Who were the Phoenicians?

 

Phoenicians settled along the Mediterranean coast mainly in what is now Lebanon and also Syria and Israel between 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 city. Phoenicians did not regard themselves as being part of Phoenician state, but rather as Canaanites with a specific culture living in rival cities that were loosely confederated. The name Phoenician was given to them by the Greeks and comes from the word phoenix, possibly related to the purple dye the Phoenicians produced. They were a Semitic people and therefore 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 did this by setting up colonies as part of their trade network. These settlements included Jaffa, Dor, and Acre (Acco) on the Israeli coast. They also set up colonies in Anatolia, Cyprus and Carthage, now Tunisia in North Africa, to consolidate their trading influence. Carthage would become the chief maritime and commercial power in the western Mediterranean, and at a later date would come into conflict with Rome in the Punic wars. The Sea People would also attempt to settle along the Israeli coast during this period and their interactions and conflicts with the Sea People are unclear as there is no written information available and we are dependent on archeology.

 

The Phoenicians were well for their industrial extraction of purple dye from murix shellfish. They probably had the monopoly on its production and use in clothes. It would also be the source of the blue dye used to color the fringes of Jews on their garments. Because it was a luxury item for the upper class, its use for Jews was forbidden by the Romans and its use in the coloring of fringes lapsed. Only now has it been renewed among some 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.   

 

Their religion was Canaanite and included Canaanite gods, prominent among them being Baal, the god of storms, fertility and agriculture and Astarte (also known as Ishtar or Ashtart), the goddess of love, beauty and fertility, although the different city states may have had different gods in their pantheon. These were, of course, the gods that were a temptation to the Israelites when they first came to Israel. Baal-worship returned to 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 northern 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 Canaanites first settled in Israel in the 3rd century BCE and the Phoenicians were possibly an off-shoot of them. 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 that they were ever able to displace them. King Solomon had a friendly relationship with King Hiram of Tyre and he provided him with help in the construction of the Temple by providing cedar and cypress timber, which was floated to Jaffa, and skilled craftsman.  

 

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

 

Yet some have questioned whether the Phoenicians should really 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 at a site called Serabit el-Khadim and have been dated to the Middle Bronze age between the 18th to 16th centuries BCE. Moreover, the Israelites were a literate society to some degree when they arrived in Canaan with Joshua at the beginning of the 14th century and it is doubtful that the Ten Commandments would have been given in hieroglyphics as no one would have been able to understand them. An alternative suggestion, therefore, is that this alphabet was developed from hieroglyphics by the Israelites when they lived in Egypt and they brought it to Canaan. The Phoenicians immediately appreciated the value of this script for their trade and adopted it. This would have been relatively easy as they spoke the same language and would have used the same consonants. From here it spread to the Greek world and they were the ones who added vowels to the alphabet using Hebrew/Phoenician symbols that were not of use to them.