Phoenicia

Phoenicia was not a country but a strip of Levantine coast whose city-states - Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Berytus - emerged as independent powers around 1200 BC, when the collapse of the Bronze Age empires removed the Egyptians and Hittites who had governed them. Hemmed against the sea by mountains and by larger neighbours inland, they went outward instead. Phoenician ships carried cedar, glass and the purple dye made from murex shells that gave the region its Greek name, and their traders established posts and then colonies across the whole Mediterranean: Cadiz, Palermo, Sardinia, and in 814 BC Carthage, which outgrew its founder. They probably circumnavigated Africa for an Egyptian pharaoh, and they reached Cornwall for tin. Their most consequential export was administrative. The alphabet they used - twenty-two consonantal signs, learnable in a day rather than a career - was adopted by the Greeks, who added vowels, and descends into Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew; almost every alphabet in use today is a modification of it. Politically the cities were never unified and were usually tributary to whoever was strongest inland, paying Assyria, Babylon and then Persia while retaining their fleets and their internal government. That arrangement ended with Alexander, who besieged Tyre for seven months in 332 BC, built a causeway to reach its island, and destroyed it. The coast became Hellenistic and then Roman, and the Phoenician language died out, surviving longest in Punic North Africa. The name Phoenician is Greek and means something like purple people, after the dye. They left almost no literature of their own, so most of what is known comes from their enemies and customers. Carthage carried the culture on for six centuries after Tyre fell.

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