The Phoenicians: Traders and Sailors of the Mediterranean

The Phoenicians were the greatest seafarers, traders, and colonists of the ancient Mediterranean. Living in a narrow strip of coastal cities in what is now Lebanon, they founded colonies from Cyprus and Malta to Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa, and Spain. They invented (or perfected) the phonetic alphabet that would become the basis of the Greek and Latin alphabets, and through them, of most of the alphabets of the modern world. Their most famous colony, Carthage, would eventually fight Rome in the long and devastating Punic Wars, and their purple dye would become the imperial color of the Roman Empire.

The alphabet you are reading this sentence in is, with about ten generations of detour through Greek, Etruscan, and Latin, the Phoenician alphabet. So are the Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic scripts. For a people who left almost no history of their own — and whose cities, Tyre and Sidon, are now just ruins on the Lebanese coast — they did remarkably well at exporting things. This page covers the homeland, the trade network, the alphabet, the religion, and the legacy, with links to the Punic Wars, Carthage, Hannibal Barca, and the Ancient Civilizations pillar.

The Phoenician Homeland

The Phoenicians were a Semitic-speaking people who lived in the coastal cities of what is now Lebanon (with the southern boundary at about Mount Carmel, just north of modern Haifa). Their main cities were Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Arwad, and Berytus (modern Beirut). The Greek name Phoinikes may come from the Egyptian word for the Canaanite coastal peoples, or it may refer to the purple dye (phoinix) for which the Phoenicians were famous; the origin is still debated.

The Phoenician homeland was small, rocky, and poor in agricultural resources, but it was ideally located for maritime trade. The Lebanese coast is indented with natural harbors, the cedar forests of the Lebanon mountains provided excellent shipbuilding timber, and the cities were perfectly placed to control the eastern Mediterranean trade routes.

The Phoenician Cities

Each Phoenician city was an independent kingdom, often with its own king, its own patron god, and its own colonies. The most important were:

Tyre, the greatest of the Phoenician cities, founded (according to tradition) in the twenty-eighth century BCE. Tyre was famous for its purple dye, its shipbuilding, and its colonies. The prophet Ezekiel and the prophet Amos both denounced Tyre for its wealth and its pride. The city was besieged by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II for thirteen years (the basis for the famous prophecy in Ezekiel 26), and was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE after a seven-month siege that included the construction of a famous causeway from the mainland to the island city.
Sidon, the second city of Phoenicia, was famous for its glass, its purple dye, and its skilled craftsmen. The city was the most important Phoenician city of the early first millennium BCE and was the source of many of the finest Phoenician works of art.
Byblos, the oldest Phoenician city, was the main exporter of cedar wood to Egypt. The name Byblos (meaning “papyrus” in Greek) gave us the word Bible, and the city was the source of the Phoenician alphabet that was eventually adopted by the Greeks and the Romans.
Arwad, a small island city off the coast, was famous as a naval base.
Berytus (Beirut), the smallest of the major Phoenician cities, later became one of the great centers of Roman law.

The Phoenician Trade Network

The Phoenicians were the most important merchants of the ancient Mediterranean. They traded in cedar, purple dye, glass, metalwork, slaves, ivory, and luxury goods. Their ships sailed the entire Mediterranean: from the Aegean to the Black Sea, from Sicily to Sardinia, from North Africa to the Atlantic coast of Spain, and possibly to the Canary Islands. The Greek historian Herodotus recorded a tradition that the Phoenicians, commissioned by the Egyptian pharaoh Necho, had circumnavigated Africa.

The Phoenicians were also the first great colonial power of the ancient Mediterranean. Their colonies were not conquests but trading settlements, established in cooperation with local rulers. The most important were:

Carthage, founded (according to tradition) by Queen Dido in 814 BCE. Carthage became the center of Phoenician power in the western Mediterranean and the great rival of Rome. The Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage are among the most important conflicts in ancient history. The full story of the final destruction of Carthage is told in The Siege of Carthage.
Utica, an older Phoenician colony on the North African coast.
Cadiz (Gadir), in southwestern Spain, the westernmost Phoenician settlement.
Cypriot colonies, including Kition (modern Larnaca), which was an important Phoenician cult center of Astarte and a key way-station in the trade with the western Mediterranean. The mother city of Carthage, however, was Tyre.
Sicilian and Sardinian colonies, including Panormus (Palermo) and Caralis (Cagliari).
Maltese colonies, with the famous temple complexes of Tarxien and the Hypogeum.

The Phoenician Alphabet

The Phoenicians are most famous for the alphabet. The earliest known Phoenician inscriptions date to about 1050 BCE, and the alphabet was probably developed in the second millennium BCE from the proto-Canaanite script used by the peoples of the Levant. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 characters, all representing consonants, and was the first purely alphabetic writing system (as opposed to syllabic or logographic systems) to be widely used.

The Phoenician alphabet was borrowed by the Greeks, probably in the early eighth century BCE. The Greeks added vowels, changed some of the letter shapes, and adapted the alphabet to write their own language. The Greek alphabet was then borrowed by the Etruscans, and from the Etruscans (and from the Greek colonies of southern Italy) the Romans adopted it. The Latin alphabet that we use to write English is, in a direct line, the descendant of the Phoenician alphabet. The Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic alphabets are also descendants.

Phoenician Religion

The Phoenicians worshipped a pantheon of gods and goddesses headed by El (the father of the gods) and his consort Asherah. The most important gods of the Phoenician cities were:

Melqart, the “king of the city,” the patron god of Tyre. The Greeks identified Melqart with Heracles, and a temple to him stood on the island of Tyre.
Astarte, the goddess of love and war, identified by the Greeks with Aphrodite. The cult of Astarte spread across the ancient Mediterranean.
Baal (Haddad), the storm god, the son of El.
Eshmun, a healing god worshipped especially at Sidon, identified by the Greeks with Asclepius.

Whether the Phoenicians practised child sacrifice is one of the most contested questions in Phoenician scholarship. The Tophet of Carthage — a sacred precinct containing the cremated remains of many young children and infants — was long read (following Diodorus Siculus and the Hebrew prophets) as the site of mass child sacrifice to the god Baal Hammon. Since the 1980s, however, the interpretation has divided scholars: Lawrence Stager and Joseph Wolff (American Journal of Archaeology, 1984) defended the sacrificial reading on the basis of the age and epigraphy of the urns; Josephine Xella and others (Ritual Landscape at the Phoenician-Punic Tophet, 2013) have argued that the children died of natural causes and were commemorated there as votive offerings. The Greco-Roman sources, which routinely accused Phoenician and Carthaginian religion of child sacrifice, may themselves reflect a stereotype as much as a fact. The question is still open.

The Decline of the Phoenicians

The Phoenician homeland was conquered by a long succession of empires: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, and finally the Romans. By the second century BCE, the Phoenician cities had been largely Hellenized, and the Phoenician language and culture had been absorbed into the wider Greek and Roman worlds. The most important Phoenician colony, Carthage, was destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE, ending Phoenician independence in the western Mediterranean for good.

The Phoenician Legacy

The Phoenicians’ most enduring legacy is the alphabet. The 22 consonantal letters of the Phoenician alphabet were borrowed by the Greeks, who added vowels to create a 24-letter alphabet; the Greek alphabet was in turn borrowed by the Etruscans and the Romans and, through them, became the 26-letter Latin alphabet that we use to write English and most of the modern world’s languages. The Phoenicians were also pioneers of seafaring, long-distance trade, and colonial settlement. The Greek historian Strabo called the Phoenicians “the inventors of navigation” and the model for the Greek colonization of the Mediterranean.