Phoenicians were active in the eastern Mediterranean from around the 4th millennium BC probably before the Minoans whose civilization emerged in the 3rd millennium BCE.
Canaan was the bridge that concocted Egypt and Mesopotamia and this piece of land shared today by Lebanon and Israel. Two groups – The Phoenician and the Hebrews – settled in Canaan and formed small kingdoms.
The Phoenicians people were part of a larger group known as the Canaanites. The Canaanites came from the desert south and east of Canaan.
The term “Phoenician” itself is a Greek invention. One interpretation of the origins of the word Phoenician is that it derives from the Greek p(h)oinix (singular) or poiniki (plural) used to describe people who lived in Canaan.
The term Canaanites is generally applied to them, but could include non-Phoenicians. Another group – the Philistines – lived in southern Canaan along the Mediterranean.
Around 60 BCE, Diadorus wrote: “The Phoenicians ... from ancient times were skilled in making discoveries for their own profit.” Masters of the sea, they took to exploring uncharted oceans as they looked for new sources of both raw materials and manufactured goods, as well as of grain and other foodstuffs.
Phoenicians heyday came after the collapse of the great powers of Hittite Anatolia, Kassite Babylonia, and Mycenaean Greece around 1200 BCE: merchants from Levantine ports including Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Beirut, seized a new set of opportunities, trading cedar from Mount Lebanon, along with exquisite items crafted from metal, ivory, and glass, for raw metals from the west.
For about a thousand years, Phoenicians and other Punic people were able to travel by sea across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean and far beyond. Their sailors and explorer plotted their courses by the sun and stars. They travel to places where no one else dared to go.
Assisted by large quantities of the natural resource known as Lebanese Cedar (regarded as the finest ship-building material) these peoples developed great skills in shipbuilding and seamanship, and became Masters of the Sea.
Sidon and Tyre were two large Phoenician cities barely 35 kilometers apart, a fact that contributed to their rivalry, open or latent, throughout the whole of their history. They developed alternately: when one was prosperous and powerful, the other was weak and in decline. Sidon developed substantially during the second half of the second millennium.
Phoenicians played a large part in the development of the first alphabet using abstract symbols rather than pictographs as used in Egyptian and Babylonian writing.
History and origin of Phoenicians
