History of Phoenician people

The Phoenicians occupied a narrow tract of land along the coast of modern Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. In 1950 Otto Eissfeldt in his article "Phoiniker" in the "Realenzyklopadie" expressed the opinion that the history of this people began about 3000 B.C.

Phoenicia was an ancient civilization in Canaan which covered most of the western, coastal part of the Fertile Crescent. 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.

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. 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 name Phoenician, used to describe these people in the first millennium B.C., 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. For about a thousand years, Phoenicians 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.

They were the great mariners of the ancient world, and their thalassocracy (maritime realm) was organized into city-states akin to the Greeks. 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.

The Phoenicians founded the coastal city-states of Byblos, Sidon and Tyre (ancient Canaan). All were fiercely independent, rival cities and, unlike the neighboring inland states, the Phoenicians represented a confederation of maritime traders rather than a defined country. 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.

The greatest of all the Phoenician city-states, however, was Carthage in North Africa. According to legend it was founded in 813 BCE by Queen Dido, and its name meant “New Village”.

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. Herodotus cites Phoenicia as the birthplace of the alphabet, stating that it was brought to Greece by the Phoenician Kadmus.

Phoenician alphabet developed out of the North Semitic alphabet and was spread over the Mediterranean area by Phoenician traders. It was in use until about the 1st century BCE in Phoenicia proper.
History of Phoenician people

Hyksos people

The Hyksos (means ‘ruler of foreign lands’) were a people of mixed origins from Western Asia, who settled in the eastern Nile Delta, sometime before 1650 BC.

A potential disruption to Phoenician-Egyptian trade rose in the 18th century BC in the form of an invasion by the Hyksos people.

The Hyksos took over rule of Bobos and much of Phoenicia and Syria ejecting the Amorite rulers, and by about 1720 BC had even conquered Egypt. The invasion of Hyksos people on Egyptian Middle Kingdom was the first military conquest in the history of human civilization and they ruled it for one hundred years (1680-1580 BC).

As it turned out, the Hyksos did nothing but further develop the trade lines throughout the eastern Mediterranean, as doing so enabled them to sustain their own imperial ambitions.

One technology that was introduced Egypt at the time of the Hyksos’s military conquest was the horse-drawn chariot. Hyksos were the first people who introduced the domestic horse into Africa.

This new chariot culture bestowed by the Hyksos provided the New Kingdom with an unprecedented military might with which it expanded its borders as far as the upper course of the Euphrates River in Iraq.

In 1570 BC the Egyptian prince Ahmose I (1570-45 BC) launched a war against the Hyksos, a war that was continued by Thutmose III (ca, 1504-145 BC). This ware eventually pushed the Hyksos out of their Egyptian and Phoenician gains and established Egypt as the dominant power in the Mediterranean.
Hyksos people

Carthaginian Empire

Carthage is situated on the coast of North Africa. The earliest settlement was established in around 800 BC. In the Aeneid Virgil immortalized the foundation myth of Queen Dido fleeing the Phoenician city of Tyre and the murderous designs of her brother to the shores of North Africa where she established her ‘New City’ in 814 BC.

According to the Roman historian Livy, the city was large, with protective walls that stretched for nearly 33 km.

The Carthaginians were a seafaring people and they had a large army. Soon the Carthaginian seafarers of Carthage began to colonize Andalusia, Malta, Sardinia and parts of Sicily.  Carthage also exerted control aver Malta and other islands in the sea lanes.

One group among the leaders of Carthage favored branching out into the interior where they occupied land in the Bagradas valley, and successfully practiced agriculture among the Berbers.

The high point of the Carthaginian hegemony may have occurred around 400 BC.

Carthage founded settlement which Greeks called emporia, along the entire coast from the Gulf of Sidra in present-day Libya, through present-day Tunisia and Algeria to the Atlantic coast of Morocco as well as on all the islands of the western Mediterranean, including the Balearics.

The Carthaginian trade continued to flourish, not only by sea but also across the Sahara Desert.

With Rome’s expansion, a series of wars against Carthage ensued in the third and second centuries over control of Mediterranean commerce and sea lanes.

For centuries Cartage had stood as the great rival to Rome. But after the conquest of the city in 146 BC by the Roman military leader Scipio Aemilianus, its walls were destroyed and only a ruin identified its location.

In that year the city was besieged, taken, plundered, its inhabitant exiled or enslaved, its wall demolished, its houses and public buildings burned to the ground.
Carthaginian Empire