The Phoenician Connection
An introduction to the ancient Semitic seafarers who tie history together
In The Big Lebowski, the Dude bemoans the loss of a rug that, we are told, “really tied the room together.” That’s how I feel about the Phoenicians, an ancient culture mostly lost to time, but whose presence is nevertheless felt almost anywhere you look in history. The ancient Romans, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, and Israelites all had deep connections with the Phoenicians. The Israelites probably were Phoenicians, or close cousins anyway. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon remarks,
Phoenicia and Palestine will for ever live in the memory of mankind; since America, as well as Europe, has received letters from the one, and religion from the other.
Not a bad legacy for a mostly vanished culture. We hear a lot about ancient Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The Phoenicians sat right in the middle of these three great civilizations, and with their trade and technology they turned the Mediterranean Sea into a giant cultural melting pot. It’s time they got their due.
The land of purple
The word Phoenician is what the ancient Greeks called the Semitic inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean coastland. Phoenician comes from the Greek word for a brilliant reddish-purple color, phoinix. The Phoenicians were famous throughout the Mediterranean for their red-purple dyes, extracted from a rare, spiky, cannibalistic snail. The Roman term Punic is derived from Phoenician.
The Bible uses the term Canaan for this land, and the etymology of the Semitic word Canaan may also refer to the color purple. The ancient Egyptians called this part of the Mediterranean coastland Retjenu. Today, the heartland of Phoenicia — western Syria, Lebanon, and Israel — is often called the Levant, meaning “east” or “land of the rising sun.” In Arabic, it’s known as al-Sham, “the land of the left hand.”
It is not clear what the inhabitants of this land called themselves, or if they even considered themselves a single civilization. Like many ancient cultures, the Phoenicians/Canaanites lived in distinct city-states. The three most important cities — Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon — are clustered in modern-day Lebanon, but the Phoenicians also established colony cities throughout the Mediterranean Sea. What bound them together was a language, similar to Hebrew, and the worship of a distinctive pantheon with deities named Baal, El, Asherah, and Anat. I’ll follow general convention and call them Canaanites during the Bronze Age and Phoenicians during the Iron Age.
East of Egypt, West of Mesopotamia
The Canaanites weren’t the only Semitic-speaking people in town. The great Mesopotamian civilizations of Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria were also Semites, and their empires often dominated the Levantine coast. The Canaanite pantheon has many parallels to Mesopotamian religion. Both feature a storm god (Baal in Canaan, Marduk in Babylonia) who fights a malevolent ocean deity (Yam in Canaan, Tiamat in Babylonia). Both have a “high god” — El in Canaan, Anu in Babylonia — who lives in heaven, and more malevolent deities who live in the underworld. The Canaanites, like the Mesopotamians, wrote on clay tablets in the complicated cuneiform writing system. But the Canaanites distinguished themselves from their neighbors to the east with their early adoption of the alphabet, invented in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula — likely by Canaanites working in a turquoise mine there.
The alphabet is just one way that the Canaanites’ proximity to Egypt set them apart from their fellow Semites in Mesopotamia. Egypt’s influence is evident in Canaanite religion: the Canaanite god Kothar Wa-Khasis, a weaponsmith and technologist, was explicitly said to be from Egypt. Canaanites often migrated to Egypt, and the chariot-riding Canaanites known as the Hyksos conquered Egypt around 1650. But more often, domination went the other way. According to the Bible, the Israelites were native Canaanites who made extensive contacts with powerful Egyptian rulers — most famously, as slaves of the Pharaoh. Scholars are not sure how much truth there is to the legend of the Exodus, but there is a great deal of archaeological evidence that Egypt controlled Canaan during this period, with Canaanite rulers acting as clients of the Egyptian Empire. This fact is discerned from the Amarna letters, a series of diplomatic cuneiform tablets from the 1300’s B.C., addressed to the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Written in the contemporary lingua franca of Akkadian, the tablets sent from Canaanite leaders are obsequious toward the Pharaoh. Some even beg the Egyptian leader to send troops to help put down violent uprisings by nomads known as Apiru or Habiru.
If that word piques your interest, you’re not alone — it looks cognate with Hebrew, though scholars are not sure there’s an actual connection. Its meaning, in the context of the Amarna letters, was more likely akin to “rural folks,” “outsiders,” or perhaps something like “rednecks.” Still, it’s interesting to imagine the political dynamics in Canaan in the 1300’s — cosmopolitan city-states, subservient to a foreign empire, and surrounded by hostile rural marauders who may or may not believe in an austere monotheistic religion. It reminds me of modern-day Iraq or Afghanistan.
North of Israel, South of Greece
Around 1200 B.C., a series of invasions by the mysterious Sea People left the major powers of the Near East in ruins. The Canaan that emerged from the so-called “Bronze Age Collapse” looked quite different afterward. The southern Canaanites became the state of Israel, where the high Canaanite god El-Elyon seems to have been identified with — or absorbed by — the cult of Yahweh, a deity famous for his inability to share a pantheon.
North of Israel, however, the Canaanites continued worshiping Baal and company, and the coastal cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos soon took control of the neglected sea trade and prospered. It was these seafaring northern Canaanites who the Greeks called Phoenicians, and the two cultures greatly influenced each other. The Greeks credit the Phoenician prince Cadmus for giving them the alphabet. The Phoenicians also spread their shipbuilding techniques to the Greeks, notably the bireme, a vessel with two rows of oars for increased propulsion. The Greeks, for their part, seem to have traded extensively with the Phoenicians, judging from the quantity of Greek goods found in Phoenician cities.
Over time, the Phoenicians and Greeks “split the sea,” with the Greeks taking the north and the Phoenicians the south. The Greeks are famous for their Italian colonies of Magna Graecia, but it was the Phoenicians who first colonized the breadth of the Mediterranean, establishing cities as far west as Spain by 1000 B.C. They may well have sailed much farther. Herodotus recounts a story of a Phoenician expedition circumnavigating the entire continent of Africa. Herodotus himself says he’s skeptical, but the details of the story do fit the geography.
At War with the Romans
In the Levant, the great Phoenician city-states fell to the mighty Assyrian Empire, whose expansion in the 700’s B.C. also absorbed the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel. But far to the west, Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, became the most powerful Phoenician colony. For centuries, no power could challenge Carthage’s domination of the western Mediterranean, not even the Greeks.
That situation changed when the Romans expanded into the island of Sicily, a giant breadbasket smack between Italy and Carthage. Between 264 and 164 B.C., Rome and Carthage fought three wars — the “Punic Wars,” as the Romans called them. During the second war, the Carthaginian general Hannibal famously led his army, complete with elephant cavalry, from Spain, across the Alps, and into Italy, where he destroyed the Romans in battle after battle.
But despite Hannibal’s military genius, the Phoenicians never actually won any of the wars they fought against the Romans, and after the third Punic War, Carthage was annihilated. The Romans eventually extended their empire to ring the entire Mediterranean Sea, winning control of all the Phoenicians’ north African colonies as well as their heartland in Syria, Lebanon, and Judea. Of course, by this time, the Phoenicians had long since lost control of their heartland. They’d been conquered by a succession of empires: first the Assyrians, then the Neo-Babylonians, then the Persians, and finally and most destructively, the Greeks under Alexander the Great. Those Purple People were truly gifted at invention and writing, wonderful at sailing and exploration … but not so great at defending territory against imperial conquest.
One of the last vestiges of ancient Phoenician culture lay far from the coast, in the desert city of Palmyra. Situated between the rival Roman and Persian empires — and right on top of the lucrative Silk Road trade route from the sea to inland markets — Palmyra once featured a great temple to the Canaanite god Baal-Shamin. When the Roman Empire finally conquered a stubborn Palmyran dynasty in 273 A.D., they destroyed the city but spared this magnificent temple. And so the building stood throughout history, a reminder of our shared Phoenician heritage … until the Islamic State blew it up for no reason in 2015, thus proving to the world that they are far more insecure about their religion than Emperor Aurelian was about his.
Of course the Islamic State is not at all representative of Islam, but it is somewhat ironic that the book they invoked to justify their vandalism of Phoenician monuments — the Quran — was recorded in Arabic, a script based on the Phoenician alphabet. So is the Hebrew script of the Torah, the holy text of those other famously iconoclastic monotheists, the Jews. Both Jews and Muslims get the name of their God from the Canaanite god El, an ancient paternal deity who rules the pantheon from the highest seat of heaven. Whatever your beliefs about God, it is hard to ignore the deep connections between the religion of the Canaanites and the Middle Eastern religions followed today. And long before Christianity — sometimes characterized as a synthesis of “Athens and Jerusalem” — the Phoenicians were melding Greek and Semitic modes of thought.
Which is not to say that Phoenician religion was the same as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The Phoenicians sacrificed children to their gods, a practice widely criticized by their Jewish, Greek, and Roman contemporaries. In defense of the Phoenicians, it’s not clear how much of their child-sacrificing reputation was exaggerated, or outright invented, by their enemies. And it’s not as if any other ancient culture has clean hands (or any modern culture, for that matter).
I have never been much for ancestor worship, and I think this is why I’m so fascinated by the Phoenicians. We are all the products of previous cultures, and we tend to inherit traditions, warts and all. But what actually survives of Phoenician culture? Conquered and dispersed and assimilated again and again, they’ve left behind a legacy that is as pervasive as it is subtle. Few Phoenician monuments still stand. Phoenician religious and civil traditions — unlike those of the Jews or Romans — were not self-sustaining. And it is a sad irony that these brilliant, prolific inventors of the alphabet did not manage to leave behind any written histories of themselves, unless you count the Bible, which I don’t. Whether their records were destroyed or if they never bothered to write records in the first place, the non-Jewish Phoenicians are now merely subjects of other cultures’ storytellers.
But there’s an upside to this quietness. When I study the Phoenicians, no voices from the past confront me, shouting to submit to laws or gods or imperial might. No crumbling monuments or creaking theologies define the Phoenicians’ legacy. We are forced to encounter the Phoenicians not as they understood themselves, or imagined themselves, but as they were seen by their fellow human beings, lensed through all the different civilizations they interacted with, for better or worse.
Feel free to follow me, @DanielKenis, on the Twitters. And for more stories about our Phoenician friends, check out my publication, The Purple People:
