Phoenicians

The Phoenicians were an ancient people who lived along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Their homeland sat in what is now Lebanon and parts of Syria and Israel. They were not one big country. They lived in separate city-states, each with its own king. The most important cities were Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. The Phoenicians were powerful between about 1500 BCE and 300 BCE.

The Phoenicians were the greatest sailors of the ancient world. Their cities sat right on the sea, with mountains close behind. There was not much room to farm, so the Phoenicians turned to the water. They built strong wooden ships from the cedar trees that grew in the mountains nearby. In these ships they sailed all over the Mediterranean. Some sailed even farther, out past the Strait of Gibraltar to the Atlantic Ocean. According to one ancient story, a Phoenician crew may have sailed all the way around Africa around 600 BCE, more than 2,000 years before any European did it again.

Phoenicians were traders more than fighters. They sold cedar wood, glass, jewelry, and a famous purple dye called Tyrian purple. The dye was made from tiny sea snails. It took about 12,000 snails to dye one small robe. The color was so rare and expensive that, for centuries, only kings and queens could afford to wear it.

The Phoenicians built trading posts and colonies wherever they sailed. The most famous of these was Carthage, founded in North Africa around 814 BCE. Carthage later grew so powerful that it fought three long wars with Rome. Rome finally destroyed it in 146 BCE.

The biggest gift the Phoenicians left the world was their alphabet. Older writing systems, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, used hundreds of picture-symbols. The Phoenicians invented a simpler system with just 22 letters, each one standing for a sound. This made writing much easier to learn. Greek traders picked up the Phoenician alphabet and adjusted it. The Romans then borrowed it from the Greeks. The letters you are reading right now are great-great-grandchildren of the Phoenician letters.

We do not know as much about the Phoenicians as we would like. They wrote on papyrus, which rots away in damp weather. Most of what survives was written about them by their neighbors and rivals, like the Greeks. Archaeologists are still digging up Phoenician shipwrecks and ports today, hoping to learn what these sea traders said about themselves.