The Phoenicians spread out

The story

A strip of coast, many cities

Phoenicia was never a country with borders and a single king. It was a narrow band of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, in present-day Lebanon and parts of Syria and Israel, squeezed between the mountains and the sea. Here stood independent cities, each with its own king, its own walls and its own business: the most important were Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. Scholars have searched for a long time, but there is no proof that these cities felt they were a single people. The name “Phoenicians” was given to us by the Greeks, who called them that, and we do not know what they called themselves.

The territory was small and had little farmland. On the other hand there were good natural harbours and the cedar forests on the mountains of Lebanon, a strong, sweet-smelling wood, excellent for building ships. From the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC the people of these cities lived mainly by trade across the sea.

After the great crisis

Around 1200 BC the eastern Mediterranean went through a very grave crisis: many cities and many kingdoms were destroyed or abandoned. Historians call it the collapse of the Bronze Age. The Phoenician cities, however, did not disappear. Indeed: when Egypt and Assyria, two great powers of the region, grew weaker, they managed to become freer and stronger. By the time the Egyptian story of Wenamun was written, Phoenicia had already won back its independence from Egypt.

With no great empires around them, Phoenician merchants had a free hand at sea. They built ships with their cedar, loaded timber, wine, glass, metal objects, cloth dyed purple, and set out to sell and buy. Among the cities Tyre stood out, where Hiram I reigned, a king traditionally dated to the years between about 969 and 936 BC, whom the sources present as the ruler who made it the most powerful of the Phoenician cities.

The colonies

The Phoenicians did not conquer territory with armies: they founded ports and trading posts, where ships could stop, take on supplies and exchange goods. The first sure traces of a Phoenician presence on Cyprus date to the 10th–9th centuries BC. In Spain, at Almuñécar, there are landing places active from the 9th century BC, and at Toscanos there are fortified settlements from at least the 8th century. Other colonies arose on Malta, in Sicily (such as Motya) and in Sardinia (such as Tharros). Of them all, the most important became Carthage, in Africa, which according to the ancient historian Timaeus was founded in 814 BC.

The founding dates handed down by the ancients should be treated with caution. For example, tradition put the foundation of Cadiz (Gadir), in Spain, at around 1100 BC, but archaeologists have found no layers on the site older than the 9th century BC. History and legend were often mixed.

A network of ports

The colonies were not all the same. Some were small landing places on the coast. Others became real cities. It is a system very different from that of an empire: a network of ports scattered along the coasts, linked by ships carrying goods from one place to another.

Under the great empires

The freedom of the Phoenician cities did not last for ever. From the 9th century BC Assyria began to push westward and by about 738 BC it controlled much of the region. In 721 BC Sargon II crushed a revolt by Tyre. Later the Babylonians of Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Tyre, which submitted in 573 BC. After Cyrus conquered Babylon, in 539 BC, the Persians left the Phoenician cities a great deal of autonomy, treating them as vassal kingdoms. In 332 BC Alexander the Great took Tyre after a siege of about seven months, while Sidon surrendered without a fight.

Even after these conquests the cities remained centres of trade and crafts. And their colonies, Carthage in particular, went on living and growing on their own.