The Phoenicians: everything you wanted to know

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Phoenicians – Everything You Wanted to Know

History Extra Podcast
Host: Emily Briffett
Guest: Josephine Quinn (Professor of Ancient History, University of Cambridge)
Release date: September 13, 2025

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Overview

In this captivating episode, historian Josephine Quinn joins host Emily Briffett to answer listener questions and offer a wide-ranging introduction to the Phoenicians, the influential but often overlooked seafarers of the Eastern Mediterranean. The discussion covers the origins, identity, archaeology, extensive trade networks, culture, and the enduring legacy of the Phoenicians, delving into why their achievements have been neglected in popular history and what their story can teach us today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Who Were the Phoenicians?

• Phoenicians were inhabitants of ancient port cities along the Eastern Mediterranean coast, in what is today Lebanon (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and others), dating back to the Bronze Age (~4,000 years ago) [02:57].
• Overlooked in mainstream ancient history due to the focus on Greece and Rome, they were “extraordinary navigators,” foundational traders, and city-builders before Greek or Roman ascendancy [02:57].

“They discovered the Pole Star, they founded all sorts of settlements in the Western Mediterranean before the Greeks were sailing around.”
– Josephine Quinn [02:57]

• Their “classic era” runs from ca. 1000 BCE to 500 BCE; later, the focus of their civilization shifted west, primarily to Carthage [03:38-05:36].

Origins and Population

• Originated from local Levantine populations; legends like Tyre’s supposed Persian Gulf origin are more myth than fact [05:42].
• By the time their cities colonized the western Mediterranean, they had become highly cosmopolitan, as reflected by recent DNA evidence [05:42-07:00].

“There are actually very few people, apparently, on the evidence so far, very few people from the Levant in these ports. So they’ve become these incredible kind of cosmopolitan international centers.”
– Josephine Quinn [06:32]

Sources and Archaeology

• Major limitations: Scarcity of literary sources—either not much was written, or writings on papyrus did not survive due to the climate [07:10].
• About 10,000 inscriptions exist, but most are formulaic religious dedications.
• Archaeology is hampered because the port cities are now under modern cities, making excavations difficult [07:10-10:09].
• Main non-material sources: Greek authors, Roman authors, Assyrian records, and the Hebrew Bible [07:10-10:29].

“It’s a bit of a jigsaw with about three quarters of the pieces missing.”
– Josephine Quinn [09:12]

Identity: Did They Call Themselves "Phoenician"?

• They did not see themselves as ‘Phoenician’ but rather as citizens of their own cities (e.g., ‘sons of Tyre’, ‘sons of Carthage’) [10:29-12:07].
• The label "Phoenician" comes from Greek authors; it is a convenient outsider grouping, not a self-identity [12:09-13:29].

How Greeks & Romans Viewed the Phoenicians

• Early Greek and Roman views were often positive; the Phoenicians were regarded as ‘ancient and noble’.
• During wartime alliances (e.g., Phoenicians siding with Persia against Greek cities), negative portrayals increased [13:33-14:59].
• Carthage, as Rome’s rival, generated especially hostile Roman representations [13:33-16:29].

Carthage’s Significance

• Carthage was “hugely significant,” surpassing individual Greek city-states and even Rome in scale and power until its destruction [16:29].
• Carthage controlled much of Western Mediterranean trade, enforced maritime dominance, and built an empire in its own right [16:29-18:41].

“It really was their sea.”
– Josephine Quinn [17:52]

Maritime Skills and Trade Networks

• Phoenician seafarers solved key challenges in long-distance Mediterranean navigation, chiefly sailing westward against prevailing winds [19:05].
• Their trade networks eventually reached as far as Crete, the Aegean, and even the Atlantic coasts for tin and other metals, crucial in the Bronze Age economy [19:05-22:47].

Major Trade Goods

• Besides metals, they traded pottery (used as both trade goods and ballast), slaves (as indicated in the Hebrew Bible), and above all, textiles dyed with their famous purple dye (from sea snails) [22:42-25:21].

“These were the purple guys, the purple snail men.”
– Josephine Quinn [25:14]

Culture, Architecture & Art

• Phoenician architecture shows strong Egyptian influence in decoration, such as the distinctive “throat cornice” [25:31-29:00].
• House types with internal courtyards, extensive cosmopolitan styles due to wide contacts [25:31-29:00].

Relations Between City-States & Daily Life

• Phoenician cities functioned as independent entities, sometimes connected by religious ties or colonial relationships (Carthage as colony of Tyre) [29:00-31:47].
• Two ‘Phoenician worlds’ developed: a central (Carthage, Sicily, Sardinia) and a far-western (Morocco, Spain) sphere; Carthaginian imperialism eventually unified them [29:00-31:47].

Religion and Belief

• Their pantheon overlapped with those of other Near Eastern, Greek, and Egyptian religions—gods were often understood under multiple names (e.g., Ashtar/Ishtar/Aphrodite).
• Each city had a patron god (e.g., Melqart for Tyre) [32:12].
• Religion permeated daily life more as a background ritual than as intellectual belief—likened to the omnipresence of social media today [32:12-35:34].

“It’s more like, honestly, scrolling social media. It’s something that’s always there in the background.”
– Josephine Quinn [34:30]

Timeline and Major Moments

• Rise as vassal kingdoms in the Bronze Age, golden eras as independent city-states from 1000–500 BCE (East), then 500–146 BCE (West/Carthage).
• End in the destruction of Carthage by Rome (146 BCE), but language and culture persisted for centuries, up to St. Augustine’s time [35:34-38:31].

Their Legacy: The Alphabet

• The Phoenicians revolutionized writing with the development of the alphabet, later adopted and adapted by the Greeks and, from them, by much of the world [38:31-43:09].

“The alphabet… grows up in the Levant… and is used to write down these Levantine languages… And then finally… alphabetic letters are called by the rest of the people who live in that region—they’re called Tyrian letters.” – Josephine Quinn [38:41-43:09]

Why So Successful?

• Success attributed not to general ethnic cohesion, but to strategic city locations (Tyre and Carthage), defensible geography, and adaptability [43:31-44:52].

Why So Overlooked?

• Neglect stems largely from a lack of accessible literature (as opposed to Greek/Roman texts), educational priorities in the 19th century, and a degree of racism (anti-Semitism) against Semitic peoples [45:05-47:48].

“A lot of it does come down to which cultures were privileged because they were both legible and easy to teach in a particular historical moment… the Phoenicians were considered Semitic and there was an awful lot of anti-Semitism...”
– Josephine Quinn [45:05-47:48]

Final Pitch: Why Should We Care About the Phoenicians?

• The Phoenician model challenges modern assumptions about ethnicity and identity—flourishing without the need for overarching ‘national’ identity, showing the power of city-based allegiance and cosmopolitanism [47:58].

“The Phoenicians provide a really useful lesson in how strange modern ideas about the world are… you can have these big interesting city-states that don’t need to depend on a larger idea of heritage…”
– Josephine Quinn [47:58]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the lack of textual sources:
  “It’s a bit of a jigsaw with about three quarters of the pieces missing.” [09:12]
• On Phoenician cosmopolitanism and DNA:
  “There are actually very few people, apparently, on the evidence so far, very few people from the Levant in these ports. So they’ve become these incredible kind of cosmopolitan international centers.” [06:32]
• On Carthage’s naval dominance:
  “It really was their sea.” [17:52]
• On ancient religion:
  “It’s more like, honestly, scrolling social media. It’s something that’s always there in the background... Probably a better metaphor than going to church.” [34:30]

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:57 | Who were the Phoenicians—their scope and historical context | | 05:42 | Origins and early migration | | 07:10 | Challenges of archaeological and written sources | | 10:29 | Identity—did they call themselves Phoenician? | | 13:33 | Greek and Roman perspectives | | 16:29 | Carthage’s significance in Mediterranean history | | 19:05 | Why the Phoenicians became master seafarers and traders | | 22:47 | Major goods traded | | 25:31 | Architecture, culture, and art | | 29:00 | Interactions between city-states and regional identities | | 32:12 | Religion, gods, rituals & the meaning of "belief" | | 35:34 | Main events and turning points in Phoenician history | | 38:41 | Their legacy in the development of the alphabet | | 43:31 | Explaining their city-level “successes” | | 45:05 | Why the Phoenicians are so overlooked | | 47:58 | The modern lesson: identity and heritage |

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Conclusion

Josephine Quinn’s expert guidance reveals the Phoenicians as dynamic, innovative, and cosmopolitan players in the ancient world—navigators, traders, and cultural connectors who helped shape Western civilization, yet remain overlooked due to gaps in the historical record and enduring biases. Their story invites us to question how we define heritage, belonging, and cultural achievement.

Recommended for: Anyone interested in ancient history, forgotten civilizations, the development of writing, and the enduring complexities of cultural contact and identity.

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For more by Josephine Quinn:

• How the World Made the West
• In Search of the Phoenicians

Transcript

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[Emily Briffett]

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers from of BBC History Magazine. When we think of prominent dominant ancient societies, the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome are the ones that immediately come to mind. But what about the Phoenicians? Who were they and why do they matter? While speaking to Emily Briffet for today's episode, the historian Josephine Quinn explores the story of these ancient seafarers, traders and city builders who connected the ports along the Mediterranean and left left an extraordinary legacy in their wake long before Greece and Rome rose to power. We are covering so many questions today. Lots of lovely Ones from listeners all about the Phoenicians. So to introduce us to the topic of our chat, who were the Phoenicians?

[Josephine Quinn]

Well, we're talking about people who lived in the port cities of the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean. So cities like Tyre and Sidon and Beirut, the basically the area of modern Lebanon, give or take. These are people who tend to be overlooked in ancient history these days because that really focuses on Greece and Rome. But actually they were extraordinary navigators. They discovered the Pole Star, they founded all sorts of settlements in the Western Mediterranean before the Greeks were sailing around the Mediterranean. And I've been writing about them for the last sort of 15, 20 years, so I'm very excited to talk about them today.

[Emily Briffett]

And we're talking about quite a long time frame here, aren't we?

[Josephine Quinn]

Right, so the cities themselves go back to the Bronze Age. So we're talking that the earliest archaeological remains can go anything up to about 4,000 years ago. But in the Bronze Age, they're stuck in between these enormous empires, the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Babylonians and so on. And so they don't really have a lot of room to manoeuvre. What we know about them in that era is the odd letter that the king of one of these cities will send to Pharao or something like that. But it's really when those empires collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, we still don't really know why, but that's when these cities, these much smaller kind of political communities, come into their own, because they've always been port cities, they've always been trading sailing cities. But before that, they had to, you know, share their profits essentially with whichever of the great kings of the region was in charge at the time. And so once those kings have disappeared, they have the. The motivation and the knowledge and so on to really take advantage, really come into their own. And so that's the sort of classic era of those cities, from about a thousand BCE to around about 500, probably 500, 400. That's the sort of golden age, if you like, of the Eastern Phoenician cities. But as I said, they also, in that period, found all these cities in the Western Mediterranean. So that leads to a kind of third, third phase where actually these Western Mediterranean cities, and above all Carthage, the great colony of Carthage, become actually even kind of more powerful and wealthy than their mother cities. So you get this shift in the focus from the Levantine coast of around Lebanon to the Western Mediterranean. We're talking Tunisia, Algeria, Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, that kind of region that's really the Western Phoenician Mediterranean.

[Emily Briffett]

Where can we really say that their origins lie? Can we? Or is it a bit indistinct?

[Josephine Quinn]

No, it's a really good question. So, I mean, as far as we know on current evidence, those populations of those original cities, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and so on, they are local populations. And the Tyrians at least had a legend that they came from the Persian Gulf. But it seems like that's probably more to do with the fact that the island that's now Bahrain was Tylos in antiquity, which sounds an awful lot like Tyros. And so it's probably just kind of a legend to explain that similarity that's quite common. So as far as we know, that they are quite a local population in the Levant. By the time they get to the west, though, of course, you get very mixed populations in the western cities. And there's actually wonderful ancient DNA evidence that's just from the last year or two, showing just how extraordinarily mixed these cities are, that people are moving all around the Mediterranean, settling in these enormous ports. There are actually very few people, apparently, on the evidence so far, very few people from the Levant in these ports. So they've become these sort of incredible kind of cosmopolitan international centers. But their origins, these Western settlements, their origins are in migration of some kind from the East.

[Emily Briffett]

What are our main sources or archaeological sites, I guess, for understanding this history? And dare I ask, how reliable are they?

[Josephine Quinn]

Well, I mean, the problem that we have as Phoenician historians is that there's no, or very little literary evidence now, whether that's because, in fact, these were societies that didn't write things down as much as other Mediterranean societies, which would be very normal. There were a lot of very oral, focused cultures in the Mediterranean, or perhaps even more likely, they did write things down, but on papyrus, like the Egyptians did. And unfortunately, the Levant is a much rainier region than Egypt, and so papyrus survives much better in the kind of dry environment of Egypt. So we just don't know how much we've lost there. So you start off always from a sort of traditional perspective as an ancient historian, with a gap, but there are things to fill it. So we have an enormous amount of inscriptions, about 10,000 across the Mediterranean in the Phoenician language, various dialects of it. The problem there is that almost all of them are from religious sanctuaries, their dedications to the gods. And what that means is that they all say almost this exactly the same thing. So, you know, we know an awful lot about how to dedicate something to the gods in Phoenician, but that's not necessarily a very full picture of the society. And then on top of that, of course, we have the archaeology again. The problem there, you see, is that the cities that these people lived in are really well chosen. They're fantastically good places to put a port, which means that they turned into major Roman ports in many cases. And now they're still often major at port cities today. I mean, Tyre is an enormous city today, very wonderful. But you can't do a lot of archaeology in the middle of, you know, city center with shopping centers and all that kind of thing. So all of this is. It's the problem that it's unreliable. It's largely invisible. So this is why the. Probably the main evidence that you have to start from, from a lot of questions about the Phoenicians is from their neighbors. So that's Greek authors writing about them. They're very interested in them. Roman authors. It's also Assyrian authors and of course the authors of the Hebrew Bible who are their closest neighbors. This is really of like the next communities along the coast. Phoenician speakers were Hebrew speakers and which is, you know, it's so close as a language, they could be called dialects of the same language. And so they actually have quite a lot to say about the history of these cities. So that's kind of one of the things that makes it a really very fun thing to study, is there's all these little bits of evidence that make up a kind of jigsaw with about three quarters of the pieces missing. But then there's all this stuff from the outside that also obviously all has its own kind of perspective. Some problems, some feuds, but sometimes not. And so there's a lot to sort through.

[Emily Briffett]

It sounds like there certainly are some challenges there, but some quite intriguing possibilities given that we're talking about some city states here. How did the Phoenicians actually see themselves? Did they see themselves as a single people? Did they even use the term Phoenician?

[Josephine Quinn]

No, it's the easy answer there. Now, these city states are completely separate. I mean, they occasionally allied together in wars and so on, but they're basically separate kingdoms to start off with in the eastern Mediterranean. And the people who live there, as far as we can tell, and again, we're missing a lot, a lot of pieces of the jigsaw. But they don't call themselves Phoenician. They don't have any other corporate name as far as we know. I mean, people try quite hard to find one. There have been various suggestions over the years about names they could have called themselves. So people sometimes say they call themselves Canaanite, for instance. But the problem is that when you dig into the actual evidence, it kind of disappears under your gaze. You know, in the modern world there's such a kind of sense that it's natural to have a kind of large scale ethnic identity and so on. But actually in antiquity, you know, that sort of scale of communication and life just wasn't there in the same way as it is today. And so I think there was much less assumption that it was normal to have a kind of large scale regional identity, which isn't to say that lots of people didn't. Or identities based on religion or identity, all sorts of kind of identities that would have been larger than a single city state. And the people that we call Phoenician seem to be on current evidence in that camp are the people who basically describe themselves as sons of their cities. You get sons of Tyre, sons of Carthage and so on, occasionally daughters.

[Emily Briffett]

So where does this term Phoenician actually come from?

[Josephine Quinn]

So this is a term that was invented by Greek authors to describe this whole group of people from this region. So of course, from the Aegean, we're looking across hundreds thousand kilometers of sea. And then of course, it all looks much more similar. And I say these cities, they speak very, very similar dialects and they're very different to Greek. This is really crucial. So Greek is an Indo European language. Phoenician is a Semitic language. As far as we know, Greeks and Phoenicians didn't know about language groups, but they would have realized how incredibly different their languages were in structure as well as sound and so on. So I think that's what made them look to the outside outside like quite a coherent group. It made sense to give them a kind of group name, even if that didn't make sense to them themselves. So, yeah, we rely on Greek sources. This gets taken over by Romans. And then of course, because we get so much of our information about these people from Greek and Roman sources that's been taken over by modern historians as a kind of group name, which is fine as long as we kind of bear in mind what it represents, which is a view from the outside that these people look not dissimilar to each other, rather than their own perspective where they no doubt were very proud and thought they were very different.

[Emily Briffett]

What did the Greek and Romans actually think of the Phoenicians?

[Josephine Quinn]

Mostly very positive. They recognized Them as an ancient and noble group of cities in the Mediterranean, they knew they were older than Greek cities. Rather like the Egyptians, they like to play up their own relations with Phoenicians. So quite a lot of Greek legends involve Phoenician characters or Phoenicians sort of marrying into Greek families, that kind of thing. Things take a bit of a more negative turn in the 5th century BCE when a lot of Greek cities go to war with the Persian king and the Phoenician cities are on the side of the Persian king, they basically form his navy. And so there's a period there where Phoenicians aren't so popular in a lot of Greek writing. Though of course we only have the writing from the cities who opposed Persia. So who knows. And then when you get onto the Romans, it is sort of similar story that a lot of kind of discussions of Phoenicians. Phoenician history is fairly, you know, neutral to admiring. But when you get onto the city of Carthage, which became Rome's great enemy as Rome was rising to power in the Mediterranean, the Carthaginians were the great existing power. At periods when the Carthaginians and Romans are directly at war, you do tend to get a slightly more skeptical view, particularly of those Western Phoenicians. So people associated with Carthage. So yeah, it varies.

[Emily Briffett]

A bit of a mix then.

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[Josephine Quinn]

Hugely, I would say really not just in the Phoenician story but in the whole story of the Mediterranean. I felt this is something that has been really kind of lost in histories that sort of move from Greece first to Rome second. Because it misses out this sort of massive third power. In fact bigger than either, bigger than any of the Greek city states and bigger than Rome for, you know, all of its history until Rome destroyed it in the end. So I mean Carthage was really a kind of mega city and it controlled trade and shipping in most of the western Mediterranean. It was an enormous city, probably certainly by far the largest city in the western Mediterranean. There may have been eastern cities like Alexandria that may have rivaled it towards the end. But we're talking about something quite out of proportion with almost all the other cities in the Mediterranean. So they developed their own empire in the last few centuries of their existence. So from maybe from about the 6th or 5th century onwards there is still, you know, that sort of missing bits of the jigsaw puzzle make it a bit difficult to pinpoint exactly. But we could say from around the year 500, very broadly speaking, we're beginning to see evidence for real kind of territorial power on the part of Carthage. Not just kind of general hegemony and control and so on but really kind of provinces and control of the shipping lanes. We have various treaties that talk about how people who are not Carthaginian should not go past certain ports. And then there's a wonderful Greek author Eratosthenes who explains that what happened if you did that? The Carthaginian ships would just come along and toss you into the sea. So really they enforced it. It wasn't just a kind of rhetorical. This is our sea. Which is a kind of cliche about the Mediterranean in a way that, you know, everyone sees it as their sea but they actually, yeah, if you. It really was their sea. So yes, I think you can't underestimate the power of Carthage in the west and how, you know, what a kind of extraordinary, in a way, an extraordinary job it was for the Romans to actually overtake them in the end.

[Emily Briffett]

Don't mess with the Carthaginians then. I've got a question here that we have touched on so much and it's one that you introduce the Phoenicians with. And this is a question We've had from a listener on Instagram, and that's why would the Phoenicians, such accomplished seafarers, traders, and how far did their networks extend?

[Josephine Quinn]

Okay, that's a really great question. So I think there is actually quite a specific answer to this, potentially. I mean, everyone would have a different answer to it probably, but I'm going to try quite a specific one. So sailing is invented on the Nile somewhere in the third millennium bce, very kind of early, kind of middle Bronze Age. And it's invented actually not even in Egypt, but in what's now Sudan. That's the first place that you get kind of images of ships with sails on. And it gradually, over a period of about 500 to a thousand years, kind of works its way up the Nile. The ships become more sophisticated. And then when the Egyptians have taken over sailing on the Nile, they start to sail out into the Mediterranean. So they have the outlet into the Mediterranean and they start sailing round the coast, which means they can get to these Levantine cities. Places like Byblos in particular, is the great port for the Bronze Age Egyptians. And that's very useful because there's a lot of timber, cedar wood, in particular the famous cedars of Lebanon, and they're all accessed through the port of Byblos. And the Egyptians really want wood. There's not a lot of wood in Egypt, if anyone's been there. But the thing is that sailing on the river is relatively straightforward because the Nile has a very strong current going in one direction and then winds in the other. So sailing round the coast is, I mean, much trickier. Of course, you're out in the sea, but you are still near the coast. It's a bit easier. You're in sight of land all the time. It's a fairly obvious next step. The thing that's really tricky and this I finally get to an answer to the question I think it's really tricky is sailing west into the Mediterranean, into the open sea. And the reason for that is that all the winds, or almost all the winds in the Mediterranean are westerly, so they come from the west. So sailing into the wind, across the open sea is really tricky. And that's the kind of challenge that when the sort of the torch is passed on, if you like the sailing torch from the people of Nubia, it's now Sudan, to the Egyptians into the sea to these Levantine cities, then that the next step is to kind of try and get west and extend trade networks in that direction. But that's the really tricky thing. And they manage it. It takes about 500 years, but by 2000 BC, so 4,000 years ago, ships from these cities are reaching Crete and then kind of extend west from there. So the reason everyone wants to go to Crete is that Crete is the kind of gateway to the Aegean. And the Aegean is full of silver and full of people who've bringing silver down from further north yet. Gold comes from Egypt, silver comes from the Aegean. And the final thing that they really want, everyone wants in this era, is tin, because tin is how you make bronze. And in this period, bronze is the metal for every weapons in particular, but all sorts of other things too. And so there are two places you can get tin in the Bronze Age. One is Afghanistan. It's a very long way over land. I mean, a journey that is regularly made all the same, because people really want tin. Or the Atlantic coast. So, I mean, famously Cornwall, but also the coasts of in particular the Spanish Atlantic. So that's then the motivation to go further. They've got to the silver and presumably a little bit of tin trickles through lots and lots and lots of intermediaries. And so the next challenge is to get to that tin themselves and to get to the other metals of the Atlantic coast. And, yeah, about a thousand years later, they managed that.

[Emily Briffett]

Excellent. What are some of the other goods that they traded in and with whom?

[Josephine Quinn]

Yeah, it's a really good question. So what's left archaeologically, of course, isn't a really good reflection of what people were doing, but in particular why they were doing it. So we have a lot of pottery. Pottery lasts very well, impossible to get rid of a pot. I mean, it's the kind of ultimate recycling problem from the ancient world, but it can give a really misleading impression of what people were up to. So one thing is that pottery is it can be valued for itself. It can be valued as something to eat, food off, drink wine out of, very importantly. So these ships from these Phoenician cities are very often bringing more sophisticated kinds of vine to the places that they visit, which is a very good trading device. But the pottery itself is honestly probably used as much to provide ballast weight. It's cheap and heavy and you're going to bring metals back, so that's going to be heavy. But on the way out, you need something to weigh the boat down enough. They no doubt do sell it at the other end, but that's not the motivation necessarily. What are they dealing in, apart from metals? One big thing that we hear from the Hebrew Bible about is slaves. So the Tyrians are famous slave traders. You know, people often say that the Greeks are the first kind of slave society where the economy really depends on slavery to actually operate. But in fact, I think there's a good case to be made, unfortunately, that the Phoenicians got there first. So there's a kind of unpleasant side, very unpleasant side to that, but there's also going to be a lot of other organics, as it were. And one big thing that we know about Phoenicians is that these cities specialized in a very expensive kind of purple dye that is extracted from the innards of kind of particularly unfortunate species of sea snail in vast quantities. I mean, you need an awful lot of poor sea snails to make, you know, a small jar of this dye. It's very expensive and it's very unstable, so you can't actually export the dye, but you can export clove that are textiles of various kinds that are dyed with this particular kind of purple. And that might also explain the name Phoenician. In fact, I've talked about why the Greeks might have thought these people were a group, but why did they give them that particular name? Well, one theory I think is quite plausible is that phoenix in Greek, one of the things it means is it's kind of red, a sort of reddy, dark, reddy colour. And so that may well be a reference, I think, to this famous dye. These were the purple guys, the purple snail men.

[Emily Briffett]

Yeah, yeah. What about Phoenician arts, culture, architecture? Is there anything identifiable about it?

[Josephine Quinn]

Yeah, it's interesting. One of the problems is, so going back to that issue that the cities are so difficult to excavate in many cases that it's hard, I mean, even when you have a greenfield site. So I excavated for a number of years at Utica in Tunisia, which was a port, very important port, probably even earlier than Carthage. But the. The coast has sort of changed shape and height in that part of the world, and so now it's about 10km inland. And so it's actually very kind of rural area. So we had incredible privilege of actually being able to excavate a site that was. Well, had been still occupied by local people until the French archaeologists had them moved on in the colonial period. But not like a big modern city or anything. So it was quite easy to see what was going on there. But that's very unusual, of course. Of course, to sort of establish patterns, you need quite a number of places like that that you can really investigate. But you can see some things. You can see particular motifs and symbols. I mean, these Are all people who are speaking the same language or very similar, a mutually intelligible dialect certainly. So you kind of expect that to go along to some extent at least with a sort of shared cultural understanding. And I think you can see that through some of the symbols they have. There's a sun and moon symbol, a kind of, of sun with a moon over it. One of the things that's distinctive about Phoenician architecture is how Egyptian it looks. The buildings couldn't have looked like Egyptian buildings, they were never on that scale. But they use a lot of the architectural decoration and mouldings. There's a particularly beautiful, very sheer cornice called a throat cornice. It seems to get taken over in a lot of these Venetian speaking cities as being a kind of very elegant piece of architecture, both in the east and the Western. While the last time I was in Tyre, which was several years ago now, they had just discovered not a new temple interestingly, but actually a temple that had first been identified at the site or semi excavated just before the civil war in Lebanon started. And it had just been sort of reopened up and it was so beautiful. It was from maybe the Archaic period they say, perhaps, you know, between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE and it was full of these beautiful Egyptian, very elegant Egyptian kind of architectural details, but, you know, did not look like an Egyptian building at all. So that was quite thrilling. So there's some architectural things, there are some house types, there's a particular kind of house, like a sort of normal small house, you know, like we say a terrace house these days, which has a kind of distinctive, like a corridor that you go down and then you're in a small courtyard and the other rooms are off the courtyard, quite small rooms usually. But that's quite nice, nice because it's private. So I'm very fond of that particular house type. So there are little things like that, but in general, I mean these are sailors, you know, these are traders and so on. One of the things that's really distinctive about them is how cosmopolitan they are. So so much of the time you're looking at stuff and saying, ah, they were probably Phoenician speakers here because there's an Egyptian thing or there's something that you also find in temples in Israel or there's, I mean, that of things. So it kind of goes along, I suppose, with the new DNA evidence for real kind of individual mixing in these cities.

[Emily Briffett]

Can you tell us more about these interactions between the city states and I guess between the city states themselves and the outside world and also what daily life might have been like or how society was structured.

[Josephine Quinn]

I mean in terms of interactions between these different Venetian speaking city states, it seems to vary quite a lot. So there are these strong senses of religious connection, particularly between cities that consider themselves to be colonies. So Carthage is always said to be a colony of Tyre. Now we don't honestly know if that's true or not. It may well have been, but certainly people believed or performed the belief that Carthage was a colony of Tyre. And so there would be various diplomatic exchanges, people go to each other's festivals. Festivals, people of Carthage would send tribute back to Tyre specifically to the God, not to the kind of government of the city, but specifically to the city's God Melqart and so on. So you get that sort of kind of religious, cultural relationship between cities. But kind of one of the fun things is we just don't know how far back it goes. Is that something that really does go back to an original sort of foundation moment or is it something that is a kind of invented tradition later on because it was useful to one or both sides? So that's one of the nice kind of puzzles of the Mediterranean. It's not the case that all the cities that are founded in the west, all these migrant settlements kind of form a sort of cultural club or even an economic one. There's often quite a distinction between what the people in the Central Mediterranean are doing. So the people who settle at Carthage, Sicily, Sardinia, around there, in terms of religion above all, if that's what we can see now, and what's going on in the far West. So the colonies in what's now Morocco, Spain, that sort of area, at least in the early period, they form two kind of reasonably distinct kind of economic areas, sort of navigational areas. And also it seems that, you know, there are things that you find everywhere in the Central Mediterranean you find nowhere further away and so on. And people now sometimes talk about a Punic world or something, a Western Phoenician world. And to the extent that that's true, it's really something that's brought about by Carthaginian imperialism and towards the end of the kind of independent story, pre Roman story of these cities that gradually Carthage takes over one way or another, more and more of these communities and they become, if not more similar, more I would say aligned at that point.

[Emily Briffett]

Tying into what you said there about religious exchange, going to each other's festivals and also partly my curiosity about these devoted messages to the gods you mentioned earlier, One of our listeners has asked us from instagram about their belief in a God or a God and what role religion played in Phoenician life.

[Josephine Quinn]

I mean, belief is really tricky historically. I mean, a lot of people would say that belief wasn't as important a part of ancient religions as it is of some modern ones. Like it wasn't necessarily a duty to believe in the gods almost. I would say more that it wasn't necessarily such an obvious question. Perhaps it's more obvious that that sort of sphere was there and was important, that interaction with God through ritual could be powerful. And exactly why that was the case wasn't necessarily, you know, my business as the person making an offering or something, but leaving that very kind of specific question, sort of quite modern idea of belief behind. They certainly worshipped a whole range of gods and basically in many cases they're the same gods that are worshipped in Greece. There's even overlap with Egypt, which actually is quite distinctive set of gods. But there's some overlap with Phoenician gods. Same gods they're worshiping in Mesopotamia even. This isn't necessarily a Mediterranean thing. So there's a kind of pantheon, interconnected pantheon and they have different names in different places. And what these Phoenician cities often do is that they'll kind of recognize all these gods both under their own Phoenician names and under names of, you know, if they're traveling to Greek speaking city, they will go to the sanctuary of Aphrodite and make a dedication to Aphrodite, who to them them is Ashtar, who to the Mesopotamians would be Ishtar and so on. They're not quite all exactly the same type of. But they're all versions of the same kind of thing and very much recognized as such. But on top of that each city seems to have its own God or maybe a pair sometimes of gods who are particularly their gods who seem to really look out for them in the same way that Athena is the main goddess of Athens, even though of course there are temples to many other groups gods in Athens. So Melqart is the main God of Tyre and his name actually means Milkart, the king of the city. Eshmoun is the main God of Sidon. Byblos has a woman, the lady of Byblos she's called, but that's actually. She's really a version of this Ishtar, Ashtar, Aphrodite kind of goddess. There's a lot of gods floating around. Some might be more helpful than others to individuals or cities. It depends very kind of open borders with the Gods of other language speakers in terms of what it means in people's lives. I think one thing we need to do is sort of understand how religion works in antiquity in general, really. We have to kind of get away from the idea of going to church once a week or going to the mosque once a week. And one thing is that people didn't really go inside ancient temples. I mean, pretty priests could, but normal people wouldn't normally go inside. It's more like, honestly, scrolling social media. It's something that's always there in the background. You take probably some of it more seriously than other parts of it, but it's something that's kind of a constant background activity and concern to actually understand how it impinges on people's lives. That's probably a better. Better, like TikTok is maybe a better metaphor than going to church.

[Emily Briffett]

What a great comparison between ancient religion and TikTok. We've talked about a few moments in the timeline of the Phoenicians and I suppose we should tick off a few other moments to kind of really round out this episode. So what are the major moments that our listeners should be aware of? You spoke of a couple of golden ages earlier.

[Josephine Quinn]

Yeah, I think that's it. I think it's these cities kind of coming into being in the Bronze Age as sort of vassal kingdoms in a way. Then there's this kind of, yeah, we could say a golden era. Probably not for the people they were enslaving and so on, but from their own perspectives of the citizens of these cities. I think it's probably a golden era in say, from 1000 to 500 BC, the first half of the first millennium in the Eastern Mediterranean. And then it switches focus, really switches to the western Mediterranean. That's their sort of golden era for another three or four hundred years. That's probably the real kind of culmination of the whole story really. Except that, you know, of course it comes to a pretty brutal end in the west with the destruction of Carthage by Rome, 146 BCE. Carthage is razed to the ground, almost to the ground. The archaeologist simply says, never sown with salt. That's a modern myth. But raised pretty close to the ground by the Romans, who then take the city over. Over. They leave it kind of waste for 100 years and then take it over as a Roman colony. Meanwhile, the cities in the east have kind of petered out. It's not just that they've been eclipsed by their daughter cities in the west. It's also that they've kind of come under, the empires have come back in the Eastern Mediterranean. They've got the Babylonians, you've got the Persians and so on. And really that kind of does for the independent power of these cities in these east. But I mean one of the things that, that I've been really excited about the last few years is just how much evidence we have for the language carrying on especially in the western Mediterranean. In the western Mediterranean, people are still speaking Phoenician at the time of St. Augustine in the 5th century CE and not just kind of one or two strange, you know, grandparents, but it's a common language still in North Africa. We still get inscriptions in Phoenician in the first couple of centuries CE and Gardenia and so on. So although the kind of the city of Carthage gets destroyed and pretty much all the cities that have been big kind of political centers one way or another come under Roman control pretty quickly after that. But that doesn't actually remove the culture, particularly the language which I think, you know, by the 5th century CE is being spoken in Africa by people who have no connection with the Levant at all. But it's become the kind of, of non Roman language of that region. So that's to me like a really extraordinary kind of after story for these.

[Emily Briffett]

People Speaking about that legacy of language. Is it true that the Phoenicians contributed majorly to the development of the Alphabet?

[Josephine Quinn]

Oh yes, yes. So the Alphabet, because there really is only one kind of major one. It's really weird. Humans aren't built to think in sounds, they're built to think in syllables. Right? We know this because if you say the Alphabet out loud, we don't say A, B, C, D. We say A, B, C, D. We turn them, we turn these letters into syllables just to be able to say them. Because it's such a kind of innate idea that that's how speech works. So almost all the great scripts of the world, they're almost all syllabus, but there's one that's alphabetic and it grows up in the Levant, in the region of modern Lebanon, Israel, Syria and so on. And it's used from the beginning to write down these Levantine languages. So the predecessors of Phoenician and Hebrew and so on, we don't know why they chose to do it in this very unusual way, but it did have certain advantages. So one is that there are many fewer sacrifices sounds than syllables. So it's much easier to learn. You know, modern versions of this one original Alphabet tend to have between about 20 and 30 letters. Whereas a syllabic script, you probably have to learn several hundred signs just to really get properly started, to become properly kind of literate in it. So that kind of makes it a bit easier to deal with. And it also, the way the original Alphabet worked actually is very cool because all the symbols that now become the letters we used today were originally Egyptian hieroglyphs. And the sounds associated with them were nothing to do with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but they were just taken as an example of how you could have symbols. So if you take a capital A and you turn it over on its side, it still looks a little bit like a bull's head on Aleph, you know, a house is a bait and if you turn a B on its side, you know, sort of little two room house. So you can see how this works. And the trick trick was that you didn't actually even have to know what the individual symbols were supposed to mean. You just had to be able to recognize the picture. So you would see the little two room symbol and you go, oh, that's a house, that's a bait. And it was with the first letter and, and then you could kind of sound it out. And so they start off very picture like, and then they become pretty abstract pretty quickly. So, yeah, so that, that's already existing kind of in the Levant from at least, let's say kind of of 20001800 BCE, some scholars would say earlier than that. It seems to actually been first used in Egypt. That's a whole other story. But it's always writing down these languages that become the dialects of the Phoenician cities, that also become Hebrew, that also become Aramaic, that also eventually through that Arabic and so on, all these languages develop alongside the development of this quite peculiar alphabetic script. And then finally around about 800, 900 to 800 BCE, so this writing system, which has all sorts of little local versions and so on, gets standardised at Tyre. And so alphabetic letters are called by the rest of the people who live in that region. They're called Tyrian letters. Typically Greeks call them Phoenician letters because they're looking from further away, they see the bigger picture and so they call them or just Phoenicians a lot of the time. And that is when Greeks decide, or some Greeks, maybe even a Greek, decides to start writing Greek down again. After several centuries of having no writing in Greece, after the end of the Bronze Age, they decide that these Phoenicians are the best way to do it. Or perhaps this is the most fashionable way to do it at the time. And they borrow them. They borrow them almost wholesale. So many of the sounds are borrowed directly along with the letters. But one of the differences, because borrowing is never exact, is the that vowels are much more important in Greek than they have been in Phoenician, in the Phoenician dialect, or that they are today in Hebrew or Arabic or whatever. They need to be marked a lot more in Greek so that you can actually understand what's going on. The people who borrow this Alphabet from the Phoenicians, they identify letters for sounds that exist in Phoenician but not in Greek, and they use those letters to do vowels instead. And it's just terribly clever. It's a really smart, efficient way of recycling.

[Emily Briffett]

What an incredible legacy to leave. I have a couple of questions before the end of our discussion today, and that is one from maxhfquigley on Instagram, who has asked what made the Phoenicians so successful? And also, if I can add an additional one to that is, what would you say are their major successes?

[Josephine Quinn]

I think I would turn that around a bit and say perhaps it isn't so much the Phoenicians that are successful, but individual. Some individual cities. I think if you've just been chucked off your boat by a Carthaginian coast guard because you turned the wrong way a headland somewhere, you probably wouldn't feel too successful or if you've just lost out on some major parts. Port contractor Tyre again. So I think we're really probably talking about specific city states having enormous success. And I think a lot of it does come down to positioning. I mean, maybe this is very kind of deterministic of me, but Tyre is in a fantastic position for shipping around the Mediterranean. Similarly, Carthage, they're also both in very good positions defensively looking inland. So Tyre is pulling. Built mostly on an island. There's also a kind of mainland part of it, but the main part of it is an island just offshore. Carthage is a peninsula, but with a very small isthmus, kind of connecting it to the mainland. Very easy to defend. So I think these cities are. They're very open to the sea, they're very easy to close to the land when that's convenient. And I think that more than anything is what leads to the successful ones making it work.

[Emily Briffett]

Okay, final question for you then. And this is from Hugh Berkmeyer on Facebook. And he's asked why, given their many achievements, are the Phoenicians so overlooked in history?

[Josephine Quinn]

Wow. I Think, I mean, a lot of it comes back to that lack of literature. The disciplines of modern universities, modern schools really too, in a lot of ways, were invented in the 19th century. And I think a lot of this, this is perhaps quite an idiosyncratic view on this, but I think a lot of it goes back to what 19th century school masters in minor public schools, which are very much on the rise, the 18th, the kind of early 19th century, what it was relatively easy to teach to a class of unruly young men. And so you get languages like Latin and Greek, which are honestly compared to a lot of ancient languages, pretty straightforward. And then they have this literature which is things like short poems that you can discuss in a class, political prose. It's very easy to talk about the machinations of the Roman Republic through Cicero's letters or Tacitus talking about Roman emperors. It's very easy to grasp and cut down into sort of little chunks to be fetched. Head to your class twice a week or whatever. It's a lot more difficult when you have a much more complicated languages in wholly different language groups where even if you can teach them, then you find out that there are 10,000 sanctuary dedications to read and not a lot else. So I think a lot of it does come down to which cultures were privileged because they were most, most both legible and easy to teach in a particular historical moment. In the Anglophone world and in much of Europe, I should say that the Phoenician past is a lot more recognized and talked about than in Britain and in America. So it is partly a kind of Anglophone problem. I think the other reason that I think would definitely be widely agreed with is that the Phoenicians were considered Semitic and there was an awful lot of anti Semitism in the periods when these sort of disciplines are set. And when ancient history, history becomes in many cases the history of Greece and Rome. It made them quite distasteful to people. They shared a language with, Hebrews, Arabs and so on. And that was not something that a lot of people were interested in finding out about. But it also made people underestimate them. And that's why, for instance, for a long time it was thought that it was Greeks who founded the first settlements in the Western Mediterranean. And actually now we know absolute certain that it was these Phoenician cities, you know, by centuries in some cases, but people just weren't looking for that. So I think, you know, they're having a moment right now and I'm very happy to be talking about them now.

[Emily Briffett]

Okay, I lied. If I give you one more question, if you had 60 seconds, what would be your sales pitch for the Phoenicians? Why should we know about them?

[Josephine Quinn]

So I think the Phoenicians provide a really useful lesson in how strange modern ideas about the world are. And above all, to go back to a theme we've talked about already, ideas about ethnicity, the fact that you can have these big interesting active city states that don't need to depend on a larger idea of heritage to justify their citizens, justify their actions, and so on. And I think that's a really important lesson in the modern world. Actually. I think people rely far too much on heritage and roots rather than in what we can do for ourselves, what we can do in the world without having to just reproduce what we consider our ancestors to have done. So I would say yeah, the Phoenicians are really forward looking group of people in that respect.

[Emily Briffett]

That was Josephine Corporation Quinn speaking to Emily Briffitt. Josephine is professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and the author of how the World Made the West and In Search of the Phoenicians.

[Commercial Narrator]

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[Josephine Quinn]

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of youf're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously. Each week I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past. In our all new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have meant. Miss from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers. Listen to you're Dead to Me now. Wherever you get your podcast.