Phoenicians
Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic-speaking people who inhabited the coastal region of the eastern Mediterranean known as Phoenicia, roughly corresponding to the coast of present-day Lebanon and parts of Syria and Israel. Emerging in the late Bronze Age, they flourished from about 1500 BCE to 300 BCE. They are celebrated for maritime trade, urban culture, and the development of the Phoenician alphabet, one of the earliest writing systems to use a consonant-based script and to be widely adopted around the Mediterranean.
Their political landscape consisted of independent city-states, foremost Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, often governed by oligarchies
The Phoenicians also spread their culture through colonization, including the founding of Carthage in present-day Tunisia
Religiously, they practiced polytheism with deities such as Baal and Astarte, though practices varied by city-state.