, and curses whoever would open the grave. But they left no history, no literature in their own hand that survives, no account of themselves to set beside the testimony of others.

The sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II of Sidon, its Phoenician inscription naming the king and cursing any who would disturb the tomb; Louvre AO 4806. Photo by Rama via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).

The reason is partly material. They wrote their books on papyrus, and papyrus does not last in the damp coastal earth as it does in the dry sands of Egypt; the libraries of Tyre and Sidon rotted where they lay. What might have stood in them survives only as it was caught and held in foreign vessels. The Phoenician History attributed to Philo of Byblos — a Greek-language account claiming to draw on an old priest named Sanchuniathon — comes down only because the Christian apologist Eusebius quoted it to argue against the gods it described, so that the Phoenician account of their own origins reaches us folded inside a refutation of it. The older fragments, gathered in the nineteenth century, can be read still in Isaac Cory’s public-domain anthology. It is a thin window, mediated twice over, and it is most of what there is.

So the Phoenicians live in the regard of their neighbors, and the regard was rarely disinterested. The Greeks admired their seamanship and craft and distrusted them as sharp dealers, and made Phoinix a byword for a cunning trader even as they kept the name phoinikeia grammata for the letters they owed them. The Hebrew Bible bought their cedar and their craftsmen and condemned their gods, recording Hiram of Tyre as Solomon’s partner and Jezebel of Sidon as the byword for a foreign queen who brought her Baal with her. Rome, in the end, wrote the harshest epitaph: having destroyed Carthage, the greatest of the colonies, it gave the western Phoenicians their lasting reputation as the treacherous enemy, Punica fides, Punic faith, meaning no faith at all. A people is vulnerable in its memory when it cannot speak for itself, and the Phoenicians could not.

In the homeland, the end of independence came on a causeway. When Alexander besieged island Tyre in 332 BCE, the other cities opened their gates and Sidon lent him ships; Tyre alone refused, and Alexander, lacking a fleet to match it, built a mole of rubble and timber across the half-mile of sea and brought his towers to the walls. The island fell after seven months, and the causeway never washed away — it silted into the isthmus that joins Tyre to the shore to this day, so that the island is an island no longer. Under Alexander’s successors and then Rome the cities lived on, prosperous and Greek-speaking, their gods folded into the classical pantheons, their purple still the imperial color. But the thing that had been distinctly Phoenician — the independent harbor sworn to its own god and answerable to no land empire — ended there.

The cities of the coast are gone now, or buried under modern towns, and the cedar mountains are nearly bare. The murex beds are fished out; no one has worn true Tyrian purple in fifteen centuries. But the merchants who needed a quick way to mark their cargoes and seal their contracts solved a problem the great scribe-empires had never cared to solve, and the solution proved larger than the problem ever was. Every letter set down on this page is a Phoenician sign passed through Greek and Roman hands. The people who could not keep their own books in being gave every other people the means to keep theirs — and the alphabet that records the words of the whole literate world records, of its makers, almost nothing.

→ Related: The Canaanites · The Philistines · Byblos · Tyre · Sidon · Carthage · Canaan · Ugarit · Baal · Astarte Goddess · El God · Mot God · Tophet · Dagon · Adonis · Cadmus · Ancient Egypt · Mesopotamia · Assyria · Ishtar · Old Testament · The Egyptians