25/08/2024
repost from FB Phoenician history group Kommos is an archaeological site that was a Minoan port on the South-West coast of Crete. It was home to Minoans until the end of the Bronze-Age, about 1200 BCE. For about 200 years, the site lay deserted. Then, in the Iron Age, roughly the first millennium BCE, the site was intermittently occupied by Greeks and, apparently, by Phoenicians. That Iron-Age Greeks were there is unsurprising; their modern descendants are there to this day. But why Phoenicians and what were they doing there? That they were there seems undeniable. Phoenician pottery is found at Kommos and so is a Phoenician shrine, inside a Greek temple. (Shaw 1989).
The Phoenicians initially came from cities along the Canaanite coast, essentially coastal parts of today’s Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Phoenicians were famous as sea-faring Canaanite merchants. Indeed the term “Phoenician” may be more a job description than it is an ethnic identity. Phoenicians expanded throughout the Mediterranean and even beyond to the Atlantic coasts of Africa and Spain.
They identified themselves as people of a particular city, notably Byblos, Sidon or Tyre. Phoenician cities were fiercely independent, quarreled often amongst themselves, and were often dominated by outside powers. In the Iron-Age, Canaan was increasingly dominated by Assyria (Miles 2012, 24) which became quite antagonistic to Egypt and, after 732 BCE, Canaan was essentially forbidden to trade with Egypt (Miles 2012, 55). Assyria took over Byblos and Sidon. Tyre bought off Assyria by paying massive tribute, especially in silver from the land that would later be known as Spain. It is ironic that Phoenicians exploited Spanish silver in much the same way as Spaniards themselves exploited the New World silver more than two thousand years later. Much of Tyre’s wealth came from a purple dye made from the Murex sea snail. Indeed the word Phoenician probably comes from a Greek word, “φοινικη”, for red-purple. This was royal purple, and it was extremely costly.
Sometime around 800 BCE, Phoenicians from Tyre began settling at Carthage on the north African coast in what is today, Tunisia. It became the strongest maritime power in the western Mediterranean until it was destroyed by the Romans. The Romans deliberately obliterated Carthage, along with most of its own records and writings. What we know about Carthage is from writings by its enemies. (Miles, 2012).
