Who were the Phoencians?

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Phoenicians settled along the Mediterranean coast, mainly in what is now Lebanon and also in Syria and Israel, from approximately 1500 BCE to 300 BCE. Their most famous city-states included Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Birot (now Beirut). Dor would have been one of their most southern cities. The Phoenicians did not regard themselves as being part of a Phoenician state, but rather as Canaanites living in loosely confederated cities. The name Phoenician was given to them by the Greeks and comes from the word phoenix, possibly related to the purple dye they produced. They were a Semitic people and spoke the same language as the Israelites.

 

The Phoenicians were maritime traders rather than agriculturists as they had little arable land, and they controlled maritime trade in the Mediterranean and beyond. They set up colonies as part of their trade network. These included Jaffa, Dor, and Acre (Acco) on the Israeli coast. They also had colonies in Anatolia, Cyprus and Carthage, now Tunisia in North Africa, so as to consolidate their trading influence. Carthage was their chief maritime and commercial power in the western Mediterranean, and it would eventually come into conflict with Rome in the Punic wars. Phoenician sailors did not venture far out to sea, but hugged the coast in their trading, and exchanged goods from one port to the next.

 

It was formerly believed that the Canaanites migrated into the Levant from elsewhere around 3000 BCE, in the Early Bronze Age, and brought with them urban civilization. This view was based largely on similarities in pottery, architecture, and language with peoples living farther north in Syria and Mesopotamia. However, there is little evidence for a large-scale invasion or migration, and most archaeologists now believe that the Canaanites developed locally from earlier Neolithic and Chalcolithic populations living in the region. The Phoenicians were an off-shoot. Sea People also attempted to settle along the Israeli coast, but their interactions and conflicts with the Phoenicians are unclear as there are no written records.

 

Joshua may have encountered this people when he conquered the land of Canaan. Some of their cities are mentioned in the book of Joshua, although their inhabitants are not distinguished from other Canaanites. Their territory was allotted to the Israelite tribes, although it is doubtful they were ever able to displace them.

 

King Solomon had a friendly relationship with King Hiram of Tyre, who helped him in the construction of his Temple by providing cedar and cypress timber. This was floated to Jaffa. He also lent him skilled craftsman.

 

The Phoenician religion was Canaanite. Prominent among their gods was Baal, the god of storms, fertility and agriculture, and Astarte (also known as Ishtar or Ashtart), the goddess of love, beauty and fertility. These gods were a temptation to the Israelites when they arrived in Israel. Baal-worship entered the Northern Israelite kingdom during the reign of King Ahab in a syncretic form, when his wife Jezebel, who was the daughter of King Ethbaal of the Sidonians, attempted to bring Baal worship into the Israelite kingdom. This was fiercely opposed by the prophet Elijah. His struggle to reverse the situation, including a show-down with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, was uphill and not fully successful.

 

The Phoenicians were well-known for their industrial extraction of purple and blue dyes from murix shellfish. They may well have had a monopoly on its production and use. Their dyes were also a source of the blue dye used to color the fringes which Jews put on their four-cornered garments. Because it was a luxury item for the upper class, the Romans forbad its use by Jews and its use in the coloring of fringes lapsed. Only now has it been renewed by many Jews.

 

The Phoenicians were renowned for their ship-building skills. They also invented glass blowing sometime during the 1st century. This revolutionized the glass-making process, and allowed for the production of glass vessels with greater ease and the creation of intricate designs by artisans.  

 

The Phoenicians are usually credited with developing the alphabetic writing system as an alternative to the pictorial cuneiform and hieroglyphic scripts then prominent in the Near East. This would become the basis of Western alphabets. It was a tremendous advance for civilization since it permitted a general literacy to develop that was not possible with complicated pictorial lwriting. Most examples of the Phoenician alphabetic script have been found in Babylos, about 30 Km north of the modern city of Beirut, the earliest being dated to about the 15th century BCE and mostly from the 10th century BCE.

 

However, some have questioned whether the Phoenicians should truly be credited with this discovery. The first examples of the proto-Canaanite script from which the Phoenician script developed were found in the Sinai desert and have been dated to the Middle Bronze age, between the 18th to 16th centuries BCE. Moreover, the Israelites were to a degree a literate society when they arrived in Canaan with Joshua based on the Torah. It is doubtful that this was written with hieroglyphics, as no one would have been able to understand it. An alternative hypothesis is that this alphabet was discovered by the Israelites when they lived in Egypt and they were the ones who brought it to Canaan. The Phoenicians immediately appreciated its value for trade and adopted it. This would have been relatively easy to do as they spoke the same language and used the same consonants as the Israelites. From the Phoenicians it spread to the Greek world, and they were the ones who added vowels to the alphabet using extra Hebrew symbols that were of no use to them.