The Obituary
The Phoenicians were never one state but a network of independent city-states, chiefly Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, on the coast of modern Lebanon. Master shipbuilders and merchants, they planted colonies across the Mediterranean, founded Carthage, and spread their alphabet wherever they traded. They fell under Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian overlords in turn. Alexander the Great’s brutal siege of Tyre in 332 BCE broke the last independent Phoenician power. Under Greek and Roman rule the homeland was Hellenized, and the distinct Phoenician identity dissolved, surviving longest in their colony Carthage.
Worth remembering
- The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of Greek, Latin, and most modern scripts.
- Their prized purple dye, made from murex sea snails, was worth more than its weight in silver.
Sources
- Phoenicia was a civilization of Levantine maritime city-states from the 2nd millennium BCE Wikipedia
- Alexander the Great captured Tyre in 332 BCE after a long siege Encyclopaedia Britannica
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.