Phoenicia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses of Phoenicia, see Phoenicia (disambiguation).
Coordinates 3407'25?N 3539'04?E

Phoenicia
????????
kn?n kana?an (Phoenician)
F?????? Phoinke (Greek)
1500 BC[1]539 BC

Map of Phoenicia and its Mediterranean trade routes

Capital Not specified
Languages Phoenician, Punic
Religion Canaanite religion
Government City-states ruled by kings
Well-known kings of Phoenician cities
c.?1000 BC Ahiram
969 BC 936 BC Hiram I
820 BC 774 BC Pygmalion of Tyre
Historical era Classical antiquity
Established 1500 BC[1]
Tyre in South Lebanon, under the reign of Hiram I, becomes the dominant city-
state 969 BC
Dido founds Carthage (legendary) 814 BC
Cyrus the Great conquers Phoenicia 539 BC
Preceded by Succeeded by
Canaanites
Hittite Empire
Egyptian Empire
Iberomaurusian
Achaemenid Phoenicia
Ancient Carthage
Phoenicia (UK f?'n??? or US f?'ni???;[2] from the Ancient Greek F??????, Phoinke
meaning either land of palm trees or purple country) was a thalassocratic ancient
Semitic civilization, that originated in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the west
of the Fertile Crescent. It included the coastline of what is now Lebanon, Israel,
Gaza, Syria, and south-west Turkey, though some of its colonies later reached the
Western Mediterranean (most notably Carthage) and even the Atlantic Ocean. The
civilization spread across the Mediterranean between 1500 BC and 300 BC.

Phoenicia is an Ancient Greek term used to refer to the major export of the region,
cloth dyed Tyrian purple from the Murex mollusc, and referred to the major
Canaanite port towns, and it does not correspond exactly to a cultural identity
that would have been recognised by the Phoenicians themselves. Their civilization
was organized in city-states, similar to those of Ancient Greece,[3] perhaps the
most notable of which were Tyre, Sidon, Arwad, Berytus, Byblos and Carthage.[4]
Each city-state was a politically independent unit, and it is uncertain to what
extent the Phoenicians viewed themselves as a single nationality. In terms of
archaeology, language, lifestyle, and religion there was little to set the
Phoenicians apart as markedly different from other residents of the Levant.
[citation needed]

Around 1050 BC, a Phoenician alphabet was used for the writing of Phoenician.[5][6]
It became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician
merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by
many other cultures.[7]

Contents [hide]
1 Etymology
2 Origins
3 Phoenician alphabet
4 High point 1200800 BC
5 Decline 53965 BC
5.1 Persian rule
5.2 Macedonian rule
6 Demographics
6.1 Genetic studies
7 Economy
7.1 Trade
7.2 Phoenician ships
7.2.1 Depictions
8 Important cities and colonies
9 Culture
9.1 Language
9.2 Art
10 Religion
10.1 Deities
10.1.1 Attested 1st millennium BC
10.1.2 Attested 2nd millennium BC
11 Foreign relations
11.1 Influence in the Mediterranean region
11.2 Relations with the Greeks
11.2.1 Trade
11.2.2 Alphabet
11.2.3 Connections with Greek mythology
11.2.4 Plato
12 Ancient sources
12.1 In the Bible
13 Legacy
14 See also
15 References
16 Sources
17 Further reading
18 External links
Etymology
The name Phoenicians, like Latin Poeni (adj. poenicus, later punicus), comes from
Greek F?????e? (Phonikes). The word f????? phonix meant variably Phoenician
person, Tyrian purple, crimson or date palm and is attested with all three meanings
already in Homer.[8] (The mythical bird phoenix also carries the same name, but
this meaning is not attested until centuries later.) The word may be derived from
f????? phoins blood red,[9] itself possibly related to f???? phnos murder. It is
difficult to ascertain which meaning came first, but it is understandable how
Greeks may have associated the crimson or purple color of dates and dye with the
merchants who traded both products. Robert S. P. Beekes has suggested a pre-Greek
origin of the ethnonym.[10] The oldest attested form of the word in Greek may be
the Mycenaean po-ni-ki-jo, po-ni-ki, possibly borrowed from Egyptian fn?w (fenkhu)
[11] Asiatics, Semites, although this derivation is disputed.[12] The folk
etymological association of F?????? with f????? mirrors that in Akkadian, which
tied kina?ni, kina??i Canaan to kina??u red-dyed wool.[13][14] The land was
natively known as kn?n (compare Eblaite ka-na-na-um, phnka-na-na) and its people as
the kn?ny. In the Amarna tablets of the 14th century BC, people from the region
called themselves Kenaani or Kinaani. Much later, in the 6th century BC, Hecataeus
of Miletus writes that Phoenicia was formerly called ??a khna, a name that Philo of
Byblos later adopted into his mythology as his eponym for the Phoenicians Khna who
was afterwards called Phoinix.[15] The ethnonym survived in North Africa until the
4th century AD (see Punic language).