Chapter 1: Who were the Phoenicians and what made them unique?
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You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's 3,000 years ago, and a fleet of sturdy ships sailed west past a towering promontory, overlooking a wide strait of water.
In later centuries, the Greeks would label this great limestone mountain a pillar of their hero Heracles, the Rock of Gibraltar. The sailors come from far away, from a city on the easternmost coast of the great sea they have just left, the island stronghold of Tyre. Their expertly crafted ships originate from the great cedar wood forests close to their coastal home.
Together they have traversed hundreds of kilometres of coastline and now they have finally reached the exit of the Mediterranean. They come with cargo from their homeland, stacks and stacks of finely crafted pottery, wine carried in tall clay jars and also, more infamously, slaves. All were to be offloaded at their final destination, now not far away, sold to the highest bidders.
These sailors were traders first and foremost, just as their fathers and grandfathers had been before them. Their people would become known as some of the greatest seafarers of ancient history, a mysterious yet fascinating people, the Phoenicians.
From their rise and prominence on the ancient Mediterranean stage to their lasting legacy down to the present day with the alphabet and their legendary seafaring, in this episode we're going to introduce you to who these so-called Phoenicians were and why they are some of the most fascinating peoples from antiquity. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the Phoenicians.
Our guest is Dr. Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at St. John's College, University of Cambridge. Josephine, I can't believe we haven't had you on the show before. It is a pleasure to welcome you finally to The Ancients. It's great to be here. Thank you. You're more than welcome. And I think we need to get into one of the big questions first off. Josephine, who were the Phoenicians?
Well, the people that we call Phoenician now were the people who lived in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. So what we'd now call the Levant. So modern Lebanon, bits of Syria, bits of Israel and so on. But it's a string of ports that run down that coast. And the people who lived there were extraordinary people.
sailors, navigators, inventors, and they really were the earliest explorers of the Mediterranean. Is that why we primarily remember the word Phoenician today? Is it very much linked to that idea of exploration and sea travel? Yeah, I think so.
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Chapter 2: What role did Tyre and Sidon play in Phoenician culture?
So I think right from the beginning, it's a name for sort of sailing foreigners somehow. So it almost kind of describes certain attributes of someone. I think the word the Tarentine gets called later on for people who could throw javelins from their horses and move around. It's almost like the attributes of a person and then they can be labelled a Phoenician. Is that the idea?
Yeah, I think above all, it's going to be the language they speak, because Venetian is a language very like Hebrew or even Arabic or in the ancient world, Aramaic, Akkadian, even a bit further away again. These are all Semitic languages and they're extremely different. from the Indo-European language or languages, dialects that people living in what we now call ancient Greek cities spoke.
So I think to them, that's how these people seem so foreign to them. That's why they can give them a kind of collective label. because they sort of recognize the type of person, sailors like themselves, city dwellers, people who live in city states, in fact, and so on. But they speak a really different language. I mean, the actual name Phoenician, nobody's quite sure what it originally meant.
It can be because, of course, it's a Greek name. So one thing that certainly was associated with it in antiquity is the palm tree, the phoenix in Greek. But, you know, the coast of the Levant is by no means the only place in the Mediterranean you get palm trees. So it seems like that's more of a kind of later association from the name. It doesn't explain the name.
Another idea is another meaning of phoenix in Greek is a kind of red or sort of reddy brown, purpley color. And one thing that these cities were very adept at very early on was producing a kind of purple dye from a sea snail, the remains of a sea snail. They kind of squeezed them for the dye. It's really horrible. But they had kind of factories for this sort of thing.
And that really does seem to have been a speciality of this particular group of cities and language speakers. So, I mean, I think that's the best guess for where the name originally came from. It was something to do with the sort of profession, speciality of them. But yeah, I think it becomes a very generic term for Eastern foreign trader person. So interesting.
And a bit more on the topography of where they came from, Josephine. So these coastal cities, should we also imagine that there was like great plains outside of the cities or were they very much kind of crammed up next to the coast? What should we be thinking? No, it's a good question. They're really crammed up is the answer.
Because if you think about the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, the coast of the Levant, these are cities like Beirut would be another example, an ancient Venetian city that has kind of carried on into the modern period. You've actually got very little coastal plain before you're right up against mountains along most of this coast, not the whole way down, but for most of it. And
And so actually, these are not great agricultural cities. I mean, every ancient city has to grow enough food to feed itself beyond what you can get by imports and so on. So it's not that these people didn't do any farming or agriculture at all, but it wasn't the basis of their economy, economic practices and so on.
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Chapter 3: How did the Phoenicians establish their trading networks?
So that's really frustrating. And it's made even more frustrating by the fact that there is no Venetian language literature. There are some books written in Greek much later on when really we're talking about a sort of heritage society where people are claiming to be Phoenician or claiming to write about ancient Phoenician myths and so on.
And that may well be true, but it's all kind of would be like people now writing about the time of Shakespeare and so on. It's just not quite the same thing, but without having Shakespeare himself. And the mystery here is that no one is quite sure why there's no Phoenician literature.
As I said, these are the immediate neighbours of the people who are writing the books of the Hebrew Bible in exactly the same period. They're the pretty close neighbors of the Greek city-states where people are writing, particularly in Athens, of course, but in other places as well. And on the coast of Turkey, Greek speakers writing various things.
They're just up the coast at Ugarit, on the coast of Syria, in the Bronze Age. There are huge amounts of writing in a very similar language to Phoenician. So there's this kind of gap in the Phoenician city-states. I mean, there's sort of two ways to approach this.
One is to say, this is the kind of very pragmatic answer to it, which is very likely to be right, which is that it rains a lot in this part of the world. I mean, not as much as it does in this part of the world. It rains quite a lot in the Levant as well. And so if things are being written on papyrus, they don't really survive. I mean, in Egypt, they survive because it's so dry.
But further north, they don't survive. And what we have from the Bronze Age, the cities of the Levant, are things written in cuneiform script on clay tablets. And then fired, so they survive. Not necessarily that that was the intention of firing them, but it's the effect.
And so when people stop doing that around 1000 BCE, and they start writing on papyrus instead, you often might think of that as a kind of step forwards, because closer to what we do is a write on paper. But actually, it means that it's much much less likely to survive. So that's one thing.
There may have been an incredible literature in Phoenician and so many factual accounts and histories and so on that we just don't have anymore. I mean, I have a different kind of theory about this, which is equally impossible to prove or disprove, which is that in some cases, people simply choose not to write things down. And these Phoenician cities are the very interesting
potentially problematic relationship to the people around them in that they are just west of some pretty major powers, whether we're talking about the great Mesopotamian Bronze Age kingdoms, or later the Persians, the Assyrians, very big, powerful agricultural empires who always
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Chapter 4: What influence did the Phoenicians have on the spread of the alphabet?
But you can't imagine that people are going to go all that way to sell some pots or give away some pots. You know, that's just, it's what tends to remain. You just can't kill a pot. You can break it into pieces, but then you just have to put it back together again 2,000 years later. It's really tiresome. So you've got to think, why were they doing this?
And there are other clues in terms of not what's left directly behind, but what changes. So winemaking. So we have the pots that would have had wine in them. Of course, in most cases, it doesn't survive anymore. But we also have in the Western Mediterranean vines, vines that actually make drinkable wine for the first time and vineyards set out in a way that would actually work.
So they're bringing not just things and goods. They're bringing ideas and technologies as well. To be honest, all of this, the pottery, the wine, all that kind of stuff, is probably just the social matter that smooths the way to the trade in metals. It's not what the Phoenicians are bringing to these places, it's what they're taking away. And what you get in the Atlantic is metals.
Those mountains are just absolutely stuffed with minerals and metals. And in particular, silver is a big draw in that part of the world. And this is not news to people who are living there. Very active networks up and down the Atlantic coast for, again, centuries, if not millennia at this point. Well, that's certainly in some ways millennia.
But the kind of silver mining that's going on before people from the Eastern Mediterranean turn up, so let's take the year 1000 BCE, we're really talking about here when that's when ships start to arrive. Before that, there is silver mining, but it's on quite a small scale. It's not technologically extremely advanced.
But when we start to see Phoenician pottery, we also start to see huge changes in the mines, much bigger, much better technology for actually turning what comes out of the mines themselves into something that you can use, mould, sell, and so forth. I think what they're bringing is a kind of a market that
For the people, local people who want to sell their wares, they're bringing new technologies that can help the local populations improve their production. Now, what we don't know, of course, is whether they remain in charge of it or not.
um that's less clear they may well also be bringing slaves i mean i've mentioned i think that that that one of the things that we find out from the hebrew bible is that tyrians are slave traders on quite a big scale and they seem to be acquiring humans for sale in the eastern mediterranean general sense in western asia and but
It would actually make a lot of sense for them then to bring them across the Mediterranean to actually work in places like Spain because one of the awful realities of the slave trading economies is that you want to move people as far away from home as possible.
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Chapter 5: What were the primary resources and goods traded by the Phoenicians?
set of ideas, essentially. But again, I think that there is a greater density of shared gods and ideas of gods in these Phoenician-speaking cities. I mean, that porous nature of the gods is fascinating. We did an interview a few months ago now on Inanna from Sumerian times. And then of course, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Isis, and then this goddess in Byblos as well.
Once again, you can see those links together. Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely fascinating. And when you were saying that Phoenicians and these various cities, the people could probably understand each other, but recognize differences. Should we then more be thinking of it like different dialects? Is that more of an idea of it? Yeah, yeah.
I think it's a bit tricky to understand this from an English speaker's point of view, because perhaps this is true of many languages in the 21st century, because things like television, podcasts, radio, mean that languages come together a lot more. So it's much You do get, of course, local accents and so on, some local vocabulary.
People do understand that there are many quite distinctive ways of speaking English. But I think the notion of the dialect is something that I found it easier to understand when I was digging as a student in Italy. where you really would have villages, neighboring villages, but on top of different hills, where people really found it quite hard.
They certainly weren't speaking Italian in any of these places. And people found it quite hard to have lengthy conversations with each other if they were just speaking the language of their own city. So I've always been a little bit
suspicious of the idea of too easy mutual comprehensibility, having seen how places in the late 20th century world are really very close to each other, communication is not necessarily straightforward. But it would have been recognisably the same language type, essentially. Are you looking for the perfect podcast to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?
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And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit. What about customs then? Could it be more recognisable? You see the similarities between, let's say, what people are doing in Carthage compared to what they're doing in Tyre, maybe not via the language, but via the customs and the traditions that they were doing. Can you see more clear similarities there?
Yes, in some cases. There are some very distinctive things that people in Tyre and Carthage do. The classic one is child sacrifice, a kind of awful aspect now, as it seems now. I presume it didn't seem so to them, which is something that is practiced on a fairly broad scale at Carthage in particular.
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Chapter 6: How did the Phoenicians impact the cultures of the Mediterranean?
Greek sailors start to do the same in the 8th century, starting probably again with traders, entrepreneurs, and then kind of settlers coming a bit later. But the kind of real boundary, if you like, is that the furthest... The Greek, the major Greek city that is furthest west is Massalia, Marseille, modern Marseille.
And the rivalry between Marseille and Carthage as these two great Western cities sort of facing each other from the north and south Mediterranean is a kind of wonderful theme in ancient history. Gosh, before Rome. And this is well before the rise of Rome as well, which is what's also so fascinating about this. Josephine, I must ask about the alphabet. Did they create the modern alphabet?
The simple answer is yes. So the alphabet, alphabets are really strange. Almost all of human history, people have chosen, when they've chosen to write things down at all, they've chosen to write down syllables. rather than sound. So the alphabet is sound, right? People chose to write down syllables.
And even if you, I would say, if you just sound the alphabet out, we say A, B, C, D, these are syllables. These aren't sounds. So we can't even say the alphabet in alphabetic concepts. So it's really weird. And almost all alphabets in use today go back to the alphabet that is used in these Phoenician cities. which is kind of extraordinary, really. It's invented, and it really is invented.
This is the kind of thing that doesn't just emerge slowly among thousands or tens of thousands of people, because for something like a writing system, you all need to use it the same way. So you basically do need a person or a small committee of people. to sort it out in the first place. And then, of course, it changes and develops and so on in different directions.
But this alphabet emerges in the Levant, in the Eastern Mediterranean. It's first used to write down Levantine languages, so the precursors of the Phoenician language and the Hebrew language and Aramaic and so on. Probably around 2000 BCE.
It's a little bit of a suggestion that there might be stuff even earlier than that, but it's quite disputed as to whether we're looking at alphabetic letters or just scratches. because they don't look that different, especially early on. But by around 2000 or 2000, 1900, 1800 BCE, you're beginning to get definite alphabetic signs that are writing down the precursor of the Phoenician language.
But you don't get them in Phoenicia. This is what's absolutely fascinating to me. You get them in Egypt. And it is people from the Levant, workers of some kind in Egypt. There's a lot of them at the Royal Turquoise Mines in Sinai. Whether these are mine workers or managers or whatever, they're people being brought south from the Levant to Sinai in order to work in these mines.
You also get a little bit further south in some areas that are used by the army quite a lot. So clearly, travellers are workers and so on. who actually write things down for the first time when they're abroad. They don't need to do it at home. They can just tell someone what they want. But abroad, they really need to write things down, especially for the gods.
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Chapter 7: What were the religious beliefs and practices of the Phoenicians?
But I guess you've done a lot of work on the identity of Venetians and how that's developed as time goes on. So if it was that, although those cities, Byblos, Tyre, Carthage and the like will ultimately decline, I mean, their legacy has endured to the present day with the word Venetian. Well, it's been just such a fertile ground for identity since.
I don't think the ancient Phoenicians have much of a common identity, if any, but it's been a really useful idea for identities kind of ever since.
I mean, one very obvious example is in modern Lebanon, in 20th century Lebanon, where the idea of being Phoenician, which in some sense is right, gave the Maronite Catholics a way to argue that they should be a separate nation from the Syrians, gave them a kind of identity that made them less Arab and more Mediterranean. And that was in a period of the early 20th century that was happening.
There were similar movements in Egypt. And it was a fascinating moment in kind of self-invention in this period when the nation state is a relatively recent idea. They're being made up by the old colonial powers all over the place. Some people sometimes kind of taking the opportunity to make their own kind of interventions in that. And in Lebanon, it worked.
But you also get, going back a little bit further, there's a great idea in the 17th century of Britain itself. There's a Phoenician power, sea-going empire and so on. And the trick there was that France was always identified with Rome, great territorial power.
And so to be Phoenician was not only a kind of heroic in a way, but it also made it clear that you were absolutely not like those awful French. And this is made extremely clear. some of the writings of the time. But then in Ireland in the 18th century, it works completely the other way around.
There's a real intellectual fashion for saying that the Irish are Phoenician, whether that's literally as a kind of Phoenician colony in some cases, or just, you know, inspired by Phoenicia. And the idea there is that, like Carthage, you know, this is a great cultural nation that has been abused by their neighbours, so not Rome but Britain, making Britain Rome so that Ireland can be Phoenician.
Wow. Yeah, it's a lot of fun interpretation of archaeological features of Ireland along those lines in the 18th century. Well, Josephine, I know we've just scratched the surface.
I know we could talk so much more, but what a fascinating chat this has been, giving a great overview, an introduction to who the Phoenicians, who they actually were and how important they were in antiquity and their enduring legacy down to the present day. It's been absolutely brilliant. Last but certainly not least, you've written a few works related to Phoenicians, if I'm correct?
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