Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, several smaller settlements were planted as stepping-stones along the route to Spain and its mineral wealth in silver and copper: at Malta , early remains go back to the 7th century BC, and at Sulcis and Nora in Sardinia and Motya in Sicily , perhaps a century earlier. According to Thucydides, the Phoenicians controlled a large part of the island but withdrew to the northwest corner under pressure from the Greeks.
Modern scholars, however, disbelieve this and contend that the Phoenicians arrived only after the Greeks were established. Carthage in turn seems to have established or, in some cases, reestablished a number of settlements in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, the Balearic Islands, and southern Spain, eventually making this city the acknowledged leader of the western Phoenicians.
Leptis Magna , a titular see of Tripolitana was founded by the Sidonians in a fine and fertile country, it was the most important of the three towns which formed the Tripoli Confederation Libya toay. This city subsequently became the centre of a Greek city, Neapolis, of which most of the monuments are buried under sand.
Notwithstanding Pliny Nat. Leptis allied itself with the Romans in the war against Jugurtha. Having obtained under Augustus the title of civitas it seems at that time to have been administered by Carthaginian magistrates; it may have been a municipium during the first century of the Christian Era and erected by Trajan into a colony bearing the name of Colonia Ulpia Trajana, found on many of its coins.
The birthplace of Septimius Severus , who embellished it and enriched it with several fine monuments, it was taken and sacked in the fourth century by the Libyan tribe of Aurusiani Ammianus Marcellinus, XXVIII, vi and has never since completely recovered.
It was at that time the seat of the military government of Tripolitana. It is now a residential suburb of the city of Tunis. Its Phoenician name means New Town or Land. A brief treatment of ancient Carthage follows. For full treatment, see North Africa: History. Various traditions concerning the foundation of Carthage were current among the Greeks, who called the city Karchedon; but the Roman tradition is better known because of the Aeneid , which tells of the city's foundation by the Tyrian princess Elissar or Elyssa Dido in Greek , who fled from her brother Pygmalion the name of a historical king of Tyre who ruled a century after Hiram.
The inhabitants were known to the Romans as Poeni, a derivation from the word Phoenikes Phoenicians , from which the adjective Punic is derived. According the Greek historian Timaeus c. Thereafter she traveled to North Africa where present day country of Tunis is.
The site chosen for Carthage in the centre of the shore of the Gulf of Tunis was ideal: the city was built on a triangular peninsula covered with low hills and backed by the Lake of Tunis with its safe anchorage and abundant supplies of fish. The site of the city was well protected and easily defensible. On the south the peninsula is connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land. By the late eighth century B. Sea traders from Phoenicia and Carthage a Phoenician colony traditionally founded in B.
However, much of our knowledge about the Phoenicians during the Iron Age ca. For example, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, Phoenician sailors, at the request of the pharaoh Necho II r.
The main natural resources of the Phoenician cities in the eastern Mediterranean were the prized cedars of Lebanon and murex shells used to make the purple dye. Phoenician artisans were skilled in wood, ivory, and metalworking, as well as textile production.
In the Old Testament 2 Chronicles , the master craftsman Hiram of Tyre was commissioned to build and embellish the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Phoenician art is in fact an amalgam of many different cultural elements—Aegean, northern Syrian, Cypriot , Assyrian , and Egyptian.
The Egyptian influence is often especially prominent in the art but was constantly evolving as the political and economic relations between Egypt and the Phoenician cities fluctuated. Although the Phoenicians disappeared from the pages of history, they are still remembered today as expert seafarers and merchants.
This reputation, however, pales in comparison to the greatest contribution made by the Phoenicians to the modern world — the alphabet. Like much of the Middle East during that time, the Phoenicians used a script known as cuneiform which originated in Mesopotamia.
By around BC the Phoenicians had developed their own script. The earliest known example of the Phoenician script is found on the Sarcophagus of Ahiram, which was discovered in Byblos.
The Phoenician alphabet was later adopted by the Greeks who kept some characters while removing others. The Greek alphabet was in turn adopted by the Romans resulting in its spread all across Europe. Additionally, the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the basis of other Middle Eastern, as well as Indian alphabets, either directly or indirectly.
Sarcophagus of Ahiram with Phoenician writing. Aramco Services Company. Tyrian Purple. Wars of Alexander the Great: Siege of Tyre. Phoenician Civilization. Who created the first alphabet?. Ghassulian culture. The Phoenicians — B. The Phoenicians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wenamen's Journey. Although his primary interest is in the ancient civilizations of the Near East, he is also interested in other geographical regions, as well as other time periods Read More.
Phoenicians worshiped the same high Gods as Greeks. Their main cities had Greek names. Only when they became part of the Persian Empire they were attacked by the Greeks.
Their form of writing was made of symbols representing a consonant with a vowel together. Splitting them into separate letters each one with a distinct sound alphabet was a pure Greek invention and it took place in the island of Cyprus-inhabited by Phoenicians and Achean Greeks A national geographic research has showed strong evidence of phoenician dna, about Alexander the great , the siege that lasted 7 months was in the city of Saida sidon not tyre , welcome.
Nothing mentioned about Punt. Punt is where they are supposed to have been from, and the reason the Punic wars were called the Punic wars. Nothing about the circumnavigation of Africa either. Even if Phoenicians invented the alphabet, something largely disputed, they surely made the least use of it to promote knowledge. Ancient Origins has been quoted by:. At Ancient Origins, we believe that one of the most important fields of knowledge we can pursue as human beings is our beginnings.
And while some people may seem content with the story as it stands, our view is that there exist countless mysteries, scientific anomalies and surprising artifacts that have yet to be discovered and explained. The goal of Ancient Origins is to highlight recent archaeological discoveries, peer-reviewed academic research and evidence, as well as offering alternative viewpoints and explanations of science, archaeology, mythology, religion and history around the globe.
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The company eventually arrived in Libya, in North Africa. Dido asked the local Berber chief for permission to settle on his land, to which he replied that she could take all the land covered by a single ox hide.
Clever Dido took the ox hide and cut it into narrow strips which she then used to encircle enough land for a city. Carthage would rise to become the most important Phoenician colony in the Mediterranean and one of the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan trading centers in the world.
Carthage was ultimately destroyed by the Romans in the Punic Wars over half a millennium later. The Phoenicians made many important contributions to global civilization and culture, but perhaps their most long-lasting contribution was the invention of what became our modern alphabet. The phonetic alphabet replaced the pictographic alphabets used in Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Pictographic writing disappeared in the Bronze Age Collapse and after the year Dark Age phonetic writing was invented. The Phoenician alphabet was modified and improved to form many of our modern written languages. It directly influenced the development of Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Greeks did not hide the fact that they created their alphabet from the Phoenician model, which in turn led to Latin. By virtue of being traders who used their written script to record business transactions, the Phoenicians spread their written language throughout the civilized world.
The Phoenician script was widely adopted because it was much easier to master than the pictographic scripts with thousands of possible characters. Ironically, despite their contributions to writing the Phoenicians wrote little about themselves, at least that survives. Most of what we know about the Phoenicians comes from the writings of their rivals, and discoveries by archaeologists. Lebanon was famed for its cedar forests from which the Phoenicians both exported lumber and used it for shipbuilding and temples.
The Phoenicians were known for producing fine textiles, carpets, and were manufacturers of luxury goods and glassware. They produced fabulous faience, an efflorescent glazed ceramic. Objects created with faience were considered magical, the shiny blue glaze reflects the undying shimmer of the sun, and imbues the object with the powers of fertility, life, and rebirth. The Phoenicians gained their greatest wealth and built the basis of their trading empire on the color purple.
Specifically, from the rare and valuable murex dye used to create the color purple for textiles that was reserved only for the wealthiest and royalty.
The dye was derived from murex shellfish, and each mollusk only produced one or two drops of dye. To make a single gram of purple dye required between 10, and 20, murex shellfish and this made the mollusks more valuable than gold. The Phoenicians were a peaceful people by nature, scrupulous about fair trade, and not seeking conquest or domination, though they did have slavery and trade in slaves.
They did not maintain a standing army and relied on mercenaries to do their fighting. The Phoenicians valued family, spirituality, Mother Earth, and respected women and their trading partners. They were known for their tight communities and placed a high value on solidarity and partnership, and families shared in the prosperity generated by trading ventures.
They were explorers of distant shores and were known for admiring the customs and traditions of the people they encountered. The Phoenicians developed long-lasting friendships and trade relationships and always sought interactions of mutual benefit; it was the Phoenician way.
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