Who were the Phoenicians? We know they dominated sea trade in the Mediterranean for 3,000 years. Now DNA testing and recent archaeological finds are revealing just what the Phoenician legacy meant to the ancient world—and to our own.
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The tests could confirm that men of Tyre - Christians and Muslims alike - are related to the ancient traders. Wells and Zalloua also took samples in other parts of the Phoenician world, where results may reveal the same lineage in areas of former colonies like Sardinia and Malta.
Who were the Phoenicians?
ReplyDeleteWe know they dominated sea trade in the Mediterranean for 3,000 years. Now DNA testing and recent archaeological finds are revealing just what the Phoenician legacy meant to the ancient world—and to our own.
by Rick Gore
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature2/index.html
"I am a Phoenician," says the young man, giving the name of a people who vanished from history 2,000 years ago. "At least I feel like I'm one of them. My relatives have been fishermen and sailors here for centuries."
ReplyDelete"Good, we can use some real Phoenicians," says Spencer Wells, an American geneticist, who wraps the young man's arm in a tourniquet as they sit on the veranda of a restaurant in Byblos, Lebanon, an ancient city of stone on the Mediterranean. The young man, Pierre Abi Saad, has arrived late, eager to participate in an experiment to shed new light on the mysterious Phoenicians. He joins a group of volunteers—fishermen, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers—gathered around tables under the restaurant awning. Wells, a lanky, 34-year-old extrovert, has convinced Saad and the others to give him a sample of their blood.
"What will it tell you?" Saad asks.
"Your blood contains DNA, which is like a history book," Wells replies. "Many different people have come to Byblos over the centuries, and your blood carries traces of their DNA. It's going to tell us something about your relationships going back thousands of years."
Wells has no doubts about the power of the new genetic techniques he is bringing to our understanding of ancient peoples. Nor does his bespectacled colleague standing beside him on the veranda, Pierre Zalloua, a 37-year-old scientist with a dark goatee and an intense passion for his Lebanese heritage. The two men hope to find new clues to an age-old riddle: Who were the Phoenicians?
Although they're mentioned frequently in ancient texts as vigorous traders and sailors, we know relatively little about these puzzling people. Historians refer to them as Canaanites when talking about the culture before 1200 B.C. The Greeks called them the phoinikes, which means the "red people"—a name that became Phoenicians—after their word for a prized reddish purple cloth the Phoenicians exported. But they would never have called themselves Phoenicians. Rather, they were citizens of the ports from which they set sail, walled cities such as Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre.
The culture later known as Phoenician was flourishing as early as the third millennium B.C. in the Levant, a coastal region now divided primarily between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. But it wasn't until around 1100 B.C., after a period of general disorder and social collapse throughout the region, that they emerged as a significant cultural and political force.
From the ninth to sixth centuries B.C. they dominated the Mediterranean Sea, establishing emporiums and colonies from Cyprus in the east to the Aegean Sea, Italy, North Africa, and Spain in the west. They grew rich trading precious metals from abroad and products such as wine, olive oil, and most notably the timber from the famous cedars of Lebanon, which forested the mountains that rise steeply from the coast of their homeland.
The armies and peoples that eventually conquered the Phoenicians either destroyed or built over their cities. Their writings, mostly on fragile papyrus, disintegrated—so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity. That's ironic, because the Phoenicians actually developed the modern alphabet and spread it through trade to their ports of call.
ReplyDeleteActing as cultural middlemen, the Phoenicians disseminated ideas, myths, and knowledge from the powerful Assyrian and Babylonian worlds in what is now Syria and Iraq to their contacts in the Aegean. Those ideas helped spark a cultural revival in Greece, one which led to the Greeks' Golden Age and hence the birth of Western civilization. The Phoenicians imported so much papyrus from Egypt that the Greeks used their name for the first great Phoenician port, Byblos, to refer to the ancient paper. The name Bible, or "the book," also derives from Byblos.
Today, Spencer Wells says, "Phoenicians have become ghosts, a vanished civilization." Now he and Zalloua hope to use a different alphabet, the molecular letters of DNA, to exhume these ghosts.
Although they're mentioned frequently in ancient texts as vigorous traders and sailors, we know relatively little about these puzzling people. Historians refer to them as Canaanites when talking about the culture before 1200 B.C. The Greeks called them the phoinikes, which means the "red people"--a name that became Phoenicians--after their word for a prized reddish purple cloth the Phoenicians exported. But they would never have called themselves Phoenicians. Rather, they were citizens of the ports from which they set sail, walled cities such as Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre.
ReplyDeleteThe culture later known as Phoenician was flourishing as early as the third millennium B.C. in the Levant, a coastal region now divided primarily between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. But it wasn't until around 1100 B.C., after a period of general disorder and social collapse throughout the region, that they emerged as a significant cultural and political force.
From the ninth to sixth centuries B.C. they dominated the Mediterranean Sea, establishing emporiums and colonies from Cyprus in the east to the Aegean Sea, Italy, North Africa, and Spain in the west. They grew rich trading precious metals from abroad and products such as wine, olive oil, and most notably the timber from the famous cedars of Lebanon, which forested the mountains that rise steeply from the coast of their homeland.
The armies and peoples that eventually conquered the Phoenicians either destroyed or built over their cities. Their writings, mostly on fragile papyrus, disintegrated--so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity. That's ironic, because the Phoenicians actually developed the modern alphabet and spread it through trade to their ports of call.
Acting as cultural middlemen, the Phoenicians disseminated ideas, myths, and knowledge from the powerful Assyrian and Babylonian worlds in what is now Syria and Iraq to their contacts in the Aegean. Those ideas helped spark a cultural revival in Greece, one which led to the Greeks' Golden Age and hence the birth of Western civilization. The Phoenicians imported so much papyrus from Egypt that the Greeks used their name for the first great Phoenician port, Byblos, to refer to the ancient paper. The name Bible, or "the book," also derives from Byblos.
Rooted in the Canaanite culture of the eastern Mediterranean coast, the Phoenicians became skillful traders and sailors whose colonies and ports of call stretched to the Atlantic. They remained a loosely affiliated group of cities dominated by powerful neighbors until Carthage finally forged an empire.
ReplyDeleteWith mountains to their backs and the sea spreading before them, the Phoenicians left a line of settlements along what is now the coast of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. Tyre, once the most powerful of their cities, possessed features that Phoenician colonists sought again and again when settling on foreign shores: a defensible island, a protected anchorage, and easy access to agricultural fields on the mainland.
Sidon, another great port, provided evidence of a revolutionary Phoenician development: the world's earliest alphabet. In the sixth century B.C. a king named Tabnit obtained an Egyptian sarcophagus and added an inscription in Phoenician so he could use it himself.
32OO B.C.
As early as the predynastic period, Egyptians imported prized cedars from Phoenician traders of Byblos.
25OO B.C.
Major ports on the Phoenician coast--Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, and Beirut---emerged as independent city-states.
1200 B.C.
A phonetic alphabet of 22 consonants developed, along with a distinct Phoenician language and culture.
877 B.C.
Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II visited the cities of Phoenicia, which soon began to send gifts as tribute to his empire.
814 B.C.
Expanding westward, Tyre founded Carthage--Qart-hadasht, or "new city"--an early Phoenician colony in Africa.
573 B.C.
After his predecessor defeated Assyria, King Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylonia besieged and gained control of Tyre.
539 B.C.
Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great captured Babylon, and Phoenicia became a province in his vast empire.
332 B.C.
Alexander the Great crushed Tyre, the only Phoenician city to offer serious resistance to his conquest of Persia.
264 B.C.
The First Punic War began as Carthage and Rome fought for control of Sicily. A second war started in 218 B.C. in Italy.
146 B.C.
Rome burned Carthage, ending the Third Punic War and annihilating the last major center of Phoenician culture.
HOME PORTS
The Phoenicians exported their own raw material and crafts and transported goods produced in other Mediterranean regions.
TRADE NETWORK
While searching in the Mediterranean--and beyond--for resources such as silver, the Phoenicians found markets for their own products.
COLONIES
Ships on long trade expeditions laid over in western outposts. Settlers in North Africa spoke a Phoenician dialect called Punic.
Phoenica was an ancient civilization in Canaan which covered most of the western, coastal part of the Fertile Crescent. Several major Phoenician cities were built on the coastline of the Mediterranean. It was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550 BC to 300 BC. The Phoenicians used the galley, a man-powered sailing vessel, and are credited with the invention of the bireme. They were famed in Classical Greece and Rome as 'traders in purple', referring to their monopoly on the precious purple dye of the Murex snail, used, among other things, for royal clothing, and for their spread of the alphabet (or abjad), upon which all major modern alphabets are derived.
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