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 tied to mercantile elites. These city-states built a large network of ports and trading posts across the Mediterranean and established colonies to secure resources and develop markets. They traded textiles, glass, metals, cedar wood from Lebanon, and the famous Tyrian purple dye derived from murex snails.

The Phoenicians also spread their culture through colonization, including the founding of Carthage in present-day Tunisia by Tyre in the 9th century BCE, which grew into a major power in the western Mediterranean. They produced and exported crafts as well as their distinctive writing system, which influenced the Greek alphabet and, in turn, the Latin script.

Religiously, they practiced polytheism with deities such as Baal and Astarte, though practices varied by city-state. Over time, Phoenician city-states fell to successive empires, including the Neo-Assyrian and later Hellenistic and Roman powers. The Phoenician language and alphabet persisted primarily through its legacy in the scripts used by subsequent Mediterranean cultures.