Fenische

Fenische refers to the Phoenician civilization, language, and culture of the ancient Semitic-speaking city-states along the eastern Mediterranean coast, in what is today Lebanon, parts of Syria and northern Israel. The Phoenicians flourished roughly from the mid-second millennium BCE to the end of the classical era, with their height between about 1200 and 300 BCE. They were renowned as mariners and traders, rather than a single unified empire, and their urban centers included Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos.

The Phoenician economy rested on extensive maritime networks that linked the Levant with the wider Mediterranean world. They traded textiles, glassware, metals, and the famous Tyrian purple dye derived from murex snails. Their ships and navigation facilitated the establishment of merchant colonies and trading posts across the coast of North Africa and southern Europe, including Carthage in North Africa. This commercial reach helped spread Phoenician goods, technologies, and ideas far beyond their homeland.

Linguistically, Phoenician was a Northwest Semitic language. Their writing system, a script of consonants (an abjad), evolved into a robust alphabet around the 11th century BCE. The Phoenician alphabet is widely regarded as a major ancestor of most modern alphabets, with the Greek and Latin scripts deriving from it and vowels later added in Greek.

Culturally, the Phoenicians practiced a polytheistic religion centered on city-specific cults and deities such as Baal and Astarte. Over time, Phoenician city-states fell under the control of larger empires, including Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia, before And after the rise of Hellenistic power, their political independence waned. Yet their linguistic and alphabetical legacy endured, shaping the way writing spread in the Western world.