Tyre, the City of Wanderers
The tale of this Phoenician mother-city begins on a floating island, and ends with a brutal siege
A long time ago, so it is said, a pair of floating islands wandered above the surface of the Mediterranean Sea.
On one of these islands stood a very strange sight: a burning olive tree, unconsumed by the flames.
A closer look revealed stranger sights still: An eagle perched atop the burning tree. A snake wound around the tree’s trunk. Neither animal, apparently, was harmed by the fire, nor did they have any desire to harm each other.
The Phoenicians, so the legend says, were instructed to sail after these floating islands by the god Melqart, who taught them the art of shipbuilding. After what must have been a long and perilous chase across the sea, these brave mariners managed to catch up with their quarry and scale the floating island with the burning olive tree. Then, following the orders of Melqart’s oracle, they caught the eagle on top of the tree, and sacrificed it.
This eagle sacrifice had the effect of flipping some sort of antigravity magic from “on” to “off,” because the floating islands stopped their wandering and fell into the sea, where they remain to this day.
These were not particularly huge floating islands; the big one was perhaps the size of a few city blocks. The Greeks who later recounted this legend called them “Ambrosial Rocks.” And the name of the city built upon them — Tyre — means “Rock” in Phoenician.
While we should perhaps be skeptical that the rocky foundations of Tyre ever magically floated, the city really did start out as two nearby islands, which lay about a half mile from the coast of modern-day Lebanon. Shortly after 1,000 B.C. the Tyrian monarch Hiram connected the two islands with a landfill.
In this form, Tyre became a center of commerce famous throughout the ancient world. Its twin harbors were among the best in the Mediterranean. Supplied by sea, and defended by high walls all around the island, Tyre proved a tough nut for ancient conquerors to crack — until Alexander the Great came along. Not only did he destroy much of the city in 332 B.C., he destroyed its status as an island, by building an enormous causeway from the mainland.
Tyre survived Alexander, ruled by the Seleucid Dynasty, but as a ghost of its former self. It wasn’t even an island anymore — and still isn’t.
Nevertheless, Tyre had a pretty good run: almost a thousand years as a major, if not dominant, seafaring power throughout the Mediterranean. Tyrian “merchant princes” founded colonies all along the North African coast, the most famous of which — Carthage — became a Mediterranean superpower in its own right. Tyrians managed to achieve their influence not through military might, but through commercial skill, clever diplomacy — and a thirst for wandering.
Early Tyre
The founding myth of Tyre is probably a later innovation in the city’s long history, since the god Melqart did not seem to be worshiped in the Bronze Age. A settlement on the mainland, called Ushu, dates to 2,750 B.C. The island city is usually considered Tyre proper, but the hinterland of Ushu often functioned as its suburb, supplying the island with food, freshwater, and other essentials.
Like the rest of the eastern Mediterranean coast, the inhabitants of this land were Semitic-speaking people known as Canaanites. Like other Canaanite cities, Tyre was often subject to more powerful civilizations that surrounded it. To the east: Mesopotamia, the home base of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. To the north lived the powerful Hittites, who pioneered the use of iron armaments. West was the Great Sea, controlled largely by the Minoans and Mycenaeans and, to the south, the Egyptians, who were the closest and most dominating of Tyre’s foreign neighbors.
The earliest writing from Tyre are a series of letters — in the form of cuneiform tablets — sent by the Tyrian ruler Abimilku to the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. At this time, around 1350 B.C., Tyre was a client state of Egypt. In the letter, Abimilku writes to the Pharaoh with practiced obsequiousness.
I fall at the feet of the king, my lord. My lord is the sun — who comes forth over all lands day by day according to the way of the sun, his gracious father; who gives life by his sweet breath and returns with his north wind; who establishes the entire land in peace by the power of his arm; and who gives forth his cry in the sky like Baal. All the land is frightened at his cry!
If you ever get a letter that begins like that, you might suspect the letter writer wants something from you. Indeed, Abimilku sells out his rival ruler in Sidon, accusing him of siding with rebels against Egyptian rule; and in subsequent letters, when this rebellion seems to have spread to Tyre, Abimilku begs the Egyptian king to send troops to help him. Poor, poor Abimilku.
Despite the unfortunate turmoil facing Tyre, Abimilku’s letters — together with other so-called Amarna letters from other rulers in Canaan and Mesopotamia — demonstrate the existence of a well-oiled international system of trade and diplomacy throughout the Near East. But this system would not last. Around 1200 B.C., a series of invasions and other disasters left the Egyptians, the Hittites, and the Mycenaeans — the superpowers of the region — utterly crippled.
Tyre survived the chaos of this so-called “Bronze Age Collapse.” And the city-state’s enterprising mariners were happy to fill the power vacuum left behind.
The first colonialists
The Phoenicians — the name given to Canaanites by the Greeks — were famous in antiquity for their sailing prowess. But it was mariners from Tyre who had the greatest impact throughout the Mediterranean. With the Bronze Age officially over, iron was now in high demand, and Tyrian mariners became experts at shuttling iron ore from Spain and Mediterranean islands to more “civilized” places in the Middle East. Long before Rome was founded, Tyrian colonists established trading posts and fortifications on the islands of Sardinia and Sicily. To support this lucrative trade, Tyrians established colonies along the coast of North Africa, Spain, and even beyond the “Pillars of Hercules” that form the gateway from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean.
Tyre’s Mediterranean trading network is the earliest example of colonialism in history. And here I mean colonialism in the same sense that it is used for European colonialism post-Middle Ages. To the ancient Phoenicians — and most of the civilized world at the time — the western Mediterranean was an unexplored wilderness inhabited by strange savages. The Tyrians came to these places first as traders, then as resource exploiters, and, due to their superior technology, usually ended up as de facto rulers.
It’s not clear that Tyrian colonizers were as racist as their later European spiritual successors, but they were equally fond of spreading their religion to the natives. Melqart, originally the civic god of Tyre, became the official god of exploration and colonization. Melqart’s cult was the glue that held the Tyrian colonial network together — and the conduit through which Tyre was enriched from colonial plunder. The famous colony of Carthage, for example, sent back one tenth of its local profits as tribute to the Temple of Melqart in Tyre. (The Greeks, who were also hopscotching around the Mediterranean at this time, associated Melqart with their own wandering, colonizing demigod Heracles, and in many places local worshipers seem to have amalgamated the two divine figures.)
Tyrians found further success in a tenuous alliance with a new kingdom to the south: Israel. The origins of the Jewish state are controversial, but shortly after the Bronze Age Collapse, a new religious sect controlled the southern half of Canaan. And these Yahweh-worshiping folks were decidedly not friendly to the Baal-worshiping Phoenicians to the north. Nevertheless, beginning around 980 B.C., King Hiram of Tyre sought out a lucrative partnership with Israel’s King David, winning access to trade routes across the Red Sea and Arabia. The Bible recounts that Hiram sent supplies, along with expert craftsmen and architects, to build the first Temple in Jerusalem for David’s successor Solomon. The two kings — Hiram and Solomon — are even said to have exchanged riddles, and wagered money on their ability to stump each other. (A later marriage between the Tyrian princess Jezebel and the Jewish king Ahab was intended to further diplomatic ties between the two countries … but relations broke down irrevocably when Jewish traditionalists threw the Baal-worshiping princess out a window.)
By 800 B.C., Tyre’s colonies were flourishing in the western Mediterranean, even as Tyre itself came under increasing pressure from the Assyrian Empire. Based in the northern Mesopotamian cities of Ashur and Ninevah, the Assyrians were a fearsome military force, but they were mostly landlubbers. They knew they had to rely on the Phoenicians’ extensive maritime trade to provide them with all sorts of goodies they wanted, particularly iron. Yet they also knew the Tyrians could not hope to resist them militarily. So over time, Assyrian demand for Tyrian-traded iron ore became … demands, for more iron ore as tribute — or else.
The Assyrians never conquered Tyre directly — the Tyrians could hole up in their island for a prolonged siege, and the Assyrians were hopeless at sea. But war and sieges were bad for business, and in the end, Tyrians calculated that they were better off just becoming a vassal state of the Assyrian Empire. Now the city’s ever-dwindling autonomy depended on its ability to supply the Assyrians with an ever-increasing amount of tribute.
Tyre vs. the Neo-Babylonians
The Assyrians were not known for treating their subjects kindly, and in 605 B.C., their subjects in Mesopotamia had apparently had enough. An alliance, led by the Babylonians, captured the Assyrian capital at Harran. A new Mesopotamia-based empire emerged, called the Neo-Babylonian Empire to distinguish it from earlier Babylonian civilization.
The Tyrians were delighted to get the Assyrians off their backs, but their situation epitomized the saying “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” The Neo-Babylonians were no less hungry for conquest than the Assyrians. After conquering what was left of the Jewish kingdom, the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II turned his sights on Tyre.
It’s not entirely clear why the relatively dovish Tyrians decided to throw down against the Babylonians — political machinations involving a resurgent Egypt may have been in play — but throw down they did, and so beginning in 585 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre for thirteen years. The mainland suburbs stood no chance, but the island held out surprisingly well, protected by walls around the entire landmass said to be 150 feet high.
Ezekiel, a prophet according to Jewish tradition, lived as a captive in Babylon during this period, and he alludes to the dire straights of besieged Tyre. Ezekiel reports that Yahweh, apparently feeling slighted by Tyre’s residents, has it out for the island city:
Thus says the Lord God:
See, I am against you, O Tyre!
I will hurl many nations against you,
as the sea hurls its waves.
They shall destroy the walls of Tyre
and break down its towers.
I will scrape its soil from it
and make it a bare rock.
It shall become, in the midst of the sea,
a place for spreading nets.
I have spoken, says the Lord God.
It shall become plunder for the nations,
and its daughter-towns in the country
shall be killed by the sword.
Then they shall know that I am the Lord.
(Ezekial 26:3–6)
The Lord God goes on like this for a whole chapter, and specifically names Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon as the agent of his wrath: “I will bring against Tyre from the north King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, king of kings, together with horses, chariots, cavalry, and a great and powerful army.”
Living in Babylon, Ezekiel probably heard word of Nebuchadnezzar’s siege. Maybe he assumed it would go about as well for the Tyrians as it had for his own people of Judah.
But Nebuchadnezzar never did destroy the city. Tyre managed to hold out for thirteen years, drinking brackish water, resupplying by sea, until the two sides could negotiate a ceasefire. Tyre agreed to recognize Babylonian hegemony, but the Babylonians left them their island city and even some degree of autonomy.
The Babylonians had their own problems anyway. Their hold on Mesopotamia was threatened by another rising superpower: the Persian Empire.
The Persian king Cyrus II conquered Babylon in 538 B.C. Compared to the Babylonians and the Assyrians, though, this Cyrus guy was religiously tolerant, relatively merciful, and all around pretty alright for a conqueror. (As evidence, Cyrus is the only foreign ruler the Bible portrays in a wholly good light.) Tyre worked out an arrangement with their new Persian overlords that was similar to the one they had with the Assyrians — they’d function as the navy and merchant marine for the land-based Persians, in exchange for autonomy. But the relationship between Persia and Tyre seemed to be more equitable. When Cyrus’s son Cambyses expressed his desire to extend his conquest westward to Carthage, the Tyrians refused to set sail, balking at the notion that they’d fight their fellow Phoenicians. An Assyrian emperor would have blown a gasket, but Cambyses acquiesced and looked elsewhere for conquest.
Unfortunately for the Tyrians, making friends with the Persians would earn them the enmity of the Persians’ arch-enemies: the Greeks.
Tyre vs. Alexander of Macedon
I’ve never liked calling Alexander “the Great.” Like many violent conquerors, he was clearly a lunatic. Alexander of Macedon took control of Greece at a time when the Persian Empire was waning, and in 334 B.C. he quickly pushed into Persian-occupied Asia Minor to extend his empire. The defeated Persian army fled back to Mesopotamia. If Alexander had pursued the Persians, he’d have their Phoenician allies along the Mediterranean coast at his back. So he turned south and marched toward the Phoenician heartland and its greatest city, Tyre.
The Tyrians made it clear they had no desire to cross swords with Alexander. They offered the conqueror a golden crown as a token of their submission. But remember how I called Alexander a lunatic? It seems the guy sincerely believed he was the descendant of Heracles, and later in life even claimed to be the son of Zeus. As such, what he really wanted from Tyre was access to their holy Temple of Melqart — who the Greeks believed was Heracles by another name — so he could offer a ritual sacrifice directly to his close divine relative.
Imagine if Alexander had taken his army to Jerusalem and demanded to enter the holy Temple of Yahweh — who the Greeks identified as Zeus — so he could offer sacrifice to his dad. It would have not gone over well. While the Tyrians don’t seem to be as fanatical as the ancient Jews were about religion, Melqart was their god, the founder of their city, and his temple in Tyre was the pulsing heart of Phoenician civilization. The Tyrians pointed out to Alexander’s emissaries that no foreigners, not even their Persian overlords, were allowed in Melqart’s Temple. They were happy to direct Alexander to another Melqart temple on the mainland, which was actually older than the temple on the island. But it seems Alexander did not like hearing “no” for an answer. So he laid siege to the city.
This was not the Tyrians’ first siege warfare rodeo. They’d survived against the Babylonians for thirteen years, and even scrapped with the Assyrians. They knew Alexander had no time to get bogged down in a lengthy siege, with the entire Persian army waiting for a chance to counterattack him. Plus, Carthage had promised to aid Tyre by sea, and while the Greeks were no slouches at naval warfare, Alexander did not bring a navy with him on his invasion.
When the Tyrians looked over their 150-foot walls and saw Alexander’s army scraping the mainland city clean of stones and debris and dumping them into the ocean, they were more curious than concerned. Even when it became clear that Alexander was intent on constructing an enormous causeway across the sea — a mole, in military terms — the Tyrians simply sent out ships to harass the workers with arrows and slung stones. Meanwhile, Tyrian divers undermined the mole’s foundations, so it would disintegrate in strong ocean currents.
But the work continued. The mole extended closer and closer across the half-mile expanse of water. Alexander’s army shielded themselves from Tyrian projectiles with hides and sailcloth, and erected two huge towers to launch their own projectiles back.
In response, the Tyrians loaded a ship with bitumen and sulfur, sailed it straight for the mole, and set it afire as the crew jumped overboard to safety. The defenders behind Tyre’s walls must have cheered as they watched the ship explode and Alexander’s towers collapse into fiery ruins.
At this point Alexander realized he probably needed a navy. And unfortunately for Tyre, their northern sister city and sometimes-rival Sidon was happy to oblige Alexander — perhaps in part because the Sidonians had no impregnable island fortress from which they could politely tell Alexander “no.” Alexander recruited more ships from other cities around the coast, all of whom could tell which way the wind was blowing.
The Tyrians must have gotten a good sense of what direction that wind was blowing too, when they saw the approaching warships. They scrambled to send their women, children, and elderly to Carthage and pulled in their own fleet for a last-ditch defense.
The Tyrians fought ferociously. They threw giant stones into the water to block the fleet from approaching. They sent more divers to cut the enemy ships’ moorings cables. As Alexander’s forces approached the city walls, Tyrians poured molten sand on the attackers. To cut the ropes of battering-rams, the Tyrians attached huge scythes to spare yard-arms from ships and swung them down from the parapets.
But the city was doomed. It was Alexander’s navy, and not his army, that ultimately broke through the wall, south of his mole. Once the wall was breached, Alexander’s forces poured through, and they showed no mercy. Eight thousand Tyrians died in the fighting, and 30,000 were sold into slavery. Alexander also crucified 2,000 young Tyrian men as vengeance for the deaths of Macedonian prisoners.
In the end, the siege lasted just half a year — from January to July of 332 B.C. Alexander got to perform his idiotic ritual in the temple, and with Phoenicia under his thumb he went on to conquer Egypt and Mesopotamia and Persia all the way to India before his army finally had enough of his nonsense and forced him to turn back to Babylon, where he died from a drunken fever.
Tyre after Alexander
Alexander’s brutal sack was not the end of Tyre. The city recovered quickly. Under Alexander’s successors, the Seleucids, Tyre once again became a center of Mediterranean commerce. It played the same role as part of the Roman Empire. Paul the Apostle visited Tyre, and in the 300’s, Saint Jerome seemed confused at the existence of this beautiful, thriving city when Ezekiel had so thoroughly prophesied its destruction.
After the rise of Islam, Tyre submitted to the conquest of Caliph Umar and, as it had so often in its history, thrived under yet another round of new management. Tyre fell to Crusaders from western Europe, and recovered, then fell back to the Muslims under the Mamluks, then recovered. And so on, and so forth, up into the modern age. There is a great deal of continuity from this ancient commercial center to the modern Lebanese metropolis.
But at a certain point, the story of Phoenician Tyre has to end. And while the city survived Alexander’s sacking, its identity as the jewel of Phoenician civilization did not. The city founded on floating islands had been attached to the shore, and its wandering merchant princes had nothing left of the Great Sea to explore.
Note: Abimilku’s letter is translated here. But as with much of the largely-vanished Phoenician civilization, the rest of Tyre’s history must be pieced together from the writings of non-Phoenician authorities from antiquity, such as Josephus and Herodotus. My main sources for this information are The History of Tyre, by Wallace Fleming, and Carthage Must Be Destroyed, by Richard Miles.
Feel free to follow me, @DanielKenis, on the Twitters. And for more stories about our Phoenician friends, check out my publication, The Purple People:
