Rise of Phoenician Maritime Trade
The Phoenicians ran the Mediterranean carrying trade for some six centuries without ever forming a state. They were the Canaanite population of the Levantine coast — Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Arwad — living on a narrow strip between mountains and sea with cedar, glass sand, and a shellfish that produced the purple dye that gave them their Greek name. The cities were independent of each other and stayed that way, which is the fact that distinguishes them from every other trading power in antiquity. Their opportunity was the collapse of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC, which destroyed the Hittites, the Mycenaeans and Egyptian power in the Levant, and left the Phoenician ports intact and their competitors gone. What they carried was other people's goods: Egyptian linen and papyrus, Anatolian metals, Spanish silver, African ivory, Baltic amber, and their own purple cloth, glass and worked bronze. The colonies were founded to service the routes rather than to settle territory — Kition on Cyprus, Motya in Sicily, Cádiz beyond the straits, Utica and eventually Carthage. Herodotus reports a Phoenician expedition sent by an Egyptian pharaoh that circumnavigated Africa in three years, and says he does not believe the detail about the sun being on their right hand, which is exactly the detail that makes it credible. They also carried the alphabet, which is the largest thing anyone has ever exported. Alexander took Tyre in 332 BC. The word Phoenician is Greek and none of these cities used it of themselves; they identified by their own town. What they had in common was a language, a script and a trade, which is a civilisation held together by nothing but usefulness.
- Year: 1100 BCE
- Category: Diplomacy
