The Phoenicians were notable merchants and traders from ancient Phoenicia along the coast of modern Lebanon. They established many colonies throughout the Mediterranean and were skilled seafarers and navigators. The Phoenicians made important contributions including inventing the alphabet around 1600 BC, which evolved into scripts used around the world today. Their most important city was Tyre, which produced the prestigious purple dye made from sea snails, giving its name to Tyrian purple.

1. TYRIAN PURPLE
 The Phoenicians were famous for their purple dye. They made them from the mucous secretions of a sea snail.
 Ancient region corresponding to modern Lebanon, with adjoining parts of modern Syria and Palestine.
 Its inhabitants, the Phoenicians, were notable merchants, traders, and colonizers of the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium BC.
 The chief cities of Phoenicia (excluding colonies) were Sidon, Tyre, and Berot (modern Beirut).
 Although its inhabitants had a homogeneous civilization and considered themselves a single nation, Phoenicia was not a unified

2. state but a group of city-kingdoms, one of which usually dominated the others. The most important of these cities were Simyra, Zarephath (Sarafand), Byblos, Jubeil, Arwad (Rouad), Acco (‘Akko), Sidon (Şaydā), Tripolis (Tripoli), Tyre (Sur), and Berytus (Beirut). The two most dominant were Tyre and Sidon, which alternated as sites of the ruling power.
 Phoenicians were also called “Canaanites.” In Hebrew the word kenaʿani has the secondary meaning of “merchant,” a term that well characterizes the Phoenicians.
ORIGINS
 The Phoenicians probably arrived in the area about 3000 BC. Nothing is known of their original homeland, though some traditions place it in the region of the Persian Gulf.
 In connection with their maritime trade the city-kingdoms founded many colonies, notably Utica and Carthage in North Africa, on the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea, and Tarshish in southern Spain. Tyre was the leader of the Phoenician cities.
CONTRIBUTIONS
 The most important Phoenician contribution to civilization was the alphabet. Purple dye, called Tyrian purple, and the invention of glass, are also ascribed to the Phoenicians.
 Their industries, particularly the manufacture of textiles and dyes, metalworking, and glassmaking, were notable in the ancient world, and Phoenician cities were famous for their pantheistic religion.
NAVIGATION AND USE OF POLARIS
 Essential for the establishment of commercial supremacy was the Phoenician skill in navigation and seafaring. The Phoenicians are credited with the discovery and use of Polaris (the North Star).
 Fearless and patient navigators, they ventured into regions where no one else dared to go, and always, with an eye to their monopoly, they carefully guarded the secrets of their trade routes and discoveries and their knowledge of

3. winds and currents.
COMMERCE
 The exports of Phoenicia as a whole included particularly cedar and pine woods from Lebanon, fine linen from Tyre, Byblos, and Berytos, cloth dyed with the famous Tyrian purple (made from the snail Murex), embroideries from Sidon, metalwork and glass, glazed faience, wine, salt, and dried fish.
 The Phoenicians received in return raw materials such as papyrus, ivory, ebony, silk, amber, ostrich eggs, spices, incense, horses, gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, jewels, and precious stones.
PHOENICIA: RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY
 Each city had its special deity, usually known as its Baal, or lord, and in all cities the temple was the center of civil and social life. The most important Phoenician deity was Astarte.
 Astarte or Ashtoreth, the supreme female divinity of the Phoenician nation, the goddess of love and fruitfulness. She symbolized the female principle in all its aspects, as Baal symbolized maleness. Astarte has been identified as the goddess of the moon, the goddess of wild nature and the goddess of love and beauty.
 Baal king of the gods was considered as the universal god of fertility and in that capacity
his title was Prince, Lord of the Earth. He was also called the Lord of Rain and Dew, the two forms of moisture that were indispensable for fertile soil. Also as a storm god, he has the ability to ride on the Clouds. In Phoenician, Baal was called Baal Shaman, Lord of the Heavens.
 According to the mythology, Baal, the god of life and fertility, was locked in mortal combat with Mot, the god of death and sterility. If Baal
triumphed, a seven-year cycle of fertility would ensue; but, if he were vanquished by Mot, seven years of drought and famine would ensue.
 Ishtar, chief goddess was the Great Mother, the goddess of fertility and the queen of heaven. On the other hand, her character had destructive attributes; she was considered a goddess of hunting and war and was

4. depicted with sword, bow, and quiver of arrows. As goddess of love she brought destruction to many of her lovers.
 Phoenicians believes in oracles. Oracles are responses that were supposed to be given by divine inspiration and were manifested through the medium of human beings; through their effect on certain objects, as in the tinkling, of a cauldron when hit by a chain impelled by the wind; or by the actions of sacred animals.
 The oracles in Phoenicia were associated with the deities Beelzebub and other Balaam.
 Cadmus, for example, a Phoenician prince who founded the city of Thebes in Greece. When his sister Europa was kidnapped by the god Zeus, Cadmus was ordered by his father, the king of Phoenicia, to find her or not to return home. Unable to locate his sister, he consulted the oracle at Delphi and was instructed to abandon his search and instead to found a city.
 Bronze figurines from Byblos of the early 2nd millennium are more distinctly Phoenician, as are daggers and other ceremonial weapons found there.
 Phoenician goldsmiths and silversmiths were skilled artisans, but the quality of their work depended on their clientele. Ivory work was always of the highest standards, probably because of Egyptian competition. Phoenicians sold their wares all over the

5. Middle East, and the spread of Middle Eastern style and iconography, like the alphabet, can be attributed to these great traders of antiquity.
 The most able shipbuilders of ancient times were the Phoenicians. They constructed merchant vessels capable of carrying large cargoes between the colonies that rimmed the Mediterranean Sea, such as Carthage in North Africa and Cádiz in Spain.
 Phoenician merchants built hulls from sturdy wood planks and partially covered them with a platform, or deck, that protected the crew and cargo from weather and ocean spray.
 Merchant ship design steadily improved, enabling the Phoenicians to navigate beyond the Mediterranean Sea as far as the British Isles and the Canary Islands.
PHOENICIAN CARGO SHIP
 Considered the best shipbuilders of the time, the Phoenicians designed boats that depended more on wind than on manpower. Phoenician ships could carry more cargo than galley ships, which needed room for oars and rowers.
 Competition for dominance in maritime trade between the Phoenicians and the Greeks led to frequent skirmishes at sea.
 Finding their merchant vessels clumsy and unresponsive in battle, the Phoenicians developed the war galley, an oared vessel that could maneuver and attack when there was little or no wind to drive the sails.
 Seagoing merchants from Phoenicia began using a system of insurance known as bottomry about 1200 bc.

6.  In this system, backers loaned money to merchants to finance voyages. Merchants offered their ships as collateral for such loans. When a trip succeeded, the merchant would pay the trip’s backer the original loan plus interest, the equivalent of a premium. If a ship went down on its voyage, the trip’s backer would cancel the merchant’s loan.
 Forms of insurance resembling bottomry had spread to other parts of Asia and the Mediterranean by 400 BC.
 Around 1600 B.C. the Phoenicians invented 22 ‘magic signs’ called the alphabet, and passed them onto the world. The Phoenicians gave the alphabet to the Greeks who adopted it; the evolution of the Phoenician Alphabet led to the Latin letters of present- day.
 The Phoenician alphabet, called also the Proto-Canaanite alphabet was a non- pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It is classified as an abjad because it records only consonantal sounds.
 Phoenician became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it was assimilated by many other cultures and evolved.
 The Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of modern Arabic script, while Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet was a direct successor of Phoenician, though certain letter values were changed to represent vowels.

7.  When Alexander the Great invaded Asia and defeated Persia in 333 BC, Sidon, Arwad, and Byblos capitulated to Macedonia. Tyre refused to submit, and it took Alexander a 7- month siege in 332 BC to capture the city.
 After this defeat the Phoenicians gradually lost their separate identity as they were absorbed into the Greco-Macedonian empire. The cities became Hellenized, and, in 64 BC, even the name of Phoenicia disappeared, when the territory was made part of the Roman province of Syria.