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- Phoenicia was an ancient Semitic-speaking thalassocratic civilization that originated in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily modern Lebanon. At its height between 1100 and 200 BC, Phoenician civilization spread across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula. The Phoenicians came to prominence following the collapse of most major cultures during the Late Bronze Age. They developed an expansive maritime trade network that lasted over a millennium, becoming the dominant commercial power for much of classical antiquity. Phoenician trade also helped facilitate the exchange of cultures, ideas, and knowledge between major cradles of civilization such as Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. After its zenith in the 9th century BC, Phoenician civilization in the eastern Mediterranean slowly declined in the face of foreign influence and conquest, though its presence would remain in the central and western Mediterranean until the second century BC. Phoenician civilization was organized in city-states, similar to those of ancient Greece, of which the most notable were Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. Each city-state was politically independent, and there is no evidence the Phoenicians viewed themselves as a single nationality. Carthage, a Phoenician settlement in northwest Africa, became a major civilization in its own right in the 7th century BC. Since little has survived of Phoenician records or literature, most of what is known about their origins and history comes from the accounts of other civilizations and inferences from their material culture excavated throughout the Mediterranean Sea. Little was written about the Phoenicians in the early modern period, until the 1646 publication of Samuel Bochart's Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan, the first full-length book devoted to the subject. It created a framework narrative for future scholars of a maritime-based trading society with linguistic and philological influence across the region. However, early scholars like Bochart presented the Phoenicians as merchants and colonists from the same region, rather than a fully-fledged ethnocultural group. Knowledge of the Phoenicians at this time was confined to the ancient Greco-Roman sources. Scholarly interest increased in 1758, when Jean-Jacques Barthélémy deciphered the Phoenician alphabet, and the number of known Phoenician inscriptions began to increase – the 1694 publication of the Cippi of Melqart was the first Phoenician inscription to be identified and published in modern times. In 1837, Wilhelm Gesenius published the first full compendium of the Phoenician language (Scripturae Linguaeque Phoeniciae Monumenta), after which Franz Karl Movers published Die Phönizier (1841–1850) and Phönizische Texte, erklärt (1845–1847), collecting the classical and biblical sources, in which he presented the Phoenician “people” (Völkerschaft) as an ethnic group. Further 19th century scholarly works included: John Kenrick’s Phoenicia (1855), George Rawlinson's History of Phoenicia (1889) and Richard Pietschmann's Geschichte der Phönizier (also 1889). This scholarly study of the Phoenicians was first consolidated by Ernest Renan, first with his French-government-sponsored Mission de Phénicie – considered a smaller-scale follow up to the Napoleonic era Description de l'Égypte – and then with the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. The scholarly consensus is that the Phoenicians' period of greatest prominence was 1200 BC to the end of the Persian period (332 BC). The Phoenician Early Bronze Age is largely unknown. The two most important sites are Byblos and Sidon-Dakerman (near Sidon), although, as of 2021, well over a hundred sites remain to be excavated, while others that have been are yet to be fully analysed. The Middle Bronze Age was a generally peaceful time of increasing population, trade, and prosperity, though there was competition for natural resources. In the Late Bronze Age, rivalry between Egypt, the Mittani, the Hittites, and Assyria had a significant impact on Phoenicians cities. (en)
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