History of the Ancient Near East · Part 15 · Kingdoms of the Iron Age · B1
The Phoenicians and the Alphabet
Part 15 of History of the Ancient Near East: the Phoenicians were Canaanites of the coast. They sailed further than anyone in their world, made the most expensive colour on earth, founded Carthage, and carried a simple new way of writing to the Greeks: the alphabet. The present passive for processes (the dye is made from snails), first, then, finally, and comes from, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the people who gave you your letters, Marcos. All twenty-four of them.
Ask Herodotus. Even he says we learned them from the Phoenicians. We still call them “Phoenician letters”.
And my Hebrew letters are their cousins. Aleph, beth: alpha, beta. I never thought about it before.
The coast of Lebanon and the Mediterranean, about 1200–146 BCE
The Phoenicians lived in independent city-states on the coast of modern Lebanon: Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad. They spoke a Canaanite language, close to Hebrew, and probably called themselves Canaanites, or simply people of Tyre or Sidon. “Phoenician” is a Greek name; it may come from the Greek word for a purple-red colour.
They were traders and sailors. They sold cedar wood from the mountains of Lebanon to Egypt and Mesopotamia, glass, ivory, metalwork, and the famous Tyrian purple dye. From about 900 BCE they founded colonies and trading posts across the Mediterranean, as far as Spain. The greatest was Carthage, in modern Tunisia, which later fought Rome for a hundred years and was destroyed in 146 BCE.
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