Phoenicia -- Ancient History Encyclopedia

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Timeline

c. 4000 BC

Founding of the city of Sidon.
c. 4000 BC - c. 3000 BC

Trade contact between Byblos and Egypt.
c. 2900 BC - c. 2300 BC

First settlement of Baalbek.
c. 2750 BC

The city of Tyre is founded.
c. 1200 BC

Sea Peoples invade the Levant.
1114 BC - 1076 BC

Reign of Tiglath-Pileser I of Assyria who conquers Phoenicia.
1100 BC

Phoenician alphabet.
1000 BC

Phoenician trading colonies in the western Mediterranean.
c. 1000 BC

Height of Tyre's power.
c. 1000 BC

Death of Ahiram (or Ahirom) of Byblos, whose sarcophagus bears the oldest inscription of the Phoenician alphabet.
814 BC

Carthage is founded by Phoenicians.
800 BC - 600 BC

Main period of Phoenician colonization.
c. 750 BC

Phoenicians found the colony of Motya on Sicily.
351 BC

Artaxerxes III sacks Sidon.
334 BC

Alexander the Great sacks Baalbek and renames it Heliopolis.
333 BC

Alexander the Great sacks Sidon.
332 BC

Alexander the Great besieges and conquers Tyre.
c. 301 BC - c. 195 BC

Tyre, as all other Phoenician cities, belongs to the Ptolemies, rulers of hellenistic Egypt.
274 BC - 271 BC

The first Syrian war, marking the beginning of the contest between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids for Phoenicia and Coele-Syria.
c. 195 BC

After the battle at Panion, the Seleucids finally take the rule of Phoenicia from the Ptolemies. Tyre and the other Phoenician cities will remain in the Seleucid power until the Roman conquest of Syria.
64 BC

Tyre becomes a Roman colony.

Definition

Phoenicia was an ancient civilization comprised of independent city-states which lay along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea stretching through what is now Syria, Lebannon and northern Israel. The Phoenicians were a great maritime people, known for their mighty ships adorned with horses’ heads in honor of their god of the sea, Yamm, the brother of Mot, the god of death.

The island city of Tyre and the city of Sidon were the most powerful states in Phoenicia (with Gebal/Byblos and Baalbek as the most important spiritual/religious centers) and the purple dye manufactured and used in Tyre for the Mesopotamian royalty gave Phoenicia the name by which we know it today (from the Greek 'phoinix’ for Tyranian Purple) and also accounts for the Phoenicians being known as 'purple people’ by the Greeks (as Herodotus tells us) as the dye would stain the skin of the workers. In its time Phoenicia was known as Canaan and is the land referenced in the Hebrew Scriptures to which Moses lead the Israelites from Egypt and which Joshua then conquered (Books of Exodus and Joshua). The city of Sidon (modern Sidonia) was the birthplace of the princess Jezebel who married the King of Israel, Ahab, as chronicled in I and II Kings.

Herodotus cites Phoenica as the birthplace of the alphabet, stating that it was brought to Greece by the Phoenician Kadmus (sometime before the 8th century BCE) and that, prior to that, the Greeks had no alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the basis for most languages written and spoken today and their city of Gebal (called by the Greeks 'Byblos’) gave the Bible its name (from the Greek 'Ta Biblia’, the books) as Gebal was the great exporter of papyrus ('bublos’ to the Greeks) in ancient times. It is also thought that many of the gods of ancient Greece were imported from Phoenicia as there are certain indisputable similarities in some stories concerning the Phoenician Baal and Yamm and the Greek Zeus and Poseidon.

In 334 BCE Alexander the Great conquered Baalbek (re-naming it Heliopolis) and marched on to brilliantly and brutally subdue the city of Tyre in 332 by building a land bridge from the mainland to the island which, today, still exists and is the reason why Tyre is no longer an island. After the fall of Tyre, Sidon was was overthrown and the other city-states followed suit, thus ending the Phoenician Civilization and ushering in the Hellenistic Age of Alexander. By 15 CE the disassembled parts of Phoenicia were colonies of the Roman Empire with Heliopolis remaining an important pilgrimage site which boasted the grandest religious building (the Temple of Jupiter Baal) in all of the Empire, the ruins of which remain well preserved to this day.

Written by JPryst.

Articles

Phoenician Names

Phoenician names are generally composite words with a specific meaning. The naming of children had a significance in the Ancient Near East that is difficult to understand nowadays. By choosing a name...
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Alexander's Siege of Tyre, 332 BC

After defeating Darius III at the battle of Issus in November 333 BC, Alexander marched his army (about 35,000-40,000 strong) into Phoenicia, where he received the capitulation...
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Jezebel: Princess of Sidon, Queen of Israel

Jezebel was the Phoenician Princess of Sidon (9th century BCE) whose story is told in the Hebrew Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament) in I and II Kings where she is portrayed unfavorably...
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The Phoenician Alphabet and Language

Phoenician is a Canaanite language closely related to Hebrew. Very little is known about the Canaanite language, except what can be gathered from the El-Amarna letters written...
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