Posted on 07/04/2023 4:49:14 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The Phoenicians were, for a long time, significant rivals to the Greeks in dominating Mediterranean trade. Interestingly, they shared quite a few similarities to the ancient Greeks. But what do we actually know about them? Did a place called Phoenicia even really exist?
Where Did The Phoenicians Live?
The homeland of the Phoenicians was in the Levant. Originally, they lived in the entire region where Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon now are. Their northern border was marked by ancient Syria. Their homeland was called Phoenicia. Some of the major Phoenician cities in this area were Byblos, Tyre, Sidon and Arwad.
However, the Phoenicians did not just live in this area. Like the Greeks, the Phoenicians were a seafaring nation, so they unsurprisingly established colonies in various locations. By far their most famous colony was Carthage, which later became one of Rome’s main rivals. This colony managed to remain independent for quite some time after the Phoenician homeland had been conquered by other nations.
The Phoenicians also established colonies in Spain. The most famous example is Gadir, modern-day Cádiz. So we can see that, just like the Greeks, many Phoenicians lived far outside their homeland, Phoenicia.
Did a Place Called ‘Phoenicia’ Really Exist?
Some modern sources claim that there was not really any location in antiquity called ‘Phoenicia’. The basis behind this claim is that the Phoenicians did not form a unified country. There was never a single king ruling over all the Phoenician cities.
Grecian Delight supports Greece
This is another way in which the Phoenicians were like the Greeks. They had various city-states dotted across the landscape. Each city-state had its own king, and sometimes these city-states would fight each other. On the other hand, sometimes they would form alliances against a common enemy.
However, does this really mean that we can say that ‘Phoenicia’ did not really exist? By the same logic, ‘Greece’ did not really exist in antiquity, since it was composed of independent city-states (until Alexander the Great united them all under one leader). Of course, no one would make that claim about Greece.
Therefore, it is absolutely proper to use ‘Phoenicia’ in the sense of the territory in the Levant dominated by Phoenician city-states.
Did the Phoenicians View Themselves as a Single Nationality?
However, would the Phoenicians themselves have had any concept of a location called Phoenicia, or was this just a concept held by outsiders? The answer to this largely depends on how the Phoenicians viewed themselves.
Some scholars today claim that the Phoenicians did not view themselves as a single nationality. This theory is largely based on the fact that Phoenicia was divided into numerous city-states instead of a single government.
However, the same was true of Greece, yet we know that they absolutely had a concept of ‘Greeks’ in contrast to ‘non-Greeks’. Therefore, there is no reason at all why the same could not have applied to the inhabitants of Phoenicia.
What Did the People of Phoenicia Call Themselves?
Another piece of evidence used to support the theory that the Phoenicians did not view themselves as a single nationality is the supposed lack of an endonym. This is the term for what a population calls itself. Supposedly, the Phoenicians did not have a term to call themselves. Rather, they just referred to themselves by the name of the specific city-state they belonged to.
For example, someone from Tyre would call themselves a ‘Tyrian’, someone from Sidon would call themselves a ‘Sidonian’, and so on. There is evidence of this naming practice. However, does that mean that the inhabitants of Phoenicia did not also have a sense of collective identity?
Once again, we can compare Phoenicia to Greece to assess this theory. In Greece, people would often refer to themselves by the city-state they came from (such as ‘a Spartan’ or ‘a Theban’). Nonetheless, as we have already seen, they definitely had a sense of collective identity as well.
In fact, there is direct evidence that the Phoenicians did use an endonym for themselves. Augustine of Hippo, who lived in Carthage in the fourth century AD, records that the common people there called themselves ‘Chanani’, which comes directly from the word ‘Canaanites’.
Bronze Age Phoenicia
The people who lived in Phoenicia in the Bronze Age were originally called Canaanites. The ancient Israelite writers of the Bible used this term for the people of that land, which they called Canaan. This same term was used in the Amarna Letters, which were letters sent by city-states in Phoenicia to Egypt in the 14th century BC.
This shows that, at least as early as the 14th century BC, the people of Phoenicia referred to their land as Canaan, and thus, they were Canaanites. They absolutely did have an endonym to refer to their land and their nationality.
In ancient Berytus (modern-day Beirut), the people there in the second century BC struck coins with this same term, ‘Canaan’, written on them. And all the way over in Carthage, as we have seen, the Phoenician-descendants continued to call themselves Canaanites as late as the fourth century AD.
Canaan, or Phoenicia, Really Did Exist
The term ‘Phoenicians’ is simply the Greek term for the Canaanites. Therefore, the place name ‘Phoenicia’ is simply the Greek equivalent of ‘Canaan’ (although by the time the Greeks started using that term, Canaan had lost a lot of its southern territory to the Israelites).
The evidence is clear that the Phoenicians did have a collective term to refer to themselves, showing that they had a concept of a single nationality. They were Canaanites, in contrast to non-Canaanites. As shown by the Amarna Letters, they referred to their land as Canaan. Although it was made up of independent city-states, Canaan as a single entity was absolutely a concept that they already had back then.
Since the word ‘Phoenicia’ is simply what the Greeks called this territory, it is definitely correct to say that Phoenicia really did exist.
My essential understanding is that the Phoenicians were the aftermath of the Mycenaeans after their society collapsed.
Dang thing reads like a book report...
-PJ
Exactly. This is the very thing I was trying to escape when I dropped out of 8th grade. This brings back bad memories. MY PTSD is kicking in again.
Someone stole the report I did in 6th grade!!!
I noticed that…like he had one page of information, and a five-page report to write. Sometimes my wife talks like that. Drives me nuts.
They wrote, they sailed, they dominated commerce: therefore, they were.
Thanks Larry. Phoenicia was a collection of maritime city-states, each with a supporting territory tucked into the hills to their east. Their antiquity has been grossly exaggerated under the conventional pseudochronology. If memory serves, in their heyday, Sidon was considered the oldest of the settlements.
Classical Greeks considered Cadmus the Phoenician source of the classical Greek alphabet. The cover story of one of the 1974 Nat Geog was about the Phoenicians, and starts with an anecdote related to the founding of Carthage, which was accomplished by exiles from Tyre.
Carthage was in competition with Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, and fellow Phoenician city-states for territories and colonies in the western Mediterranean, and also explored western Africa, planting colonies there, and circumnavigating that continent.
Persian rule of the Phoenician area and Ionian Anatolia led to the use of those cities' naval power against Greece during the attempted conquest.
I am so Tyred of this.
Delendam esse Carthaginem........................
Let's make it a twofer:
One of *those* topics.
Amenhotep II was identified with the king whom an ancient epic poem portrayed as leading an enormous army against the city of Ugarit, only to be pursued to the Sinai Desert. He was further shown to be the alter ego of the Scriptural Zerah, whose enterprise started similarly and ended identically.
I be rootin’ for Rome.
Rome beat Carthage at their own game using Green timber..................
Hence my comments about roots. /rimshot
The Greeks were never under the same rule until they were conquered by the Romans. Philip of Macedon and his son forced some of them into the League of Corinth and tried to boss them around (Alexander even destroyed the city of Thebes) but some of the Greeks of Greece proper remained independent (as well as the western Greeks in Italy, Sicily and elsewhere).
Just like the Phoenicians didn't call themselves Phoenicians, the Greeks didn't call themselves Greeks. That comes from the Roman name for them--they called themselves Hellenes.
Bkmark
Amen
There was an interesting article on You Tube about “The Sea Peoples” of about this era who rampaged over the Levant. The Egyptians fought with them but their origin is evidently still obscure.
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