Phoenicia

Politics and institutions

Phoenicia was never one state. Along the Levantine coast from Arwad to Mount Carmel, Canaanite-speaking cities — Byblos the oldest, Sidon, then Tyre — ruled themselves, fought each other and rose in succession: Sidon's zenith in the eleventh and tenth centuries, Tyre's great age from the ninth under kings like Hiram I, Byblos perpetual as Egypt's cedar partner. 'Phoenicia' is a Greek word for the purple they sold; they called themselves Canaanites. The cities' kings ruled by treaty and trade, minting no empire but planting one: colonies and factories from Cyprus to Sardinia, Gadir beyond the straits, and Carthage in the Maghreb, which by the seventh century BC outgrew any mother city. In 539 BC they passed, by their own choice of the lesser evil, under Persian rule as tribute-paying allies.

Economy and finance

The Phoenician economy was the ancient Mediterranean's engine of exchange. Cedar of Lebanon moved to Egypt and Mesopotamia from Byblos for a millennium; the murex shell fisheries of Tyre and Sidon produced the purple dye that clothed kings and gave the land its Greek name; their workshops made glass, metalwork and carved ivories that traveled the inland seas. The colonies were commercial: Carthage's harbors, Gadir's silver trade with Tartessos, the fishing and dye works of the western Mediterranean. Long-distance voyages — Hanno's fleet down the African coast is the famous one — doubled as reconnaissance for trade. The Tyrian shekel, silver and stable, became a currency of the eastern markets, and Phoenician ships carried the goods of three continents long before they carried its alphabet.

Society and culture

Phoenician culture's great gift was small enough to carry on a ship's manifest: the alphabet. Twenty-two consonant signs, cut in stone at Byblos by the tenth century BC in the epitaph of Ahiram, wrote any tongue a merchant needed, and from it descend Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew and most of the world's scripts. The cities worshipped their own gods — Melqart of Tyre, patron of seafaring and of its colony Carthage; Eshmun of Sidon; the Baalat of Byblos — and their kings built temples their neighbors borrowed. Phoenician craftsmen set the taste for carved ivories and metal bowls across the Near East, and their sailors' stars — the Greeks said even the pole star was the Phoenician star — marked the first navigation of the open sea.

Military and frontiers

Phoenician war was mostly naval, and mostly someone else's. The cities' squadrons were the best in the eastern Mediterranean, and when Persia took the coast in 539 BC their fleets became the empire's navy — Phoenician ships fought at Salamis and Mycale. On land the cities preferred tribute to battle: they paid Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt in turn, rebelled when the tribute doubled, and lost. Sidon burned for its revolt against Artaxerxes III in the 340s BC; Tyre refused Alexander in 332 and fell after a seven-month siege, a causeway and a fleet battle that ended the island city's independence for good. The cities' own soldiers were few — merchants hire mercenaries — and their colonies, Carthage above all, inherited the naval tradition rather than the homeland.

Foreign relations

Phoenician diplomacy was the diplomacy of necessity, practiced with remarkable continuity. Egypt was the oldest partner — Byblos served pharaohs from the Old Kingdom on; Israel's kings bought cedars from Hiram of Tyre for Jerusalem's temple and paid in grain and oil. Assyria and Babylon took silver and submission, sometimes mutiny; Persia took the fleets and left the kings; Alexander took everything, and the cities survived him by serving his successors. Under the Seleucids the cities kept councils and coinage while dynasts fought over them; Tigranes of Armenia held the coast briefly in the 70s BC; Rome organized it as Syria. Each empire prized the harbors more than the hills, and the cities, surviving every one of them, proved that autonomy, not independence, was the Levantine city's natural state.

Legacy and influence

Phoenicia's afterlife is written in almost every alphabet on earth. The twenty-two letters of Byblos became the Greek alphabet, and through it the Latin one; Aramaic and its descendants carried the Phoenician shapes across Asia. Carthage, the greatest colony, fought Rome for the western Mediterranean and gave history its word Punic; the purple of Tyre became the color of emperors; the Bible kept the names of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos in constant use. Modern Lebanon reads the Phoenician cities as its ancestors, and the sea-power model — small states living by trade and navy — remains their political bequest. The recorded history of the coast, unbroken from the Egyptian age through Rome, runs to 282, by which time the cities had outlived every empire that had ruled them.