- 1 day ago
They ran a trade network stretching three thousand kilometres without an empire, an army, or a capital. They standardised the alphabet that most of the world still writes with. And almost nothing they wrote about themselves survives — we know them through the Greeks who competed with them, the Romans who destroyed their greatest city, and the archaeology of what they threw away.
This episode covers the cedar trade with Bronze Age Egypt, the rise of Tyre, the invention of Tyrian purple, the expansion to Carthage and the Atlantic, the unresolved argument over the tophet, and the seven-month siege that ended it.
Where the evidence is contested, this video says so rather than pretend otherwise.
Key sources for this episode:
Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians
Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West
Glenn Markoe, Phoenicians
Herodotus, Histories
Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander
Josephus, Against Apion
Vanished Empires produces long-form documentaries on the civilizations that disappeared. New documentary every few days.
0:00 Introduction
3:14 Origins and the Cedar Coast
11:08 The Rise of Tyre
19:38 Purple, Letters and Ships
28:06 Life Inside the Walls
36:26 West to the Atlantic
44:19 The Gods and the Tophet
52:06 Assyria and Babylon
59:35 Alexander
1:06:26 What Remains
This episode covers the cedar trade with Bronze Age Egypt, the rise of Tyre, the invention of Tyrian purple, the expansion to Carthage and the Atlantic, the unresolved argument over the tophet, and the seven-month siege that ended it.
Where the evidence is contested, this video says so rather than pretend otherwise.
Key sources for this episode:
Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians
Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West
Glenn Markoe, Phoenicians
Herodotus, Histories
Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander
Josephus, Against Apion
Vanished Empires produces long-form documentaries on the civilizations that disappeared. New documentary every few days.
0:00 Introduction
3:14 Origins and the Cedar Coast
11:08 The Rise of Tyre
19:38 Purple, Letters and Ships
28:06 Life Inside the Walls
36:26 West to the Atlantic
44:19 The Gods and the Tophet
52:06 Assyria and Babylon
59:35 Alexander
1:06:26 What Remains
Category
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TravelTranscript
00:00:00In the spring of 332 BC, someone standing on the seawall of Tyre watched a road being built across open
00:00:07water.
00:00:09It had started weeks earlier as a line of rubble tipped into the shallows near the mainland, which was strange
00:00:15but not alarming.
00:00:16Half a kilometer of sea lay between the island and the shore, nobody built through the sea.
00:00:21Then it kept coming.
00:00:23The stone was recognizable, which was part of what made it difficult to watch.
00:00:27It was being taken from the ruins of Old Tyre, the original settlement on the mainland, abandoned generations before.
00:00:35The Macedonians were pulling apart the city's own dead ancestor and carrying it out into the water, block by block,
00:00:43toward the living one.
00:00:44For 2,000 years, that half kilometer of water had been the whole strategy.
00:00:49Egyptian pharaohs had accepted it, Assyrian kings had accepted it.
00:00:54Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had camped on that mainland for 13 years and gone home with nothing.
00:00:59Every empire that mattered had arrived, looked at the channel, and negotiated instead.
00:01:04The road took seven months.
00:01:06When it was finished, so was Tyre.
00:01:08But that is not the strangest part of this story, and it is not why we are starting here.
00:01:14The causeway was never taken down.
00:01:17Sand began collecting against it within a few years, carried by the currents and trapped by the obstruction.
00:01:23And it never stopped.
00:01:25The channel silted up.
00:01:27The gap closed.
00:01:30Tyre is not an island today.
00:01:31It sits at the end of a broad, sandy peninsula, and it has for over 2,000 years.
00:01:37If you look at a map of the Lebanese coast right now, you are looking at the outcome of a
00:01:42seven-month siege in the 4th century B.C.
00:01:45Alexander did not just take the city.
00:01:48He changed the shape of the country, and the change is still there.
00:01:52The people inside those walls had built something remarkable.
00:01:56They ran a trading network stretching more than 3,000 kilometers from Lebanon to the Atlantic coast of Spain,
00:02:03without an empire, without an army, and without a capital.
00:02:07They found the tin that the Bronze Age depended on.
00:02:10They sailed past the edge of the known world, possibly all the way around Africa.
00:02:15And they standardized a set of 22 marks that became, by a fairly direct line, the letters you are reading
00:02:21now.
00:02:22We call them the Phoenicians.
00:02:25They never call themselves that.
00:02:27The word is Greek, it means something like the purple people,
00:02:30and it was a description applied from outside by customers who could not tell one of their cities from another.
00:02:37Which raises a question that historians are still arguing about, seriously, right now.
00:02:42Not whether these cities existed, but whether the people in them ever thought of themselves as one people at all.
00:02:49Over the next hour, we are going to follow them from a timber trade with Bronze Age Egypt,
00:02:54to the day the road reached the wall.
00:02:57Twelve hundred years, told almost entirely through the writings of their competitors,
00:03:02their customers, and the empire that burned their greatest city to the ground.
00:03:07Because that is the other thing about the people who gave the world its alphabet.
00:03:12Almost nothing they wrote survives.
00:03:14The cedar logs came down from the mountains in winter.
00:03:18Men felled them on the upper slopes, stripped away the branches, and then waited for the rains.
00:03:23When the streams rose high enough, the trunks went with them, down through the ravines,
00:03:30through the foothills, into the shallow water off the beach,
00:03:35where crews lashed them into rafts and towed them along the coast to the harbor.
00:03:40The wood smelled of resin.
00:03:42It would still smell of resin, four thousand years later, sealed inside the tombs of Egyptian kings.
00:03:49This was the business of Byblos, a town on the coast of what is now Lebanon,
00:03:54and by 2600 BC, it was already an old business.
00:03:58An Egyptian record from the reign of the pharaoh Sneferu notes the arrival of forty ships loaded with cedar.
00:04:05Forty ships, in a single delivery, more than four and a half thousand years ago.
00:04:10To understand why that mattered, you have to understand what Egypt did not have.
00:04:15Egypt had grain.
00:04:17It had gold and stone and linen and a river that flooded on schedule.
00:04:21What Egypt did not have was tall timber.
00:04:24The trees that grew along the Nile were sycamore and acacia and tamarisk,
00:04:29and they were short, twisted, and nearly useless for anything requiring a long, straight beam.
00:04:36No masts.
00:04:38No temple doors.
00:04:40No ships worth the name.
00:04:42The cedars of Lebanon grew forty meters tall, and they grew straight.
00:04:47That single fact shaped four thousand years of Mediterranean history.
00:04:52The people living on that coast controlled something two of the wealthiest civilizations on earth
00:04:59desperately needed, and could not grow for themselves.
00:05:02Egypt to the south.
00:05:05Mesopotamia to the east.
00:05:07And between them, a narrow shelf of land with a forest on it.
00:05:11The shelf itself was small.
00:05:13It ran roughly two hundred kilometers along the coast,
00:05:16and in places it was only a few kilometers wide before the ground began to climb.
00:05:21The Lebanon range rose steeply behind it, and beyond that lay the Syrian interior.
00:05:27The land was not poor.
00:05:29That is worth being clear about, because the story is often told the other way.
00:05:35Olives grew well on the terrace slopes.
00:05:37So did grapes and figs and barley in the flatter ground near the shore.
00:05:42The people of this coast farmed, and they farmed successfully,
00:05:46and they went on farming for their entire history.
00:05:48What they lacked was room to expand.
00:05:52Behind them, mountains.
00:05:54Beside them, neighbors on the same narrow strip.
00:05:58Every direction on land was closed.
00:06:00Every direction by sea was open.
00:06:03So they built harbors.
00:06:04Each city on that coast developed around one,
00:06:07and the geography rewarded them.
00:06:09The coastline was ragged, full of small headlands and offshore islands,
00:06:15and an island with a channel behind it makes an almost perfect ancient port.
00:06:20Ships could shelter on whichever side the wind was not blowing from.
00:06:25Byblos was the oldest of these towns,
00:06:27and for a long stretch it was the most important.
00:06:30Its name has outlived it,
00:06:32in a way its builders could never have anticipated.
00:06:36Byblos handled the papyrus trade out of Egypt,
00:06:38and the Greeks began calling papyrus scrolls by the name of the port they came through.
00:06:43Byblos.
00:06:44From there the word passed them to Greek as the ordinary term for a book,
00:06:48and from Greek into every language that borrowed from it.
00:06:51The Bible is named after a Lebanese seaport.
00:06:54For most of the Bronze Age,
00:06:56these towns were not independent powers.
00:06:59They were prosperous, well-connected,
00:07:02and almost always somebody's vassal.
00:07:05Egypt claimed authority over the coast for long stretches.
00:07:10So did the Hittites from the north.
00:07:12The cities paid tribute,
00:07:14sent gifts,
00:07:15wrote nervous diplomatic letters,
00:07:17and got on with the business of moving goods.
00:07:20And there was a great deal of business.
00:07:22The eastern Mediterranean in the 14th and 13th centuries BC
00:07:26was densely, remarkably connected.
00:07:29Copper moved from Cyprus.
00:07:31Tin came overland from somewhere far to the east.
00:07:34Egyptian gold,
00:07:36Mycenaean pottery,
00:07:37Canaanite oil and wine,
00:07:39Anatolian silver.
00:07:41Kings exchanged letters and daughters,
00:07:43and enormous quantities of metal.
00:07:46A shipwreck found off the southern coast of Turkey,
00:07:49dating to around 1300 BC,
00:07:51was carrying cargo from at least seven different cultures
00:07:54in a single hold.
00:07:55The busiest port in that world was not Byblos.
00:08:00It was Ugarit,
00:08:01further north along the same coast,
00:08:04a city with its own writing system,
00:08:06its own literature,
00:08:07and a harbor thick with foreign merchants.
00:08:10Around 1200 BC,
00:08:12all of it stopped.
00:08:14What happened over the following decades is still argued about.
00:08:18Drought appears in the evidence.
00:08:21So does earthquake damage,
00:08:23and famine,
00:08:23and internal revolt,
00:08:25and the arrival of raiders that Egyptian sources called the Sea Peoples.
00:08:29Probably it was not one cause.
00:08:32Probably it was several,
00:08:34arriving close enough together
00:08:35that systems built on long-distance trade
00:08:37could not absorb them.
00:08:39The result is not in doubt.
00:08:42The Hittite Empire ceased to exist.
00:08:45Its capital burned.
00:08:46The Mycenaean palaces of Greece were destroyed,
00:08:49and the writing system used to administer them
00:08:52was forgotten so completely
00:08:53that Greece would not read or write again for 400 years.
00:08:57Egypt survived,
00:08:58badly weakened,
00:08:59and pulled back from the coast it had dominated for centuries.
00:09:03Ugarit was destroyed,
00:09:05and never rebuilt.
00:09:06Excavators found tablets in the ruins
00:09:08that had been left in a kiln,
00:09:10still waiting to be fired,
00:09:12describing enemy ships offshore,
00:09:14and towns already burning.
00:09:16Almost every commercial power in the eastern Mediterranean
00:09:19vanished inside a single generation.
00:09:23The cities of the Lebanese coast did not.
00:09:26Byblos survived it.
00:09:27So did Sidon.
00:09:28So did Tyre,
00:09:29sitting on its island a short distance offshore.
00:09:33They were damaged,
00:09:34and they were poorer,
00:09:35and the trade networks they had depended on were gone.
00:09:38But the harbors were intact,
00:09:40the ships still floated,
00:09:41and the mounds behind them still had trees.
00:09:45And here is the part that matters most,
00:09:47the part that most accounts of these people get backward.
00:09:51They did not rise,
00:09:52despite the catastrophe.
00:09:54They rose because of it.
00:09:56Every serious competitor they had in maritime trade
00:10:00had just been wiped out.
00:10:01The Mycenaean fleets were gone.
00:10:03Ugarit was ash.
00:10:05The empires that had spent centuries
00:10:07telling these cities what to do,
00:10:09and taking a share of what they earned,
00:10:11were either destroyed or in retreat,
00:10:13and for the first time in their history,
00:10:16nobody was standing over them.
00:10:18The routes were still there.
00:10:20The demand was still there.
00:10:22Egypt still needed cedar.
00:10:24Mesopotamia still wanted purple cloth
00:10:26and worked metal.
00:10:28There was simply nobody left to carry any of it.
00:10:31Within two centuries,
00:10:33ships from this coast would be trading
00:10:35at the far end of the Mediterranean,
00:10:37more than 3,000 kilometers from home,
00:10:39in waters no eastern vessel had worked before.
00:10:41They would carry a writing system
00:10:43that would eventually become
00:10:45the letters you are reading now.
00:10:46They would found a city in North Africa
00:10:48that came close to breaking Rome.
00:10:51But that expansion needed something first.
00:10:54It needed one of these towns
00:10:56to grow powerful enough
00:10:57to organize it,
00:10:58to fund it,
00:10:59and to defend it.
00:11:14That is a problem we are going to run into
00:11:16again and again in this story,
00:11:19so it is worth stating plainly at the start.
00:11:21The Phoenician cities kept records.
00:11:24They had archives, annals, king lists.
00:11:27Their scribes wrote on papyrus,
00:11:29which was cheap and light and easy to carry,
00:11:32and which rots in a damp climate
00:11:34within a century or two.
00:11:36The Lebanese coast is damp.
00:11:38Almost none of it survives.
00:11:40So Hiram of Tyre reaches us
00:11:42through two sources.
00:11:43One is the Hebrew Bible,
00:11:45which describes him as a friend
00:11:47and business partner of David and Solomon.
00:11:49The other is a Greek-Jewish historian
00:11:52named Josephus,
00:11:53writing more than a thousand years later,
00:11:55who quotes a man named Menander of Ephesus,
00:11:58who claimed to have translated
00:12:00the archives of Tyre into Greek.
00:12:03Menander's book is lost.
00:12:05We have only the fragments
00:12:06Josephus chose to copy out.
00:12:08This is the evidence.
00:12:10A religious text,
00:12:12written by a neighboring kingdom,
00:12:14and a quotation of a translation
00:12:15of an archive nobody has seen
00:12:17since antiquity.
00:12:19Historians place Hiram's reign
00:12:21somewhere around 969 to 936 BC,
00:12:25and that range is an argument,
00:12:27not a fact.
00:12:28Some scholars shift it by decades.
00:12:31A few question whether the details
00:12:33attached to him are reliable at all.
00:12:35What is not in question
00:12:37is that during roughly this period,
00:12:39Tyre became the most powerful city
00:12:41on the coast.
00:12:42For 2,000 years,
00:12:44Byblos had been the important one.
00:12:45It had the oldest relationship with Egypt,
00:12:48the deepest archives,
00:12:50the most prestige.
00:12:51But Byblos sat on the mainland,
00:12:53on a low headland,
00:12:55reachable by anyone with an army.
00:12:58Tyre sat on a rock in the sea.
00:13:00The island was small.
00:13:02Estimates put the original outcrop
00:13:04at something like 4 hectares
00:13:06before it was expanded,
00:13:07a space you could walk across
00:13:09in a few minutes.
00:13:10It had no farmland,
00:13:12no forest,
00:13:13and no fresh water supply
00:13:14of its own worth speaking of.
00:13:17Everything had to come
00:13:18from the mainland by boat.
00:13:20By every ordinary measure,
00:13:22it was a bad place to build a city.
00:13:24It had one advantage,
00:13:26and the advantage was decisive.
00:13:28To attack Tyre,
00:13:29you needed a fleet.
00:13:30And in the eastern Mediterranean,
00:13:32after the Bronze Age collapse,
00:13:34the only people with fleets
00:13:36worth the name
00:13:36were the Phoenicians themselves.
00:13:39Assyrian armies could march
00:13:41down the coast
00:13:41and burn every town
00:13:43from Arwa to Akko.
00:13:44They did, repeatedly,
00:13:46over the following centuries.
00:13:48They would arrive at Tyre,
00:13:50look across half a kilometer
00:13:52of open water at walls
00:13:53rising straight out of the sea,
00:13:55and negotiate.
00:13:57This is the thing
00:13:58that most accounts of Tyre
00:14:00get slightly wrong.
00:14:02Its strength was not military.
00:14:04The Tyrians won very few land battles
00:14:06and generally avoided fighting them.
00:14:08Their strength was geographic,
00:14:10and it bought them something
00:14:11more valuable than victories.
00:14:13It bought them the ability
00:14:14to survive losing.
00:14:16Hiram's contribution
00:14:17was to take that advantage
00:14:19and build on it.
00:14:20He undertook a program of engineering
00:14:22that sounds modest and was not.
00:14:24He had the channel
00:14:26between two parts of the island
00:14:27filled in,
00:14:28joining them into a single landmass.
00:14:30He extended the shoreline
00:14:33with quarried stone,
00:14:34adding usable ground
00:14:36to a city that had almost none.
00:14:38He built up the harbors.
00:14:40There were two of them,
00:14:42and their arrangement
00:14:43is the clearest surviving evidence
00:14:45of how these people thought.
00:14:47One harbor faced north,
00:14:49the other faced south.
00:14:51In a sea where the wind
00:14:52can swing hard between seasons,
00:14:54and where a storm
00:14:55from the wrong direction
00:14:56could smash a fleet
00:14:57against its own quay.
00:14:58Tyre had a port
00:15:00that worked no matter
00:15:01what the weather did.
00:15:02Ships could always come in.
00:15:04Ships could always get out.
00:15:06The northern harbor,
00:15:07the Sidonian harbor,
00:15:09was the deeper
00:15:10and better protected of the two.
00:15:12The southern one,
00:15:13facing Egypt,
00:15:15handled the traffic
00:15:16running down toward the Nile.
00:15:18A city with two harbors
00:15:20is a city that has thought carefully
00:15:21about never being closed
00:15:23for business.
00:15:25Hiram also built temples.
00:15:27According to the Josephus fragments,
00:15:29he demolished older shrines
00:15:31and constructed new ones,
00:15:33including a great temple
00:15:34to a god named Melkart.
00:15:36That name is worth pausing on
00:15:38because it is not really a name.
00:15:40Melkart means, roughly,
00:15:42king of the city.
00:15:43It is a title.
00:15:44The god of Tyre was,
00:15:46in the most literal sense,
00:15:47the personification of Tyre itself.
00:15:50And his festival calendar
00:15:52tracked the city's rhythm.
00:15:53Each year, at a fixed point,
00:15:55the god was said to die
00:15:57and be resurrected in fire.
00:15:59The ceremony was called
00:16:00the Egersis, the Awakening.
00:16:04This mattered far beyond religion,
00:16:06and the reason is something
00:16:08we will come back to repeatedly.
00:16:10When Tyrians sailed west
00:16:13and founded a settlement,
00:16:14they took Melkart with them.
00:16:16They built his temple,
00:16:17kept his calendar,
00:16:18sent offerings back
00:16:19to the mother city.
00:16:21A trading post,
00:16:222,000 kilometers away,
00:16:24full of people
00:16:25who had never seen Tyre,
00:16:26still marked the same festival
00:16:28on the same day.
00:16:29There was no Phoenician Empire.
00:16:32There was no central government,
00:16:34no standing army,
00:16:35no shared citizenship.
00:16:38What held the network together
00:16:39across the entire Mediterranean
00:16:41was a god,
00:16:42a language,
00:16:43and a set of family relationships.
00:16:45That is a remarkably
00:16:47fragile-looking arrangement.
00:16:49It lasted longer
00:16:50than most empires.
00:16:52The other thing
00:16:53Hiram is remembered for
00:16:54is a business deal.
00:16:55The Bible describes
00:16:57an agreement
00:16:58between Tyre
00:16:59and the kingdom of Israel
00:17:00under Solomon.
00:17:02Hiram supplied
00:17:03cedar and cypress timber
00:17:05and skilled workers
00:17:06for the construction
00:17:07of the temple
00:17:08in Jerusalem.
00:17:10In exchange,
00:17:11he received wheat
00:17:12and olive oil
00:17:13year after year
00:17:14in large quantities.
00:17:17The two kings
00:17:18are also described
00:17:18as sending out
00:17:19joint expeditions
00:17:20from a Red Sea port,
00:17:22sailing to a place
00:17:23called Ophir
00:17:24and returning with gold.
00:17:26Where Ophir was,
00:17:27nobody knows.
00:17:29Proposals range
00:17:30from southern Arabia
00:17:31to the Horn of Africa
00:17:32to India.
00:17:34Historians have argued
00:17:35about this partnership
00:17:36for a long time.
00:17:38The archaeological evidence
00:17:40for a monumental temple
00:17:41in 10th century Jerusalem
00:17:43is thin,
00:17:44and some scholars think
00:17:45the biblical account
00:17:46inflates a modest arrangement
00:17:48into a grand alliance.
00:17:49Others point out
00:17:50that the specific details
00:17:52of the trade,
00:17:52the commodities
00:17:53and the terms,
00:17:54read like the kind
00:17:56of thing preserved
00:17:56in a real commercial record,
00:17:58rather than invented
00:17:59centuries later.
00:18:01Set aside the question
00:18:02of scale,
00:18:03and one thing about
00:18:04the arrangement
00:18:05is unmistakable.
00:18:06Tyre traded timber
00:18:07and expertise
00:18:09for food.
00:18:10The island had no fields,
00:18:12it could not feed itself,
00:18:13and as it grew,
00:18:14the gap widened.
00:18:15What Hiram secured
00:18:16from Israel
00:18:16was not prestige
00:18:17or an alliance
00:18:18against a common enemy.
00:18:19It was grain and oil,
00:18:21delivered annually,
00:18:23in bulk.
00:18:24This is the pattern
00:18:25underneath everything
00:18:26the Phoenicians did
00:18:27for the next 800 years.
00:18:29They did not conquer territory.
00:18:31They did not need to.
00:18:33They controlled things
00:18:35other people wanted,
00:18:36and they traded those things
00:18:37for the things they lacked,
00:18:39and they arranged their cities
00:18:41so that the trade
00:18:42could never be interrupted.
00:18:44Every element was in place
00:18:46by the end of Hiram's reign,
00:18:48a defensible base,
00:18:49two harbors that worked
00:18:51in any weather,
00:18:52a god who traveled,
00:18:53a food supply secured
00:18:55by contract,
00:18:56rather than conquest,
00:18:58and behind it all,
00:18:59the mountains,
00:19:00still covered in cedar.
00:19:02What Tyre did not yet have
00:19:04was a reason for anyone
00:19:05far away to care.
00:19:07Grain and timber
00:19:09move over short distances.
00:19:11To justify a voyage
00:19:13of a thousand kilometers,
00:19:14in a small wooden ship,
00:19:16across open water,
00:19:18you need cargo
00:19:19worth more than the risk.
00:19:21In the century after Hiram,
00:19:23the Tyrians found
00:19:24three things that were.
00:19:26One of them came out
00:19:27of a rotting shellfish.
00:19:29One of them was a set
00:19:30of 22 marks
00:19:31that could be learned
00:19:32in an afternoon.
00:19:33And one of them was a ship
00:19:35built to cross water
00:19:36no one had crossed before.
00:19:38The dye works were built
00:19:39outside the city walls.
00:19:40and there was a reason
00:19:41for that.
00:19:42The process began
00:19:43with a sea snail,
00:19:44several species,
00:19:46actually,
00:19:46from the family
00:19:47Neurosidae,
00:19:48gathered in baited traps,
00:19:50lowered onto the seabed,
00:19:51and hauled up
00:19:52by the thousand.
00:19:53Each snail carried
00:19:54a small gland
00:19:55containing a clear fluid.
00:19:58Removed from the animal
00:19:59and exposed to air
00:20:00and sunlight,
00:20:01that fluid turned yellow,
00:20:03then green,
00:20:04then blue,
00:20:05and finally,
00:20:06a deep red-violet
00:20:07that did not fade.
00:20:09Getting it out
00:20:10required breaking the shells
00:20:11and extracting the glands
00:20:12by hand,
00:20:13then leaving the material
00:20:15to stand in vats
00:20:16of stale urine
00:20:17and seawater for days
00:20:18while it fermented.
00:20:19The smell reached
00:20:20far beyond the vats.
00:20:23Ancient writers
00:20:24who mentioned
00:20:24Phoenician dye towns
00:20:25mentioned the stench
00:20:27in the same breath.
00:20:28And archaeologists
00:20:29locate the dye works
00:20:30of the region,
00:20:31partly by the mounds
00:20:32of crushed murex shells
00:20:34left behind,
00:20:35some of them enormous,
00:20:36still sitting on the coast
00:20:383,000 years later.
00:20:40How many snails
00:20:41it took to produce
00:20:42a usable quantity of dye
00:20:44is a question
00:20:45you will see
00:20:46confidently answered
00:20:47in a great many places,
00:20:48usually with a very
00:20:50large round number.
00:20:51Those figures come
00:20:53from a small set
00:20:54of modern reconstruction
00:20:55experiments,
00:20:56and they vary wildly
00:20:57depending on the species
00:20:58used and the method
00:20:59followed.
00:21:00The honest answer
00:21:01is that it took
00:21:02a great many,
00:21:03that the exact ratio
00:21:05is not settled,
00:21:06and that anyone
00:21:07quoting a precise number
00:21:09is quoting an estimate.
00:21:11What is certain
00:21:12is the price.
00:21:14Purple cloth
00:21:15was among the most
00:21:15expensive commodities
00:21:16in the ancient world,
00:21:18and it stayed that way
00:21:19for well over
00:21:20a thousand years.
00:21:21Roman law
00:21:22eventually restricted
00:21:23the deepest shades
00:21:24to the emperor alone.
00:21:26The phrase
00:21:27born to the purple
00:21:29survives from that world.
00:21:31So does the word
00:21:32for a Catholic cardinal's
00:21:33rank,
00:21:34and the color
00:21:35of academic
00:21:35and judicial robes
00:21:37in half the countries
00:21:37on earth.
00:21:38A color that signals
00:21:40authority,
00:21:41more or less universally,
00:21:42across cultures
00:21:43that otherwise
00:21:44share very little.
00:21:45That association
00:21:46did not come
00:21:47from anywhere natural.
00:21:49It came from
00:21:49a manufacturing monopoly
00:21:51held by a handful
00:21:52of towns
00:21:52on a narrow coast,
00:21:54who happened to
00:21:55control the one process
00:21:56that produced
00:21:57the permanent purple,
00:21:58and who kept
00:21:59the price high
00:22:00because the process
00:22:01was disgusting,
00:22:02laborious,
00:22:03and theirs.
00:22:04This is the first thing
00:22:05worth carrying that far.
00:22:06Purple cloth is light,
00:22:08it does not spoil,
00:22:09and a single bolt of it
00:22:10was worth more
00:22:11than a shipload of grain.
00:22:13The second thing
00:22:14they carried
00:22:14weighed nothing at all.
00:22:16Here it is necessary
00:22:17to correct something,
00:22:19because the popular
00:22:20version of this story
00:22:21is wrong in a specific
00:22:23and interesting way.
00:22:24The Phoenicians
00:22:25did not invent
00:22:26the alphabet.
00:22:27The idea of using
00:22:29a small number
00:22:30of signs
00:22:30to represent
00:22:31individual sounds
00:22:32rather than
00:22:33whole words
00:22:34or syllables
00:22:34appears considerably
00:22:36earlier in inscriptions
00:22:38found in Egypt
00:22:39and the Sinai,
00:22:40probably made
00:22:41by Semitic-speaking
00:22:42workers around
00:22:43the 19th century B.C.
00:22:45These are called
00:22:47proto-Sinaitic,
00:22:48and they are crude,
00:22:49inconsistent,
00:22:50and clearly experimental.
00:22:52The system
00:22:53took centuries
00:22:54to stabilize.
00:22:56What the Phoenicians
00:22:57did was finish it,
00:22:58standardize it,
00:22:59and use it so widely
00:23:01that it spread.
00:23:02The result
00:23:03was 22 characters,
00:23:05no vowels,
00:23:06only consonants,
00:23:08no pictures.
00:23:10Each sign
00:23:11stood for one sound.
00:23:12The signs
00:23:13were written
00:23:13in a fixed order
00:23:14that was memorized
00:23:15as a sequence,
00:23:16and the whole system
00:23:17could be taught
00:23:18to an adult
00:23:19in a matter of days.
00:23:21Compare that
00:23:21to what it replaced.
00:23:23Mesopotamian cuneiform
00:23:25used hundreds of signs,
00:23:27and a competent scribe
00:23:28needed years of training.
00:23:30Egyptian hieroglyphic
00:23:31writing was similar.
00:23:32In both systems,
00:23:34literacy was necessarily
00:23:35a profession.
00:23:36You did not learn
00:23:38to write
00:23:38in order to record something.
00:23:40You hired a man
00:23:41whose entire career
00:23:42was writing.
00:23:44An alphabet
00:23:45of 22 letters
00:23:46removes that gatekeeper
00:23:47entirely.
00:23:48And notice
00:23:49where it appears.
00:23:50Not in temple inscriptions
00:23:52or royal monuments
00:23:53at first,
00:23:54but on jars,
00:23:56on weights,
00:23:57on ownership marks,
00:23:58on the mundane paperwork
00:24:00of moving goods around.
00:24:01A merchant
00:24:02standing on a key
00:24:03counting sacks
00:24:04does not need a scribe.
00:24:06He needs to make a note.
00:24:08There is a reasonable case
00:24:10that the most consequential
00:24:11writing system
00:24:12in human history
00:24:13was refined
00:24:14into its final form,
00:24:16not by priests
00:24:17or scholars,
00:24:18but by traders
00:24:19who needed to keep track
00:24:20of inventory.
00:24:21That case
00:24:22is an inference
00:24:23rather than
00:24:24a proven fact,
00:24:25but the earliest
00:24:26surviving examples
00:24:27point that way.
00:24:29Around the 8th century BC,
00:24:31possibly earlier,
00:24:33Greeks who traded
00:24:34with Phoenicians
00:24:34adopted the system.
00:24:36Exactly when
00:24:37is disputed,
00:24:38with serious proposals
00:24:40ranging from
00:24:40the 11th century
00:24:41to the 8th,
00:24:42and the argument
00:24:43turns on a small number
00:24:45of early inscriptions
00:24:46whose dates
00:24:46are themselves uncertain,
00:24:49The Greeks
00:24:50made one change
00:24:50that mattered enormously.
00:24:52Their language
00:24:53could not be read
00:24:54clearly without vowels,
00:24:55so they took
00:24:56several Phoenician letters
00:24:57representing consonants
00:24:59they did not use
00:25:00and repurposed them
00:25:01for vowel sounds.
00:25:02From Greek,
00:25:03the system passed
00:25:04to the Etruscans,
00:25:05from the Etruscans
00:25:06to the Romans,
00:25:07and from Latin
00:25:08into most of Europe.
00:25:09A separate line
00:25:10runs from the same source
00:25:11through Aramaic
00:25:12into Hebrew,
00:25:14Arabic,
00:25:14and eventually
00:25:15many of the writing
00:25:16systems of Asia.
00:25:18The letters on this page
00:25:19are a modified form
00:25:20of marks
00:25:21standardized by merchants
00:25:23on the coast of Lebanon
00:25:24roughly 3,000 years ago,
00:25:26which makes the central fact
00:25:28of this story stranger.
00:25:30A people who gave the world
00:25:31the most accessible
00:25:32writing system ever devised
00:25:34left almost no writing
00:25:35of their own
00:25:36that we can read.
00:25:37The third thing
00:25:38was the ship.
00:25:40Phoenician vessels
00:25:40came in two broad types,
00:25:42and the distinction
00:25:43was deliberate.
00:25:44The cargo ship
00:25:45was built round and deep,
00:25:47a wide hull
00:25:48that could hold
00:25:49a great deal of weight,
00:25:50driven by a single
00:25:51square sail,
00:25:52slow and unglamorous.
00:25:54The Greeks
00:25:55called these gaoloi,
00:25:57tubs.
00:25:58The warship
00:25:59was long and narrow,
00:26:01built for speed,
00:26:02driven by rowers.
00:26:04The Phoenicians
00:26:05are generally credited
00:26:06with an important development
00:26:07in warship design,
00:26:08the arrangement of oarsmen
00:26:10in two banks,
00:26:11one above the other,
00:26:12This doubles the rowing power
00:26:14without doubling
00:26:15the length of the ship,
00:26:16and a shorter ship
00:26:17turns faster.
00:26:19The Bahrain became
00:26:20the standard fighting vessel
00:26:21of the eastern Mediterranean,
00:26:23but the cargo tub
00:26:24is the more important vessel
00:26:26for this story.
00:26:27Most ancient sailing
00:26:28was coastal.
00:26:29You kept the shore in sight,
00:26:31you anchored at night,
00:26:32and you rarely lost
00:26:33your reference points.
00:26:35It was slower,
00:26:36but it was survivable.
00:26:38Phoenician crews
00:26:39became known
00:26:40for something else.
00:26:41Ancient sources
00:26:42described them
00:26:43sailing at night
00:26:44and navigating
00:26:45by the stars,
00:26:46and specifically
00:26:47by the constellation
00:26:48the Greeks came
00:26:49to call the Phoenician,
00:26:50which we know
00:26:51as the Little Bear,
00:26:52and which contains
00:26:53the North Star.
00:26:54A ship that can hold
00:26:55its bearing after dark
00:26:57can cross open water,
00:26:58it can cut directly
00:26:59across a gulf
00:27:00instead of tracing
00:27:01every bay.
00:27:02It can make a voyage
00:27:04in a season
00:27:04that a coast-hugging vessel
00:27:05could not make at all.
00:27:07Put the three things together,
00:27:09and the shape
00:27:10of the next 400 years
00:27:11is already visible.
00:27:13A cargo worth more
00:27:15than its weight
00:27:15in almost anything.
00:27:17A way of recording
00:27:18accounts that
00:27:19any merchant could learn.
00:27:21And a vessel
00:27:22that could carry
00:27:22both across water
00:27:23nobody else
00:27:24was willing
00:27:25to cross at night.
00:27:27The Phoenicians
00:27:28did not set out
00:27:29to build an empire,
00:27:30and they never did
00:27:31build one.
00:27:31What they built
00:27:32was a route.
00:27:33It ran west,
00:27:34and it ran further west,
00:27:36and by the time
00:27:37anyone in the
00:27:38eastern Mediterranean
00:27:39had a clear idea
00:27:40of how far it went,
00:27:41there were Tyrian ships
00:27:42trading beyond
00:27:43the edge
00:27:44of the known world.
00:27:45Before we follow
00:27:46them out there,
00:27:47it is worth
00:27:48staying home
00:27:48for a while.
00:27:50Because the picture
00:27:51we have of these people
00:27:52is almost entirely commercial,
00:27:54and that is because
00:27:55commerce is what
00:27:56their neighbors
00:27:56wrote down.
00:27:58The question
00:27:59of what it was
00:27:59actually like
00:28:00to live in one
00:28:01of these cities
00:28:02is a harder one,
00:28:03and the answer
00:28:03comes from a different
00:28:04kind of evidence
00:28:05entirely.
00:28:07Almost everything
00:28:08we know
00:28:08about ordinary
00:28:09Phoenician life
00:28:10comes from rubbish.
00:28:12Not from chronicles
00:28:14or biographies
00:28:14which do not survive,
00:28:16but from what people
00:28:17threw away
00:28:17and what they built
00:28:18on top of.
00:28:19Fish bones
00:28:20in a kitchen drain.
00:28:22Charred grain
00:28:23in a burnt storeroom.
00:28:24The residue
00:28:25left inside a wine jar
00:28:26that dried out
00:28:273,000 years ago
00:28:28and was never washed.
00:28:30Foundations of houses
00:28:32rebuilt on the same
00:28:33footprint
00:28:34generation after
00:28:35generation
00:28:36until the ground
00:28:36level rose
00:28:37above the surrounding
00:28:38plain.
00:28:40This is slower
00:28:41evidence than
00:28:41a written account
00:28:42and it is far
00:28:43less dramatic.
00:28:44It also lies less.
00:28:46A king's inscription
00:28:47tells you what
00:28:48a king wanted
00:28:48remembered.
00:28:50A midden
00:28:50tells you what
00:28:51people actually ate.
00:28:53Start with the city
00:28:54itself
00:28:54because the shape
00:28:55of it explains
00:28:56most of the rest.
00:28:58Tyre had
00:28:58almost no room.
00:29:00The island
00:29:01was small.
00:29:02The population
00:29:03kept growing
00:29:03and there was
00:29:04nowhere to expand
00:29:05except upward
00:29:06and outward
00:29:07into the sea
00:29:08so the houses
00:29:09went up.
00:29:09Ancient writers
00:29:10described multi-story
00:29:11buildings in
00:29:12Phoenician cities
00:29:13and Strabo
00:29:14writing much later
00:29:15claimed the houses
00:29:16of Tyre
00:29:17had more floors
00:29:18than those of Rome.
00:29:19That is a Greek
00:29:21geographer
00:29:21reporting on a city
00:29:22he probably never
00:29:23entered
00:29:24and it may be
00:29:25exaggeration.
00:29:26But the pressure
00:29:27that would produce
00:29:28such buildings
00:29:29was certainly real
00:29:30and the archaeology
00:29:31shows dense stone
00:29:32construction packed
00:29:33along very narrow
00:29:34lanes.
00:29:35Picture the effect.
00:29:37Streets a few meters
00:29:38wide running
00:29:39between walls
00:29:40three and four
00:29:40stories high
00:29:41in a place
00:29:42where the sun
00:29:42is strong
00:29:43for most of the
00:29:44year.
00:29:45Much of the city
00:29:46would have been
00:29:46in shadow
00:29:47at ground level
00:29:48for much of the day
00:29:49sound carried
00:29:49smells carried
00:29:50further
00:29:51and the smells
00:29:52were the problem.
00:29:54These were the
00:29:55wealthiest cities
00:29:56on the eastern
00:29:56Mediterranean
00:29:57and by any account
00:29:58they stank.
00:29:59Part of it
00:30:00was ordinary.
00:30:01A pre-modern
00:30:02city with no
00:30:03sewers
00:30:04packed onto a rock
00:30:05with fish being
00:30:06gutted on the
00:30:07quays every morning
00:30:08is gonna smell
00:30:09like a pre-modern
00:30:10city.
00:30:11But the specific
00:30:12smell of a
00:30:12Phoenician town
00:30:13came from the
00:30:14thing that made
00:30:15it rich.
00:30:16The dye vats
00:30:17were outside the
00:30:17walls which
00:30:18helped though
00:30:19not enough.
00:30:20On a hot day
00:30:22with the wind
00:30:22in the wrong
00:30:23direction
00:30:23the fermenting
00:30:25murex
00:30:25reached everywhere.
00:30:27Roman writers
00:30:28centuries later
00:30:29still mention it
00:30:30and one of them
00:30:32notes that the
00:30:32smell was the
00:30:33reason the
00:30:34trade was
00:30:35considered
00:30:35slightly
00:30:36disreputable
00:30:37despite the
00:30:38enormous money
00:30:38in it.
00:30:40The men and
00:30:40women who
00:30:41worked those
00:30:41vats were
00:30:42marked for life
00:30:43hands and
00:30:44forearms
00:30:44stained a
00:30:45color that
00:30:45would not
00:30:46wash out
00:30:46permanent
00:30:47evidence of
00:30:48the job.
00:30:49In a city
00:30:50where the
00:30:50finished cloth
00:30:51was worth
00:30:51more than
00:30:52gold by
00:30:52weight
00:30:53the people
00:30:54who made
00:30:54it were
00:30:54near the
00:30:55bottom of
00:30:55the social
00:30:56order and
00:30:57everyone could
00:30:57identify them
00:30:58on sight.
00:30:59What that
00:31:00social order
00:31:01looked like
00:31:01at the top
00:31:02is genuinely
00:31:02unclear and
00:31:03the honest
00:31:04position is
00:31:04to say so.
00:31:06Tyre had
00:31:07kings.
00:31:07That much
00:31:08is certain
00:31:09and king
00:31:10lists survive
00:31:11in fragments.
00:31:12But there
00:31:13are also
00:31:13repeated
00:31:14references
00:31:14in Assyrian
00:31:15records and
00:31:16later Greek
00:31:17accounts to
00:31:18a council of
00:31:19elders and
00:31:20to something
00:31:20that reads
00:31:21like an
00:31:21assembly of
00:31:22leading
00:31:22families
00:31:22with real
00:31:23authority.
00:31:25In several
00:31:25documented
00:31:26moments of
00:31:26crisis,
00:31:27decisions
00:31:28appear to
00:31:28have been
00:31:29made by
00:31:29a group
00:31:29rather than
00:31:30by a
00:31:30king alone.
00:31:32Some
00:31:32historians
00:31:33describe the
00:31:34Phoenician
00:31:34cities as
00:31:35merchant
00:31:35oligarchies
00:31:36with a
00:31:36ceremonial
00:31:37monarch.
00:31:39Others
00:31:39think the
00:31:40kingship was
00:31:40substantially
00:31:41stronger than
00:31:42that and
00:31:43the evidence
00:31:43for the
00:31:43councils is
00:31:44being
00:31:44overread.
00:31:46The truthful
00:31:47summary is
00:31:47that these
00:31:48cities were
00:31:48governed by an
00:31:49arrangement between
00:31:50hereditary rulers
00:31:51and wealthy
00:31:52trading families,
00:31:53and the
00:31:54balance between
00:31:54the two probably
00:31:55shifted from city
00:31:56to city and
00:31:57from decade to
00:31:58decade.
00:31:59What is not in
00:32:01doubt is that
00:32:01commercial families
00:32:02were powerful
00:32:03enough to be worth
00:32:04mentioning by
00:32:04foreign scribes,
00:32:05which is more
00:32:06than can be said
00:32:07for most of the
00:32:08ancient world.
00:32:09Below them,
00:32:11the ordinary
00:32:11working population
00:32:12ate simply and
00:32:13consistently.
00:32:15Bone and
00:32:16residue analysis
00:32:17from sites across
00:32:18the region gives
00:32:19a fairly clear
00:32:19picture, barley
00:32:21bread, not wheat
00:32:22for most people
00:32:23most of the time,
00:32:24olives and
00:32:25olive oil in
00:32:26quantity, wine
00:32:27widely and
00:32:28daily, usually
00:32:29watered, legumes,
00:32:32onions and
00:32:33garlic, fish
00:32:35constantly, both
00:32:36fresh and salted
00:32:37because it was the
00:32:38one protein that
00:32:39was always available
00:32:40and cheap.
00:32:41Meat was for
00:32:42festivals, sheep
00:32:44and goat mostly,
00:32:46and only when
00:32:47there was a
00:32:48reason.
00:32:49The salted
00:32:50fish deserves a
00:32:51note because it
00:32:52was more than
00:32:53dinner.
00:32:54Saltfish keeps
00:32:55for months,
00:32:56weighs little for
00:32:57its food value
00:32:57and does not
00:32:58need cooking.
00:33:00It is exactly
00:33:01what you load
00:33:02onto a ship
00:33:02for a long
00:33:03voyage and the
00:33:05same coastal
00:33:05towns that made
00:33:06it for their
00:33:06own tables made
00:33:08it for export.
00:33:09Which brings us
00:33:10to the sailors,
00:33:11because their
00:33:12lives ran on a
00:33:13calendar the rest
00:33:14of the city did
00:33:15not share.
00:33:17Mediterranean
00:33:17sailing was
00:33:18seasonal.
00:33:19In the depths
00:33:20of winter, the
00:33:20weather made
00:33:21open-water voyages
00:33:22genuinely lethal,
00:33:24and most shipping
00:33:25simply stopped.
00:33:26The sailing season
00:33:27ran roughly from
00:33:28spring to autumn,
00:33:29and the exact
00:33:30boundaries varied
00:33:31by route and by
00:33:32how desperate the
00:33:33cargo was.
00:33:35That meant a
00:33:36merchant sailor's
00:33:36year had a shape.
00:33:38Months at sea,
00:33:39working a route that
00:33:40might not bring him
00:33:41home at all in that
00:33:42season.
00:33:43Then, a winter ashore,
00:33:44in whichever port he
00:33:45had reached when the
00:33:46weather closed in.
00:33:48For crews on the
00:33:49long western runs,
00:33:50the arithmetic was
00:33:51worse.
00:33:51Tire to the far end
00:33:53of the Mediterranean
00:33:53and back was not a
00:33:54voyage you completed
00:33:55in one season.
00:33:56Men left, and were
00:33:58gone for a year or two,
00:34:00or did not come back.
00:34:01This is one reason the
00:34:03colonies happened, and
00:34:05it is a more mundane
00:34:06reason than the usual
00:34:07explanation about
00:34:08ambition and expansion.
00:34:09If your ships cannot
00:34:11make the round trip in
00:34:12a single sailing season,
00:34:14you need somewhere at
00:34:15the far end for the
00:34:16crews to overwinter.
00:34:17A place to repair
00:34:19hulls, restock water,
00:34:21store cargo until
00:34:22spring.
00:34:23A wintering station
00:34:24with a few dozen men
00:34:25in it, occupied every
00:34:27year, becomes a
00:34:27settlement within a
00:34:28generation.
00:34:29Nobody has to plan a
00:34:30colonial empire.
00:34:32It grows out of the
00:34:33weather.
00:34:34About women in these
00:34:35cities, the evidence is
00:34:36thin and mostly
00:34:38indirect.
00:34:39There are Phoenician
00:34:40funerary inscriptions
00:34:41naming women, some with
00:34:43what appear to be
00:34:44religious titles,
00:34:45indicating that women
00:34:47held priestly roles, at
00:34:48least in some cults.
00:34:50There are legal and
00:34:51commercial documents from
00:34:52related cultures in the
00:34:53region showing women
00:34:55owning property and
00:34:56conducting transactions.
00:34:58Several Phoenician
00:34:59goddesses, particularly
00:35:01Astarte, were central
00:35:02rather than peripheral.
00:35:04What none of that
00:35:05establishes is what daily
00:35:07life was like for an
00:35:08ordinary woman in
00:35:09Tyre or Sidon, and
00:35:10anyone who tells you
00:35:11confidently is filling
00:35:13in gaps.
00:35:13The plausible reading is
00:35:15a society where elite
00:35:16women had more standing
00:35:17than in classical
00:35:18Greece, and less than
00:35:20modern readers might
00:35:21hope, and where women
00:35:22worked in textiles, food
00:35:24processing, and the dye
00:35:26industry alongside men.
00:35:28That is an inference from
00:35:29fragments.
00:35:30It is offered as one.
00:35:32Put the whole picture
00:35:33together, and something
00:35:34worth noticing emerges.
00:35:36For all the wealth
00:35:37moving through these
00:35:38harbors, life inside the
00:35:39walls was cramped, loud,
00:35:41and hard-smelling.
00:35:42Most people ate bread and
00:35:43fish.
00:35:44Most people worked with
00:35:45their hands.
00:35:46The purple cloth that
00:35:47made the city famous was
00:35:48made by people whose
00:35:49stained arms marked them
00:35:51as the lowest rung of the
00:35:52society that sold it.
00:35:54The Phoenicians are usually
00:35:55described in terms of what
00:35:57they exported.
00:35:58It is worth remembering
00:35:59that the exports were not
00:36:01for them.
00:36:01And by the 9th century B.C.,
00:36:04those exports were about
00:36:05to travel further than
00:36:06anything had traveled
00:36:08before.
00:36:08The wintering stations that
00:36:10started as practical
00:36:11necessities were becoming
00:36:12towns.
00:36:13The roots were pushing
00:36:14past every landmark the
00:36:16eastern Mediterranean
00:36:17recognized.
00:36:18One of those stations, on a
00:36:20hill above a bay in North
00:36:21Africa, would eventually
00:36:23grow large enough to fight
00:36:24Rome for the western world.
00:36:26The story the Carthaginians
00:36:28told about their own
00:36:28founding, is one of the
00:36:30best in antiquity, and
00:36:31almost none of it can be
00:36:33verified.
00:36:34A princess of Tyre named
00:36:36Alyssa, called Dido by the
00:36:37Romans, fled the city after
00:36:39her brother the king murdered
00:36:41her husband for his wealth.
00:36:42She took ships and followers,
00:36:45and the temple treasure, and
00:36:46sailed west.
00:36:47On the North African coast,
00:36:49she asked a local ruler for
00:36:51land, and he offered her as
00:36:53much ground as could be
00:36:54covered by the hide of a
00:36:56single ox.
00:36:57She had the hide cut into
00:36:59strips thin as thread, laid
00:37:01them end to end, and
00:37:02enclosed an entire hill.
00:37:05That hill was called
00:37:06Byrsa, and the Greek word
00:37:07B-Y-R-S-A means ox-hide,
00:37:10which is almost certainly why
00:37:11the story exists at all.
00:37:13It looks very much like an
00:37:15origin myth built backwards
00:37:16from a place name, and the
00:37:18Phoenician word behind it may
00:37:20have meant something closer to
00:37:21fortress.
00:37:22The traditional founding date is
00:37:24814 B.C.
00:37:27Excavation at Carthage has
00:37:28produced material from around
00:37:30the middle of the 8th century,
00:37:32which is close enough to be
00:37:33interesting, and far enough
00:37:35apart to matter.
00:37:37Whether that gap means the
00:37:38tradition is wrong, or simply
00:37:40that the earliest layers have not
00:37:42been found under two and a half
00:37:44thousand years of later city, is
00:37:46an open argument.
00:37:46The same problem appears further
00:37:49west, and worse.
00:37:52Gadir, the modern Cadiz on the
00:37:54Atlantic coast of Spain, was said
00:37:56by ancient writers to have been
00:37:57founded in 1104 B.C.
00:38:00That date would make it the oldest
00:38:02continuously inhabited city in
00:38:04Western Europe, and it is repeated
00:38:06confidently in a great many
00:38:07places.
00:38:08The archaeology does not support it.
00:38:11Excavated material from the site
00:38:12points to the 9th or 8th century B.C.,
00:38:15300 years later than the tradition
00:38:17claims.
00:38:18There are two ways to read that.
00:38:20Either the founding dates preserved
00:38:22by Greek and Roman authors are
00:38:24inflated, pushed backwards to make
00:38:26cities more venerable, which
00:38:28certainly happened elsewhere in the
00:38:30ancient world, or the earliest
00:38:32settlement was small, temporary, and
00:38:34made of perishable materials, and
00:38:36simply has not survived where later
00:38:38stone building destroyed it.
00:38:40Both are plausible.
00:38:42Nobody has settled it.
00:38:43What the archaeology does show
00:38:46clearly is the shape of what
00:38:48happened next, and the shape is more
00:38:50interesting than any founding legend.
00:38:52Phoenician sites appear across the
00:38:55western Mediterranean between roughly
00:38:57the 9th and 7th centuries B.C.
00:38:59Mocha, off the coast of Sicily, Nora,
00:39:02and Tharos, on Sardinia.
00:39:04Settlements on Malta and Ibiza,
00:39:07Lixus and Mogador, on the Atlantic coast
00:39:09of Morocco.
00:39:10A string of small places, almost all of
00:39:13them on offshore islands or defensible
00:39:16promontories with good anchorage.
00:39:18That sighting is not accidental, and it
00:39:21tells you what these places were for.
00:39:23They were not colonies in the Greek
00:39:25sense.
00:39:26Greek colonization typically involved
00:39:29sending out a substantial body of
00:39:31settlers to take agricultural land and
00:39:34build a new city that would feed itself.
00:39:36Phoenician foundations were, at least
00:39:39initially, commercial.
00:39:41Small footprints.
00:39:42Positioned for shipping rather than
00:39:44farming.
00:39:45Placed where a ship could shelter and a
00:39:47cargo could be exchanged.
00:39:49The reason they went west at all comes
00:39:51down to one metal.
00:39:53Bronze requires copper and tin, and tin is
00:39:56rare.
00:39:57There was very little of it in the
00:39:58eastern Mediterranean, and the sources
00:40:00that supplied the Bronze Age had been
00:40:02disrupted.
00:40:03But there was tin in the Atlantic West,
00:40:05in Iberia, and further north, and there was
00:40:09silver in southern Spain in quantities that
00:40:11were, by ancient standards, extraordinary.
00:40:14Gadir sat at the mouth of that trade.
00:40:17Behind it lay the mining districts of the
00:40:19Guadalquivir Valley and the Rio Tinto
00:40:21region worked on an industrial scale.
00:40:24Silver and tin flowed east.
00:40:26Wine, oil, cloth, and worked goods flowed west.
00:40:30The Phoenicians did not conquer Iberia.
00:40:33They set up at the river Malds and traded with
00:40:36the people who were already there, and both
00:40:38sides did well enough out of it that the
00:40:41arrangement lasted for centuries.
00:40:44Then, they went past it.
00:40:47Beyond Gadir, the Mediterranean ends.
00:40:50Ships passed the strait that Greeks would
00:40:52later call the Pillars of Hercules and
00:40:54entered the Atlantic, where the tides are
00:40:56large, the swell is long, and none of the
00:40:59sailing knowledge accumulated over a
00:41:01thousand years applied.
00:41:03They went anyway, in both directions.
00:41:06North along the Atlantic coast of Iberia, and
00:41:09eventually toward the tin sources of the
00:41:11far northwest.
00:41:12South along the coast of Africa.
00:41:14A Carthaginian named Hanno is credited with
00:41:17an expedition down the West African coast,
00:41:20described in a Greek text that claims to
00:41:22translate an inscription he set up on his
00:41:24return.
00:41:25How far he got is disputed.
00:41:27Proposals range from Morocco to Sierra Leone
00:41:30to Cameroon, and the account contains details
00:41:33that are difficult to place.
00:41:35And then, there is the story that is either
00:41:38the greatest voyage of the ancient world or
00:41:40a fabrication, and the evidence for deciding is
00:41:43a single strange sentence.
00:41:45Herodotus reports that the Egyptian pharaoh
00:41:48Necho II commissioned a Phoenician crew to
00:41:51sail south from the Red Sea, around Africa, and
00:41:54return through the Pillars of Hercules.
00:41:56He says they took over two years, going ashore each
00:41:59autumn to sow grain, and waiting until harvest
00:42:02before continuing.
00:42:04Herodotus did not believe them.
00:42:06He says so directly, and gives his reason.
00:42:09The sailors claimed that as they rounded the
00:42:12southern end of the continent and sailed west, the
00:42:15sun was on the right-hand side, to the north.
00:42:17To Herodotus, this was obviously absurd.
00:42:20The sun does not travel through the northern sky.
00:42:23Every observation he had ever made confirmed it.
00:42:26But south of the equator, that is exactly what the
00:42:29sun does.
00:42:31Nobody in the Greek world of the 5th century B.C.
00:42:34understood why that would be true.
00:42:35It is not the sort of detail a sailor invents to
00:42:39make a lie more convincing, because it makes the
00:42:42lie less convincing to the audience, which is
00:42:44precisely what happened.
00:42:46Herodotus dismissed the whole account because of
00:42:49it.
00:42:49That single sentence has kept the debate alive for
00:42:52two and a half thousand years.
00:42:54Some historians consider it near proof that the
00:42:57voyage happened.
00:42:58Others point out that the crops and harvest detail
00:43:01strains belief that no other source mentions such an
00:43:04expedition, and that a story can pick up a true-sounding
00:43:08detail second-hand.
00:43:10There is no archaeological trace of the voyage, and there
00:43:13probably could not be.
00:43:14It stands or falls on one observation about the position
00:43:18of the sun.
00:43:19What is beyond dispute is the scale of the network these
00:43:23people built without ever building a state.
00:43:25By the 7th century B.C., a merchant leaving Tyre could travel
00:43:29more than 3,000 kilometers west, and at intervals along
00:43:33that entire route, find a harbor where his language was
00:43:36spoken, his god had a temple, and his credit was good.
00:43:40There was no emperor, no capital, no army enforcing it.
00:43:45There was a shared identity and a shared set of obligations, and
00:43:49it functioned across a distance that no ancient empire ever managed
00:43:53to administer, but the network had a weak point, and the weak point
00:43:57was the same place it had started.
00:44:00The cities on the Lebanese coast were rich, small, and located
00:44:04directly in the path of the most effective military machine the world
00:44:08had yet produced.
00:44:09Everything the network depended on ran through harbors that an Assyrian
00:44:13army could reach on foot.
00:44:15And in the 9th century B.C., the Assyrians started walking.
00:44:19Before we follow the Assyrians down that road, there is something else
00:44:23that has to be dealt with, because it is the thing these people are most
00:44:27notorious for, and it is the least settled question in the entire field.
00:44:32Start with what is not in dispute.
00:44:34The Phoenicians worshipped a set of gods that varied by city.
00:44:38Tyre had Melkart.
00:44:40Sidon had Eshmun, associated with healing.
00:44:44Byblos had a goddess the Greeks identified with Aphrodite.
00:44:49Across all of them stood Astarte, a goddess of fertility and war, and
00:44:54Baal, a title meaning Lord that attached to several different deities
00:44:59depending on where you were standing.
00:45:01At Carthage, the leading pair were Baal-Haman, and a goddess named
00:45:06Tanit, who appears more prominently there than anywhere in the eastern
00:45:09homeland.
00:45:11Worship happened in temples, but also in open-air precincts, and it
00:45:15involved offerings, food, drink, incense, and animals.
00:45:19This was entirely ordinary.
00:45:21Every Mediterranean culture of the period sacrificed animals to its gods,
00:45:25including the Greeks and Romans, who would later find Phoenician religion
00:45:29barbaric.
00:45:30What sets Carthage apart is a specific kind of site, and the argument about
00:45:35what happened there has been running for over a century.
00:45:37The Carthaginians called it, or something like it, a place that modern scholars label
00:45:43a tophet, borrowing a word from the Hebrew Bible.
00:45:47It was an open enclosure outside the settled part of the city.
00:45:50Within it, buried in the ground, were ceramic urns.
00:45:53Each urn contained cremated remains.
00:45:56Above many of them stood carved stone markers.
00:45:59At Carthage alone, the number of urns recovered runs into the many thousands,
00:46:05deposited over roughly six centuries, from around the 8th century BC into the Roman
00:46:11period.
00:46:12Similar precincts have been found at Mottia, at sites on Sardinia, and elsewhere in
00:46:17the Phoenician West.
00:46:19The remains inside are overwhelmingly those of the very young, newborns, and infants.
00:46:24In many urns, the remains of young animals, lambs, and kids appear as well, sometimes
00:46:30mixed with the human remains and sometimes alone.
00:46:33Those are the facts on the ground.
00:46:35Everything after this point is interpretation, and the interpretations are irreconcilable.
00:46:41Greek and Roman writers had an explanation, and they gave it in detail.
00:46:46Diodorus Siculus describes Carthaginians sacrificing children to bail Haman during a siege, in a public
00:46:52ceremony, to win the favor of the god.
00:46:56Plutarch describes something similar.
00:46:59The practice appears in Roman writing as a defining mark of Carthaginian cruelty.
00:47:06For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this was simply accepted.
00:47:11The classical sources said it, the archaeology seemed to confirm it, and nobody looked much
00:47:17harder.
00:47:18From the 1970s onward, a serious revision took hold.
00:47:22The argument ran like this.
00:47:25Every ancient author describing Carthaginian child sacrifice was writing from a culture
00:47:31that had fought three wars against Carthage and destroyed it.
00:47:35Roman accounts of Carthaginian atrocity are the accounts of the victors, produced by a state
00:47:41that had every reason to justify what it had done.
00:47:44Greek writers had their own commercial rivalries.
00:47:47More importantly, the physical evidence could be read differently.
00:47:52Infant mortality in the ancient world was catastrophic.
00:47:56Plausibly a quarter or more of all children dying before their first birthday.
00:48:02A society that cremated its infants and buried them in a dedicated precinct would produce exactly
00:48:09the archaeological pattern found at Carthage, without a single child ever having been killed.
00:48:16Some analyses of the remains supported this.
00:48:19Studies examining the age of the individuals argued that many were prenatal or died within
00:48:25days of birth, consistent with stillbirth and natural death, rather than selection for ritual.
00:48:30By the 1990s, this had become close to the standard view in many quarters.
00:48:36The Tophet was an infant cemetery, and the sacrifice story was ancient propaganda
00:48:42that modern scholarship had finally corrected.
00:48:45Then it turned again.
00:48:47From around 2014, a series of publications pushed back hard, and the case they made is not easily dismissed.
00:48:54The first point concerns the stone markers.
00:48:57Many of them carry inscriptions, and the inscriptions do not read like grave markers.
00:49:01They read like votive dedications.
00:49:04The recurring formula records that a person made a vow to the God, and that the God heard their
00:49:09voice and blessed them.
00:49:12That is the language of a promise fulfilled.
00:49:14It is very difficult to explain why the death of an infant would be recorded as evidence
00:49:18that a God had answered a prayer favorably.
00:49:22The second point concerns the animals.
00:49:24Lambs and kids appear in the same urns, in the same precinct, treated the same way.
00:49:30Nobody suggests those animals died of natural causes and were buried out of grief.
00:49:34They were offerings.
00:49:36The identical treatment of the human and animal remains is hard to explain if one category
00:49:42is a cemetery and the other is a sacrifice.
00:49:45The third point is a question about absence.
00:49:49If the Tafet were simply where infants were buried, one would expect it to contain something
00:49:54close to the full toll of infant mortality in a city of that size over six centuries.
00:49:59Some researchers argue the numbers recovered are far too small for that, implying selection
00:50:05rather than universal burial.
00:50:07Against all this, the other side has answers.
00:50:10Votive language could reflect a hope for the child in an afterlife, or gratitude for a pregnancy,
00:50:16even when it ended badly.
00:50:18Animal remains might represent substitute offerings made alongside a burial.
00:50:24The osteological work on age at death remains contested, with specialists disagreeing about
00:50:29the methods used to estimate it from cremated bone.
00:50:33And the sources remain what they are, written by enemies, decades or centuries after the fact.
00:50:39This is where the matter stands.
00:50:43There is no consensus.
00:50:45Serious specialists hold positions on both sides and publish against each other,
00:50:49and the evidence has now reversed the field's mainstream opinion twice in under a century.
00:50:55The honest conclusion is that we do not know, and that a documentary presenting either version
00:51:01as settled fact is misleading its audience.
00:51:03What can be said with more confidence is why this argument matters beyond the question itself.
00:51:10Carthage lost.
00:51:12Its libraries were dispersed or destroyed, its records did not survive, and the only sustained
00:51:18written account of Carthaginian religion comes from the people who burned the city.
00:51:23Whatever happened in that precinct, our access to it runs entirely through hostile witnesses
00:51:28and physical remains that can be read more than one way.
00:51:32That is the condition of nearly everything in this story.
00:51:35The alphabet, the voyages, the founding dates, the kings, and now this.
00:51:41A civilization reconstructed almost entirely from the outside.
00:51:45And the outside was about to press in much harder.
00:51:49The Assyrian army that started moving west in the 9th century BC was not interested in interpretation.
00:51:56It wanted tribute, and it wanted it annually.
00:51:59And the cities of the Lebanese coast were about to spend 300 years learning exactly how much
00:52:04they could afford to pay.
00:52:06The Assyrian kings kept records, and unlike the Phoenicians, they carved theirs into stone.
00:52:13That is the reason this part of the story can be told at all, and also the reason it has
00:52:18to be told carefully.
00:52:20Assyrian royal inscriptions are not neutral documents.
00:52:22They are monuments to the king, composed to be read by gods and successors, and they inflate.
00:52:30Enemy armies are always vast, victories are always total, and the tribute received is
00:52:36always magnificent.
00:52:37What they are reliable about is the basic shape of events.
00:52:41A king went somewhere, and something was extracted.
00:52:47The first clear appearance of the Phoenician cities in these records comes in the 9th century
00:52:52BC, under Assyrian Sirpaul II.
00:52:55His inscriptions-less tribute received from Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and other coastal towns.
00:53:00Silver, gold, tin, bronze vessels, linen, ivory, and timber.
00:53:05Notice what is not listed.
00:53:07There is no account of a battle.
00:53:08No siege, no storming of walls, no city burned.
00:53:13The Phoenicians paid.
00:53:15This became the pattern for the next 300 years, and it is worth being clear that it was a strategy
00:53:21rather than a humiliation.
00:53:23These were small cities with small populations.
00:53:26They could not field an army capable of meeting Assyria, and they never seriously tried.
00:53:31What they had was money, and a product line nobody else could supply.
00:53:35An Assyrian king who destroyed Tyre would get one payday.
00:53:41An Assyrian king who left Tyre standing and taxed it would get a payment every year, forever,
00:53:47in silver and purple cloth and cedar.
00:53:50Both sides understood this arithmetic perfectly well.
00:53:54Under Tiglath-Pileser III, in the 8th century, the arrangement tightened.
00:53:59Assyria moved from collecting occasional tribute to installing officials,
00:54:04formalizing the relationship, and treating the coast as a managed asset rather than a source of gifts.
00:54:10The cities kept their kings, their gods, and their trade.
00:54:13They lost independence and foreign policy.
00:54:16For a merchant on the quay at Sidon, very little changed.
00:54:20The ships still sailed.
00:54:21The divats still stank.
00:54:23Someone else took a cut.
00:54:25The system held as long as everyone stayed inside it, and periodically someone did not.
00:54:31Under Sennacherib, at the end of the 8th century, the king of Sidon backed a coalition against Assyria.
00:54:38When the campaign came west, he abandoned his city and fled overseas, and Assyria installed a replacement.
00:54:45That was a warning.
00:54:46It was not heeded for long.
00:54:48In the reign of S-R-Hadol, around 677 B.C., Sidon rebelled again.
00:54:54This time, the response was different in kind.
00:54:57The Assyrian records describe the city being taken and destroyed, its king pursued and executed,
00:55:03its population deported, and a new settlement founded in its place under Assyrian control.
00:55:09Whether the destruction was as complete as the inscription claims is uncertain,
00:55:13and the site shows recovery within decades.
00:55:16But the message was unambiguous, and it was aimed at an audience.
00:55:20Tyre was watching, and Tyre was the harder problem.
00:55:24Esser hadn't campaigned against Tyre as well, and forced terms on it.
00:55:28A treaty survives in fragments, imposing an Assyrian official at the king's side,
00:55:34and controlling which ports Tyrian ships could use.
00:55:36What does not appear in any Assyrian record is the capture of the island itself.
00:55:43Ashurbanipal, later, describes blockading Tyre and forcing its submission.
00:55:48Again, no assault on the walls.
00:55:50Again, negotiation.
00:55:52The pattern is consistent enough to be the central fact of Tyre's political history.
00:55:57Empire after empire arrived, applied pressure, took what it could get, and did not take the city.
00:56:04Assyria eventually collapsed under a combination of civil war and invasion,
00:56:09and its place was taken by Babylon.
00:56:11Which brings us to the most remarkable episode in the whole sequence.
00:56:15In the 580s BC, Nebuchadnezzar II, having already taken Jerusalem, turned on Tyre.
00:56:22The siege is reported to have lasted 13 years.
00:56:26That figure comes to us once again through Josephus quoting the Lost Tyrian Archive,
00:56:31and it is worth pausing on what a 13-year siege actually means.
00:56:36It means a besieging army camped on the mainland for over a decade,
00:56:40watching a city it could see but not reach.
00:56:42It means Tyrian ships continuing to come and go from harbors on the seaward side,
00:56:48bringing in food and water while the siege was in progress.
00:56:51It means the blockade was never complete,
00:56:54because a blockade of an island requires a fleet,
00:56:57and Babylon did not have one worth the name.
00:57:01Ezekiel, writing during or shortly after the events,
00:57:04contains a passage acknowledging that Nebuchadnezzar's army got nothing for its trouble,
00:57:08describing the soldiers, shoulders rubbed raw and their heads made bald by the labor,
00:57:14with no reward taken from the city.
00:57:17The siege ended in a negotiated settlement.
00:57:20Tyre accepted Babylonian overlordship, and the Babylonian army went home.
00:57:26Nebuchadnezzar never entered the island.
00:57:28Thirteen years is among the longest sieges recorded in the ancient world,
00:57:32and it ended in a draw.
00:57:34But there is a slower story running underneath these events.
00:57:38And it matters more than any of the individual campaigns.
00:57:42Every one of these arrangements cost money.
00:57:46Tribute to Assyria, then to Babylon, year after year, decade after decade.
00:57:52Sidon rebuilt, then rebuilt again.
00:57:56Ports restricted, cargoes taxed, kings replaced.
00:58:00The eastern cities remained wealthy,
00:58:03But the surplus that had once funded voyages to the Atlantic
00:58:06was steadily being handed over to whoever was strongest inland.
00:58:11Meanwhile, 2,000 kilometers west, Carthage had no such problem.
00:58:16No empire could reach North Africa on foot from Mesopotamia.
00:58:21Carthage paid tribute to nobody.
00:58:23It had access to Iberian silver, Sardinian grain, Sicilian ports,
00:58:29and the entire western trade network.
00:58:31And it had no overlord taking a share.
00:58:34By the 6th century BC, the balance had inverted.
00:58:38The colony had become richer and more powerful than the mother city.
00:58:42Carthage began building something the eastern Phoenicians never had,
00:58:47which was a territorial state with an army,
00:58:50a subject population,
00:58:51and expansionist ambitions of its own.
00:58:54The story of the Phoenicians splits here.
00:58:57One branch runs west
00:58:58and becomes the power that will fight Rome for 80 years
00:59:01and lose everything.
00:59:02The other stays on the Lebanese coast,
00:59:05still trading, still paying,
00:59:08growing steadily less able to determine its own future.
00:59:12For that eastern branch,
00:59:13the system had one remaining assumption holding it up.
00:59:16It had held for 2,000 years,
00:59:19through Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Babylonians,
00:59:22and every one of them had eventually accepted it.
00:59:25Tyre was an island.
00:59:27Armies could not cross water.
00:59:30In 332 BC,
00:59:32a Macedonian arrived who declined to accept it.
00:59:35The request Alexander made was,
00:59:37on its face,
00:59:38a religious one.
00:59:39He had come down the coast in 332 BC,
00:59:43and city after city had opened its gates.
00:59:46Biblos submitted.
00:59:48Sidon submitted and welcomed him.
00:59:50When his envoys reached Tyre,
00:59:52the Tyrians sent back gifts and a declaration
00:59:55that they would do whatever he asked.
00:59:57So he asked to enter the city
00:59:59and sacrifice at the temple of Melchart,
01:00:02whom the Greeks identified with Heracles,
01:00:04and from whom the Macedonian kings claimed to dissent.
01:00:07The Tyrians said no.
01:00:09They offered an alternative.
01:00:11There was an older temple of Melchart on the mainland,
01:00:14at the site of the original settlement.
01:00:15He was welcome to sacrifice there,
01:00:18with full honors.
01:00:19But no foreign army,
01:00:20Persian or Macedonian,
01:00:22would be admitted onto the island.
01:00:23Both sides understood exactly what was being discussed.
01:00:27A king who sacrifices in the city's own temple
01:00:29is a king the city has accepted.
01:00:32The Tyrians were offering neutrality,
01:00:34while the war between Macedon and Persia was decided,
01:00:37and reserving the right to deal with whoever won.
01:00:39It was the same calculation their ancestors had made
01:00:42for a thousand years,
01:00:44and it had worked every time.
01:00:46To understand why they were so confident,
01:00:48you have to look at the two centuries that came before.
01:00:51In 539 BC,
01:00:54Babylon fell to Cyrus of Persia,
01:00:56and the Phoenician cities passed to a new overlord
01:00:59without a fight.
01:01:00What followed was,
01:01:01by the standards of everything preceding it,
01:01:03a good arrangement.
01:01:05The Persians needed a navy.
01:01:06Persia was a continental power,
01:01:09with no naval tradition of its own,
01:01:12and its ambitions ran toward Greece,
01:01:14Egypt, and the Aegean,
01:01:16all of which required ships.
01:01:18The best shipbuilders and sailors in the empire
01:01:20were on the Phoenician coast.
01:01:22So the cities were granted a light touch.
01:01:24They kept their kings and their internal autonomy.
01:01:27They received territory on the mainland.
01:01:30In exchange,
01:01:31they supplied and crewed the fleet.
01:01:33Phoenician squadrons formed the core
01:01:36of Persian naval power
01:01:37for the better part of 200 years.
01:01:39Their ships fought at Salamis in 480 BC,
01:01:43in the great defeat that broke
01:01:44the Persian invasion of Greece,
01:01:46and Herodotus rates them
01:01:47the best sailors in the fleet.
01:01:49That is one of the sharper ironies in this story.
01:01:53The people who taught the Mediterranean
01:01:55how to build ships and read the stars
01:01:57are remembered by Greek history,
01:02:00mainly for losing a battle on the wrong side.
01:02:03The arrangement held for a long time,
01:02:06and then it frayed.
01:02:07In the middle of the 4th century BC,
01:02:10Sidon led a revolt against Artaxerxes III.
01:02:13It went badly.
01:02:15The Persian army came west,
01:02:17the city was betrayed by its own king,
01:02:19and Sidon was burned.
01:02:21Ancient sources give a death toll of 40,000,
01:02:25which is the kind of round number
01:02:27that should be treated with caution.
01:02:29Casualty figures in ancient writing
01:02:31are frequently rhetorical rather than counted,
01:02:34and this one comes from a source
01:02:36writing centuries later.
01:02:38That the city was devastated is not in doubt.
01:02:40The scale is a claim, not a measurement.
01:02:44Sidon was still rebuilding
01:02:45when Alexander came down the coast,
01:02:47which is part of why it welcomed him.
01:02:50Tyre, undamaged and unbowed,
01:02:51made a different choice.
01:02:54Alexander's response to the refusal
01:02:55was to do the thing nobody had done.
01:02:57The island lay several hundred meters offshore.
01:03:01He had no fleet at the outset.
01:03:03What he had was an army, engineers,
01:03:06and the ruins of the old mainland city of Tyre,
01:03:09abandoned centuries earlier,
01:03:11sitting on the shore in front of him.
01:03:13He ordered a causeway built from the mainland
01:03:15to the island,
01:03:16and he built it out of the old city.
01:03:19The stone of ancient Tyre
01:03:21was carried into the water.
01:03:23Timber came from the mountains behind.
01:03:25The mole advanced slowly,
01:03:27in shallow water at first,
01:03:29and the work went well
01:03:31until it reached deeper water,
01:03:32closer to the island,
01:03:34where the Tyrians could reach it.
01:03:36They attacked it from the sea.
01:03:38They sent fire ships against the wooden towers
01:03:40at the head of the causeway
01:03:41and burned them.
01:03:42They rebuilt,
01:03:43and Alexander rebuilt,
01:03:45and the fighting continued for months.
01:03:47What ultimately decided it
01:03:49was not the mole itself.
01:03:51As the campaign dragged on,
01:03:53the naval contingents
01:03:54of the other Phoenician cities,
01:03:56along with those of Cyprus,
01:03:57came over to Alexander.
01:03:59Sidon,
01:04:00Byblos,
01:04:01and Arwad
01:04:01had already submitted,
01:04:02and their fleets followed.
01:04:04Tyre,
01:04:05which had held out
01:04:06against every land empire
01:04:07for two thousand years
01:04:09by being unreachable,
01:04:10suddenly faced a fleet
01:04:12crewed by its own neighbors.
01:04:15Blockaded from the sea
01:04:16and approached
01:04:17across the causeway,
01:04:18the walls were finally breached
01:04:20after roughly seven months.
01:04:22What followed was brutal,
01:04:24and the ancient accounts of it
01:04:25are lurid
01:04:26and probably inflated.
01:04:27Large numbers killed,
01:04:29the rest sold into slavery,
01:04:31executions on the shore.
01:04:33The specific figures
01:04:34vary widely between sources,
01:04:36and should be read
01:04:37as impressions of catastrophe
01:04:38rather than counts.
01:04:41Alexander sacrificed
01:04:42at the Temple of Melkart,
01:04:43Then he moved on toward Egypt
01:04:45and Tyre became
01:04:46a Macedonian possession.
01:04:48The city recovered.
01:04:50It was rebuilt,
01:04:52repopulated,
01:04:53and remained a working port
01:04:54under the Hellenistic kingdoms
01:04:56and then under Rome,
01:04:57prosperous for centuries afterward.
01:05:00Purple dye was still being made there
01:05:02in the Roman period.
01:05:03But something had ended,
01:05:05and it was not the city.
01:05:07For two thousand years,
01:05:09the entire strategy
01:05:10of the eastern Phoenician cities
01:05:12had rested on one physical fact.
01:05:15They were unreachable,
01:05:16or nearly so,
01:05:17and therefore they could negotiate
01:05:19rather than fight.
01:05:21That fact was now gone,
01:05:23and it was gone permanently.
01:05:25The causeway was never removed.
01:05:28Sand and silk began to collect
01:05:29against it almost immediately,
01:05:31carried by the currents along the coast,
01:05:33and trapped by the new obstruction.
01:05:35Over centuries,
01:05:37the deposits widened on both sides.
01:05:39The channel filled in completely.
01:05:41Tyre is not an island today.
01:05:43It sits at the end
01:05:44of a broad, sandy isthmus
01:05:46connecting it to the Lebanese mainland,
01:05:48and it has been that way
01:05:49for more than two thousand years.
01:05:51The peninsula on the modern map
01:05:53is the direct physical result
01:05:55of a seven-month siege
01:05:56in 332 B.C.
01:05:59Alexander did not simply
01:06:00capture the city.
01:06:01He edited the coastline,
01:06:04and the edit is still there.
01:06:06Which leaves one question,
01:06:08the one this whole account
01:06:09has been circling
01:06:10from the beginning.
01:06:11We have followed these people
01:06:13for twelve hundred years
01:06:14across the entire Mediterranean,
01:06:16through the invention
01:06:17of the alphabet
01:06:18and the discovery of the Atlantic.
01:06:20And we have called them
01:06:22Phoenicians throughout.
01:06:24They never called themselves that.
01:06:25The word Phoenician is Greek.
01:06:28It comes from phoenix,
01:06:30a term connected
01:06:31to the color red or purple,
01:06:33and it was applied
01:06:34by Greek speakers
01:06:35to the people
01:06:35selling them dyed cloth.
01:06:37It is a trade description,
01:06:39roughly the purple people.
01:06:41There is no evidence
01:06:42that anyone on that coast
01:06:44ever used it about themselves.
01:06:46What they used,
01:06:48when they referred
01:06:48to themselves collectively at all,
01:06:50appears to have been Canaanite,
01:06:52but mostly they did not refer
01:06:54to themselves collectively.
01:06:56A man from Tyre was a Tyrian.
01:06:58A man from Sidon was a Sidonian.
01:07:02In inscriptions across
01:07:03the Mediterranean,
01:07:04from Cyprus to Spain,
01:07:06people identify by their city,
01:07:08not by a nation.
01:07:10This has led to a genuine
01:07:12and quite recent argument
01:07:13about whether the Phoenicians
01:07:15existed at all.
01:07:16The case for saying
01:07:17they did not runs like this.
01:07:19There was no Phoenician state,
01:07:22no shared government,
01:07:23no federation,
01:07:25no common army.
01:07:27The cities fought each other,
01:07:29allied against each other,
01:07:30and submitted to foreign powers
01:07:32separately.
01:07:33There is no surviving text
01:07:35in which anyone declares
01:07:36themselves part of a Phoenician people.
01:07:39The category was invented
01:07:40by outsiders,
01:07:41who could not tell
01:07:42the cities apart,
01:07:44inherited by Greek
01:07:45and Roman writers,
01:07:46and then adopted wholesale
01:07:48by modern historians
01:07:49who needed a label
01:07:50for a chapter heading.
01:07:52On this reading,
01:07:53we have spent 2,000 years
01:07:55discussing a nation
01:07:56that only ever existed
01:07:57in other people's descriptions.
01:07:59The case against
01:08:01is more straightforward
01:08:02and, to many scholars,
01:08:04decisive.
01:08:05These cities shared a language
01:08:07and a closely related set of gods,
01:08:09and a material culture
01:08:11consistent enough
01:08:12that archaeologists
01:08:13can identify a Phoenician site
01:08:15from its pottery.
01:08:16They ran a commercial network
01:08:18that functioned on truss
01:08:19across 3,000 kilometers,
01:08:21which is difficult to do
01:08:23between total strangers.
01:08:24Colonists from Tyre
01:08:26kept sending offerings
01:08:27back to Tyre
01:08:27for centuries
01:08:28after any political tie
01:08:29had lapsed.
01:08:31An identity
01:08:32does not require a state.
01:08:33Modern historians
01:08:35who insist it does
01:08:36may be imposing
01:08:37a 19th century idea
01:08:38of nationhood
01:08:39on a world
01:08:40that organized itself
01:08:41differently.
01:08:42The argument is live,
01:08:44and it is not going
01:08:45to be settled
01:08:46by new evidence,
01:08:47because the evidence
01:08:48that would settle it
01:08:49was written on papyrus
01:08:50and did not survive.
01:08:52Which brings this back
01:08:53to where it started.
01:08:55The alphabet
01:08:55these cities standardized
01:08:57passed to the Greeks,
01:08:58who added vowels.
01:09:00From Greek,
01:09:01it went to the Etruscans,
01:09:02and then to Rome,
01:09:03and Latin letters
01:09:05now carry most of the written output
01:09:07of the Western world.
01:09:08A separate line runs
01:09:09through Aramaic
01:09:10into Hebrew and Arabic,
01:09:12and onward into scripts
01:09:13used across Asia.
01:09:16Something close to half
01:09:17the people alive today
01:09:18write using a system
01:09:20descended from marks
01:09:21refined by merchants
01:09:22on 200 kilometers
01:09:24of Lebanese coastline.
01:09:26And from those merchants
01:09:27themselves,
01:09:28we have almost nothing.
01:09:30No histories,
01:09:31no literature,
01:09:32no account of a voyage
01:09:33written by anyone
01:09:34who made one.
01:09:35A few thousand inscriptions,
01:09:37most of them short,
01:09:38many of them funerary.
01:09:40Fragments quoted
01:09:41by foreigners.
01:09:42A single translated
01:09:44expedition report
01:09:45of uncertain reliability.
01:09:47Everything else
01:09:48in this story
01:09:49has reached us
01:09:49through Greeks
01:09:50who competed with them,
01:09:51Romans who destroyed
01:09:52their most successful city,
01:09:54and Hebrew scribes
01:09:55writing about neighbors
01:09:56they distrusted.
01:09:58The label has had
01:10:00an afterlife, too.
01:10:01In the 20th century,
01:10:03various modern
01:10:04groups reached back
01:10:05for a Phoenician ancestry
01:10:06in Lebanon
01:10:07and in North Africa
01:10:09and occasionally
01:10:10in places with no
01:10:11connection to the region
01:10:12at all.
01:10:13Ancient identities
01:10:14are useful to modern
01:10:15arguments precisely
01:10:16because the dead
01:10:17cannot object
01:10:18to how they are used.
01:10:20It is worth
01:10:21being careful
01:10:21with all of it.
01:10:22The confident version
01:10:24of this story,
01:10:24the one with firm dates
01:10:26and clear motives
01:10:27and settled explanations,
01:10:28is largely
01:10:29a construction.
01:10:31The honest version
01:10:32has gaps in it,
01:10:33and the gaps
01:10:34are where the papyrus
01:10:35rotted.
01:10:36They gave the world
01:10:37a way to write
01:10:38almost anything down.
01:10:40They did not get
01:10:41to write themselves.
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