Tristan Hughes (2:28)

It's 3,000 years ago and a fleet of sturdy ships sailed west past a towering promontory overlooking a wide strait of water. In later centuries, the Greeks would label this great limestone mountain a pillar of their hero Herakles, the Rock of Gibraltar. The sailors come from far away, from a city on the easternmost coast of the great sea. They have just left the island stronghold of Tyre. Their expertly crafted ships originate from the great cedar wood forests close to their coastal home. Together they have traversed hundreds of kilometers of coastline. And now they have finally reached the exit of the Mediterranean. They come with cargo from their homeland. Stacks and stacks of finely crafted pottery, wine carried in tall clay jars, and also, more infamously, slaves. All were to be offloaded at their final destination, now not far away, sold to the highest bidders. These sailors were traders first and foremost, just as their fathers and grandfathers had been before them. Their people would become known as some of the greatest seafarers of ancient history. A mysterious yet fascinating people, the Phoenicians. From their rise and prominence on the ancient Mediterranean stage to their lasting legacy down to the present day with the Alphabet and their legendary seafaring. In this episode, we're going to introduce you to who these so called Phoenicians were and why they are some of the most fascinating peoples from antiquity. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host and this is is the story of the Phoenicians. Our guest is Dr. Josephine Quinn, professor of Ancient History at St. John's College, University of Cambridge. Josephine, I can't believe we haven't had you on the show before. It is a pleasure to welcome you finally to the Ancients.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (4:40)

It's great to be here. Thank you.

Tristan Hughes (4:42)

You're more than welcome. And I think we need to get into one of the big questions. First off, Josephine, who were the Phoenicians?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (4:51)

Well, the people that we call Phoenician now were the people who lived in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, so what we'd now call the Levant, so modern Lebanon, bits of Syria, bits of Israel and so on. But it's a string of ports that run down that coast. And the people who lived there were extraordinary sailors, navigators, inventors, and they really were the kind of earliest explorers of the Mediterranean.

Tristan Hughes (5:26)

Is that why we primarily remember the word Phoenician today? Is it very much linked to that idea of exploration and sea travel?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (5:34)

Yeah, I think so. I mean, the reason that we call these people Phoenicians, so they, they themselves would probably have thought of themselves in terms of the cities they came from Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, later Carthage and so on. But we call them Phoenician because that's what the ancient Greeks called them. It seems to have been a term for people you meet on the sea who speak a really different language to you. That's really how they use that. So I think right from the beginning, it's a name for sort of sailing foreigners somehow.

Tristan Hughes (6:10)

So it almost kind of describes certain attributes of someone. Like I think that the word the Tarantine gets called later on for people who, like, who could throw javelins from their horses and move around. It's almost like the attributes of a person and then they can be labelled a Phoenician. Is that the idea?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (6:24)

Yeah, I think above all it's going to be the language they speak because Phoenician is a language very like Hebrew or even deep Arabic or in the ancient world, Aramaic, Akkadian even a bit further away. Again, these are all Semitic languages and they're extremely different from the Indo European language or languages, dialects that people living in what we now call ancient Greek cities spoke. So I think to them that's how they really. That's how these people seem so foreign to them. That's why they can give them a kind of collective label because they sort of recognize the type of person sailors like themselves, city dwellers, people live in city states in fact, and so on, but they speak a really different language. I mean, the actual name Phoenician, nobody's quite sure what it originally meant. It can be because of course it's a Greek name. So one thing that certainly was associated with it in antiquity is the palm tree, the phoenix in Greek. But, you know, the coast of the Levant is by no means the only place in the Mediterranean to get palm trees. So it seems like that's more of a kind of later association from the name, not. It doesn't explain the name. Another idea is that another meaning of phoenix in Greek is a kind of red or sort of reddy brown, purpley colour. And one thing that these cities were very adept at very early on was producing a kind of purple dye from a sea snail. The remains of a sea snail kind of squeeze them for the dough. It's really horrible. But they had kind of factories for this sort of thing. And that really does seem to have been a speciality of this particular group of cities and language speakers. So, I mean, I think that's the best guess for where the name originally came from. It was something to do with the sort of profession, speciality of Them. But yeah, I think it becomes a very generic term for eastern foreign trader person.

Tristan Hughes (8:37)

So interesting. And a bit more on the topography of where they came from. Josephine so these coastal cities, should we also imagine that there was like great plains outside of the cities, or were they very much kind of crammed up next to the coast? What should we be thinking?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (8:52)

No, it's a good question. They're really crammed up, is the answer. Because if you think about the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, the coast of the Levant, these are cities like Beirut would be another example, an ancient Venetian city that has kind of carried on into the modern period. You've actually got very little coastal plain before. You're right up against mountains along most of this coast. Not the whole way down, but for most of it. And so actually these are not great agricultural cities. I mean, every ancient city has to grow enough food to feed itself beyond what you can get by imports and so on. So it's not that that these people didn't do any farming or agriculture at all, but it wasn't the basis of their economy, economic practices and so on.

Tristan Hughes (9:39)

And so what types of sources you mentioned? Venetia, that the word is a Greek name. So I think that gives a bit of a hint to one of our sources. But what types of sources do we have surviving to learn more about these people?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (9:51)

So a variety of things. There's no, unfortunately, nobody wrote, you know, a guide to the Phoenicians in antiquity in any language, sort of references here and there in various authors. So a lot of ancient Greek interests, the historian Herodotus kind of fascinated by these people and they're very big part of his stories of early Greece and so on. Lots of interaction, settlement and sort of so on. Co conspiracy. In a way, Roman authors take over this interest from the Greeks. I mean, by the time many of the Roman authors that we have preserved, the sort of Latin authors we have preserved today, are writing, these people are no longer really powerful. So those cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Tyre and Sidon, and so on, have kind of faded over the course of the first millennium bce. And then their great western colony of Carthage is destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE. So after that you get a slightly different, it's a kind of heritage, references to them. And there's still plenty of Phoenician speakers living in the Mediterranean, particularly the southern Mediterranean, North Africa and so on. But they, after 146, there's no longer a kind of political focus for them. So it becomes more of a kind of Nostalgic literature. You also get a lot of references in the Hebrew Bible. So these are neighbors, direct neighbors, very close, speaking a language that. Or dialects that were in many cases probably mutually comprehensible with the big. The big cities of the Hebrew Bible. So narrative of the Hebrew Bible, Jerusalem and so on. So, so. And there's quite a lot of references to them, including really sort of fascinating insights into aspects of their life on the sea. That slave trading was clearly a big aspect certainly of Tyrian merchants. They were moving people as well as metals and goods around the Mediterranean. And then, of course, we've got archaeology. So one of the problems with archeology and the Phoenicians is that these cities that they inhabited are so located in such excellent strategic locations that that many of them are still occupied today. So it's actually quite tricky. But in places like Tyre, my goodness, we'd love to have more of ancient Tyre than we do, but a great deal of it is still the city of the modern, very large city of Tyre. There are some places, like Carthage in particular, that have become. They're kind of getting rebuilt now. Carthage now is a sort of seaside suburb of Tunis and it is actually, there's quite a lot of development to a kind of warring degree for the archaeology over the last decade or two. But in general, that's one place where it's easier to see more.

Tristan Hughes (12:52)

And do we get a sense from the surviving archaeology, do we get lots of inscriptions or do we get writing from these people themselves?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (13:01)

Well, this is one of the frustrations and the mysteries of these people. So the frustration is that there are huge number of inscriptions, I mean, more than 10,000 inscriptions in Phoenician. So you think that's great, we must know so much from all that stuff. And of course, the great thing about inscriptions is that in many cases, and this is one of them, you get the sort of witness of the whole social order and things like gravestones. Those are inscriptions, right? You go to a cemetery even now, or a graveyard and you'll see, you know, huge, huge social range of people and little facts about them and so on. And it's really interesting, much more so often than the kind of people who are writing the great literature of the day. The problem with this, you know, 10,000 plus inscriptions is that, you know, 9,900, probably 50 of them, say exactly the same thing. And they're basically from sanctuaries, they're dedications to the gods, but worded in exactly the same way. The vast majority of them are from Carthage itself. And they don't actually say very much about the people who are dedicated, don't say very much about the gods. So that's really frustrating. And it's made even more frustrating by the fact that there is no Phoenician language literature. There are some books written in Greek much later on, when really we're not. Yeah, we're talking about sort of heritage society where people are claiming to be Phoenician or claiming to write about ancient Phoenician myths and so on. And that may well be true, but it's all kind of. Would be like people now writing about the time of Shakespeare and so on. So it's just not quite the same thing, but without having Shakespeare himself. And there's like. The mystery here is that no one is quite sure why there's no Phoenician literature. There's nothing. You know, as I said, these are the immediate neighbors of the people who are writing the books of the Hebrew Bible in exactly the same period. They're the pretty close neighbours of the Greek city states where people are writing, particularly in Athens, of course, but in other places as well. And on the coast of Turkey, Greek speakers writing various things that. Just up the coast to Ugaritz on the coast of Syria, in the Bronze Age, the huge amounts of writing in a very similar language to Phoenicians. So there's this kind of gap in the Phoenician city states. And I mean, there's sort of two ways to approach this. One is to say this is the kind of very pragmatic answer to it, which is very kind of likely to be right, which is that it rains a lot in this part of the world. I mean, not as much as it does in this part of the world.

Tristan Hughes (16:03)

Well, tell me about it.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (16:04)

Yes, it rains quite a lot in the Levant as well. And so if things are being written on papyrus, they don't really survive. I mean, in Egypt they survive because it's so dry, but further north they don't survive. And what we have from the Bronze Age cities of the Levant is, are things written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and then fired. So they survive. Not necessarily that that was the intention in firing them, but. But it's the effect. And so when people stop doing that around a thousand BCE and they start writing on papyrus instead, you often might think of that as a kind of step forwards. It's closer to what we do is a write on paper, but actually it means that it's much, much less likely to survive. So that's one thing, there may have been an incredible literature in Phoenician and so many, you know, factual accounts and histories and so on that we just don't have anymore. I mean, I have a different kind of theory about this which is equally impossible to prove or disprove, which is that in some cases people simply choose not to write things down. And the Phoenicians, these Phoenician cities are the very interesting, potentially problematic relationship to the people around them in that they are just west of some pretty major powers, whether we're talking about the great Mesopotamian Bronze Age kingdoms or later the Persians, the Assyrians, I mean, very big powerful agricultural empires who always want to need to work with the people in these Phoenician cities in order to gain access to the Mediterranean and their trading knowledge and so on. But the less they know about them, the more they have to work with them rather than over them. So I kind of quite like the idea that in fact it's in the interest of people in these cities not to write too much down.

Tristan Hughes (18:07)

That's such a very. That's a very, very interesting argument. I'm sure we might revisit that as our chat goes on the later interactions with those Mesopotamian empires. You've mentioned them in passing, Josephine, but just to kind of summarise, so the main cities we should be thinking about,

Dr. Josephine Quinn (18:23)

so Tyre, Sidon, Byblos is another very big one on that coast, on the coast of what's now Lebanon. We can also think of Beirut itself, was. Was a fairly major Phoenician speaking city in that time, big port. And then in the west, these, I mean they're often called colonies that, that perhaps makes it sound a bit too formal. Settlements of people originally or founded by people originally from the eastern Mediterranean in places like Carthage. Cadiz is another big one even earlier probably Huelva also on the Atlantic coast of Spain. And then a whole lot of sites and settlements around the island of Sardinia in western Sicily, along the coasts of North Africa. So Utica is another. I did a lot of digging myself. That's another one in North Africa, very near Carthage on the. On the coast of southern coast of Spain. Now there's a. And. And indeed on the Portuguese coast there are. So the sort of whole Mediterranean is speckles. The sights that come from this tradition, if you like. I mean, I would say I'm being a bit careful about how I talk about this. I mean, I think if we'd been talking a year ago, I just would have said, well this is. These are settlements Straightforward settlements from the eastern Mediterranean. But in the kind of crazy way that ancient history keeps getting updated. There's an amazing new study of ancient DNA was published in Nature last year that showed these prints ports all around the central western Mediterranean that are associated in Greek and Latin literature with Phoenicians, that associate themselves with Phoenicians, we know, that often have stories about how they're founded from one city or another that certainly used the Phoenician language, so on and so on. They actually looked at the kind of heritage, if you like, of the people who are living there in the rnh, living in these cities. And essentially to ask, you know, were they more Levantine or more local? Like is this a small colonial settlement or a big colonial settlement, this like, you know, William the Conqueror or something that actually involves an awful lot of settlement from abroad. And what they found, which is absolutely fascinating, completely unexpected, was that the answer was, well, neither really. These cities are actually full of people from all over the Mediterranean. Sicilians, people from the Aegean, people, you know, and actually, and of course some local people as well, particularly in North Africa, but not necessarily majority. And almost no genetic signal from that would reflect people coming from the Levant itself at all. It's very kind of interesting and you know, really sets a challenge to historians like myself to think about what that might actually mean in terms of the mechanics of settlement interaction and so on that lead to that kind of population makeup in the area.

Tristan Hughes (21:30)

Yes, a major spanner in the works of this idea of just lots of people from those cities just going west all the time.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (21:36)

So one idea has often been that this was about agricultural settlement because there was so little good agricultural land back in the Levant. This was about people finding the wild west open horizons, lots of. And that is certainly true to some extent and particularly in Spain. There's been wonderful work done on all the new kinds of farmyard animals and so on who are introduced in this period by people coming originally at least from the Levant or some people coming. But this really suggests that that's not how. Even if that was originally, perhaps one idea or motivation, that's not how it worked out. In the end,

T-Mobile Advertiser (22:25)

Everyone deserves to be connected. T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Our networks are coming together bringing more T Mobile coverage all over the country. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com Switch and now T Mobile is available in a US cellular store near you bigger network. The combination of T Mobile and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage. Savings versus comparable Verizon plans plus the costs of options, benefits, plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third free line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (22:55)

We all prefer things a certain way, like groceries. If you want groceries just how you like them, you gotta try Instacart. They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences upfront, helping guide their choices. Because when it comes to groceries, the details matter. Instacart get groceries just how you like.

New Zealand Teaching Advertiser (23:18)

Imagine waking up to breathtaking landscapes, vibrant culture and a welcoming community. New Zealand is calling. If you are a passionate early childhood, primary or secondary school teacher, New Zealand says come teach us. With up to 10,000 New Zealand dollars in relocation support, now is the time to make your move. Find out more about moving to New Zealand to teach@workforce.education.govt.nz open to existing qualified primary, secondary and ECE teachers. Note that this grant is only dispersed after a teacher has arrived in New Zealand and meets the other accompanying criteria.

Hayden (23:52)

Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fanfellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.

Stephen (24:00)

And I'm Stephen Bookish, Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.

Hayden (24:04)

And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.

Stephen (24:13)

That's right.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (24:13)

Hey.

Stephen (24:13)

Hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.

Hayden (24:18)

And along the way we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.

Stephen (24:25)

News flash, I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday and you can find Fantasy fan fellows wherever you get your podcasts.

Tristan Hughes (24:47)

Before we delve more into that kind of expansion and those settlements further west and that seafaring, that key identity of these people, I'd like to focus on those those original cities in the Levant a bit more. Because earlier, Josephine, you mentioned the Bronze Age and you mentioned places like Ugarit. So can we link the rise, the rise to prominence of these cities with the ever popular words set of words? The Bronze Age collapse?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (25:17)

Yes, yes, I'm very suspicious of the Bronze Age collapse. I always feel like that's what it looked like if you were the king whose palace was collapsing around you, you were the sort of local peasant holding the firebrand to the palace, it perhaps didn't look so collapsing. But anyway, you're absolutely right. So these cities go back well into the Bronze Age places like Tyre and Sidon, and we have letters from them to pharaoh in the 14th century. So they are places that were existing as city states, really, but as very small ones and very much under the power of bigger empires of the Bronze Age. So Egypt, sometimes the Hittites and Anatolia and so on. They're really kind of caught between the sort of much bigger power games around them. And they have to, you can see in these letters, they have to tread extremely carefully, you know, sucking up to pharaoh, reporting on each other. I mean, just really behaving quite badly. In a lot of cases, the kings of these cities, in order to preserve some local independence and power for themselves. But then when those great big empires collapse, you know, generation or two either side of, say, 1200 BCE, suddenly kind of horizons open for these cities on. On the coast of the Mediterranean. They've no longer got these overlords, and of course that means also they've the, you know, they've no longer got the enormous demands for metals and other kinds of resources moving around, but there's still a fair amount going on in the Mediterranean, and. And they are kind of free all of a sudden to make their own way in terms of trading in particular. And what they start to do for the first time is actually sail all the way across the Mediterranean, all the way from Tyre to the Straits of Gibraltar. And they seem to do that kind of straight away. I mean, there were connections across that space and have been for, well, hundreds, certainly, probably thousands of years. But it would be down the line somebody, maybe sailors based in Sardinia who deal with that part of the Mediterranean, sailors based in Cyprus who deal with their part and stuff would move from one side to the other, but. But not on the same ships. And for the first time, these ships seem to set out from the eastern Mediterranean ports and go really quite suddenly all the way across the sea. There's very little evidence in the archaeological. In the. The sorts of objects that turn up in the furthest away places are the earliest. Wow. So, yeah, pottery, the earliest Tyrian pottery is found at Huelva. And it's only after that very long distance link has been established all the way through the Mediterranean, out into the Atlantic, that you then get, you know, maybe 10, 20, 30 years later, you start to find pottery. The Same kind of pottery in places like Sardinia, the North African coast and so on. It doesn't take very long. This is kind of the work of a generation, probably altogether. But it is this incredible thing. There's long been an assumption that the way that Phoenicians and others learn to do long distance sailing is by doing short distance sailing, that you kind of creep across, you stop every night and eventually get to where you're going and then maybe you start to miss some of the stops out. But it's the other way round. It seems that you go all the way out of sight of land probably half the time, depending a bit on the weather. And. And then it's only when you've established that link and presumably established that it's worth going backwards and forwards that you start to set up stops along the way and, you know, maintenance yards, R and R places and so on.

Tristan Hughes (29:19)

And Josephine, I mean to say like a ship maybe for half a day or so will go beyond sight of land. I mean, it doesn't sound that impressive today, but you need to back then, that was ballsy. Okay. That was a pretty big deal.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (29:32)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are no compasses. We're a good couple of thousand years before the compass here. And at night, of course it is easier because you can steer by the stars and so on, but during the day, I mean, again, depending on the weather, it really can be very difficult. But you know, people do. The Vikings, of course, are another example of seafaring societies who manage perfectly extraordinary navigational feats in actually much worse weather a lot of the time. So it's not that it's beyond the wit of humans, but it is really tough and it is quite unexpected. But now seems certain to my mind that this is something that was developed, that they did the very bold thing first and then sorted out the practicalities later.

Tristan Hughes (30:20)

And what types of resources did they have available? What would they have brought with them to these distant shores to show the local populations there? You know, we are people you want to trade with. We've got these great things that we can, we can exchange with you.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (30:34)

So it's interesting they, they, the things that we know they bring. And of course it depends a bit on what remains in the archaeology are there's an awful lot of pottery which is very nice, you know, lovely cups and bowls and so on, but you can't imagine that people are going to go all that way to, to sell some pots or give away some pots, you know, that's just. It's what tends to Remain. You just. You can't kill a pot. You can break it into pieces, but then you just have to put it back together again 2000 years later. It's really tiresome. So you've got to think, why were they doing this? And there are other clues in terms of not what's left directly behind, but what changes. So wine making. So we have the pots that would have had wine in them, of course, in most cases doesn't survive anymore. But we also have in the Western Mediterranean, vines, vines that actually make drinkable wine for the first time. And vineyards set out in a way that would actually, you know, work. So they're bringing not just things and goods, they're bringing ideas and technologies as well. And to be honest, all of this, the pottery, the wine, all that kind of stuff is probably just the sort of social matter that smooths the way to the trade in metals, because that's what. It's not what the Phoenicians are bringing to these places, it's what they're taking away. And what. What you get in the Atlantic is metals. Those mountains are just absolutely stuffed with minerals and metals. And in particular, silver is a big draw in that part of the world. And this is, you know, is not news. The people who are living there, very active networks up and down the Atlantic coast for, again, centuries, if not millennia at this point. Well, that's certainly in some ways millennia, but the kind of silver mining that's going on before people from the Eastern Mediterranean turn up. So say, let's take the year 1000 BCE we're really talking about here, that's when sort of ships start to arrive. Before that, there is silver mining, but it's on quite a small scale. It's not technologically expensive, extremely advanced. But when we start to see Phoenician pottery, we also start to see a huge changes in the mind. Much bigger, much better technology for actually turning, you know, what, what. What comes out of the minds themselves into something that you can use, mold, sell, and so forth. I think what they're bringing is a kind of a market for the people, local people who want to sell their wares. They're bringing new technologies that can help the local populations improve their production. Now, what we don't know, of course, is whether they remain in charge of it or not. That's less clear. They may well also be bringing slaves. I mean, I've mentioned, I think that one of the things that we find out from the Hebrew Bible is the Tyrians slave traders. Quite a big scale, and they seem to be acquiring humans for sale in the eastern Mediterranean, general sense, in western Asia. And. But it would actually make a lot of sense for them then to bring them across the Mediterranean to actually work in places like Spain. Because, I mean, one of the kind of awful realities of the kind of slave trading economies is that you want to move people as far away from home as possible. You want to put them in places where they don't know the language, don't understand the systems and so on, where it's going to be hard for them to get away. If you can kind of confine them on the coast, that's great because they don't have access to ships. There's nowhere for them to go. So I think it makes an awful lot of sense. Again, not something that can be proved to think that they're also bringing human labor that can then be put to work, particularly in these silver mines and other metal mines and so on.

Tristan Hughes (34:37)

I know it's probably not a resource that they would export because they need it themselves, but can we also talk about the importance of timber for these cities? Because, I mean, if they're doing all this seafaring, it feels like wood must be right at the center of their whole system.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (34:52)

Right. And this is, you know, this. The cedars of Lebanon are still, you know, the kind of symbol of modern Lebanon. And this is hugely important in the Phoenician story. These cities, particularly perhaps Byblos, is maybe most of all associated with this at an early stage. So Byblos was the first sort of really big power, a big city state on this coast. And that was because they had very early trading relationships with Egypt, where there isn't a lot of wood. And they were building ships and buildings and the Egyptians needed wood. And the cedars of Byblos now of Lebanon are really were their best bet. And so I think it is one of the things that really establishes these cities as kind of small trading powers is the transportation of wood. It's interesting question. That's probably not what's going on in the longer voyages across the Mediterranean, because of course, there's quite a lot of wood in Iberia in this period as well. So that's more something, I think that kind of explains the early story of these cities. And later they have to branch out more to find new resources to exploit.

Tristan Hughes (36:17)

And these cities, like becoming trading powers, are they almost the equivalent of like kind of the merchant republics of later centuries? I mean, how should we. How are they socially structured?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (36:30)

Well, it's a really interesting question. And one thing to say is that it varies. They're always set up fundamentally as city states, which is this very broad category that counts for almost every ancient power in the Mediterranean and medieval and so on. It's the norm rather than the exception. Within that you can have a great deal of variety. You know, you can have oligarchies, aristocracies, democracies, monarchies, and probably all of the above are found in Phoenician speaking cities. We know that the eastern Mediterranean cities, places like Tyre, Sidon, Byblos have kings certainly for the period of their history where they are most powerful when they are setting out, their sailors are setting out across the Mediterranean, the first half of the first millennium BCE in the west, the cities that seem to be founded by these Phoenician speakers, they tend to be republics. I mean of course that's often true of colonies anywhere in the world. Any time of history. It's rare for settlers to go out and set themselves up under a king, but it's not kind of natural method of community formation from scratch. I think they tend to be republics.

Tristan Hughes (37:53)

And can we imagine that there was a lot of, especially in those original cities, Tyre, Sidon, Biblos and so on. I guess there must have been a lot of competition between them, a lot of interactions, diplomacy, but also competitiveness.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (38:05)

Absolutely. I mean these are never, never a sort of political whole. They do cooperate sometimes, but particular revolts against the Persians for instance, you sometimes find cities working together. Tyre and Sidon do seem to have a particularly close relationship at various points in history. To the extent that they are described in contemporary inscriptions in a way that makes you think that they are basically operating as a single entity, most obviously under the real power of Tyre, which is always the biggest city. Though we honestly don't know the, the gory details there. And in the west as well, they often seem to operate quite separately from each other, sometimes in competition. Over time, Carthage comes to acquire some form of hegemony over much of the Phoenician speaking western Mediterranean. But as a basic principle, no, they are absolutely, absolutely acting in competition more than together.

Tristan Hughes (39:15)

And Josephine, I apologize because this is almost. Well, this is kind of two big questions in one with these various cities, let's say the ones, the original ones, and then of course the colonies as well. But do we think they also shared the same. I'm thinking very much from an identity angle here. The same religious beliefs and the same language.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (39:34)

So it's a really interesting question. The language, I mean, some scholars differentiate between Phoenician in the east and Punic in the west. You can also differentiate further between the dialects, the different cities. So it's possible to kind of cut and cut up. You could do that with many languages in the world today that we think of as languages at the other end. You know, it's the difference between what people are speaking in Tyre and Sidon and what people are speaking just down the coast in the cities of kind of the Hebrew speaking cities. It's probably, you know, it's a spectrum, it's not two quite different languages. So I would say that rather than trying to cut that spectrum up anywhere, rather a very high level, say, well, these are all kind of very similar Northwest Semitic languages. Everything would have been fairly comprehensible to each other, perhaps with some goodwill and effort, or saying that each individual city who speak Northwest Semitic languages should be treated as having their own individual language and perhaps therefore identity and so on. I think we can see it rather than worrying too much about how it looks in, at each point in space, we can see it in terms of that relationship between the languages. These people made sense to, to each other. That doesn't mean they identified, you know, absolutely and completely with each other, but I think they made sense to each other. And that, that also goes for the gods. So different cities. And this is the same for Greeks as well and the same in ancient Italy that different cities will have a particular God or gods, sometimes couples or not, who, who are their own civic gods. So Tyre has the God Melqart who's literally the milk cart, the king of the city, who also becomes quite an important God. Then in other Phoenician speaking cities. He's very important in ancient Cadiz or Gadia in Phoenician, but he's a sort of lesser God in places like Carthage or even Byblos and so on. Byblos, the main goddess is called the lady of Byblos, the Balak Godul. And she looks awfully like Ishtar actually, and also sometimes looks a bit like Isis from Egypt. So you get these. There's a sort of shared pantheon where different gods are sort of top of the pops in different cities, but it's also shared with neighboring communities. When later Greek authors write about what they call Phoenician religion, they include gods like Athena and so on. The great goddess of Athens, she comes into the story, she's given her city by the king of the Phoenician gods, El and so on. And so there's a just. Ancient religion is a very porous set of ideas, essentially but again, I think that there is a kind of a greater density of shared gods and ideas of gods in these Phoenician speaking cities.

Tristan Hughes (42:51)

I mean, that porous nature of the gods is fascinating. We did an interview a few months ago now on Inanna from Sumerian times. And then of course, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Isis, and then this goddess in Byblos as well. Once again, you can see those links together.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (43:05)

Absolutely.

Tristan Hughes (43:06)

It's absolutely fascinating. And when you were saying that like Phoenicians and these various cities, the people could probably understand each other but recognize differences, should we then more be thinking of it like different dialects? Is that more of an idea of it?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (43:20)

Yeah, yeah. I think it's a bit tricky to understand this from an English speaker's point of view because perhaps this is true of many languages in the 21st century, because things like television, podcasts, radio, mean that languages come together a lot more. So it's much. You do get, of course, local accents and so on, some local vocabulary, local. I mean, there are. People do have. Understand that there are many kind of quite distinctive ways of speaking English. But I think the notion of the dialect is something that's. I found it easier to understand when I was digging as a student in Italy, where you really would have, you know, villages, neighbouring villages, but on top of different hills, where people really found it quite hard. They certainly weren't speaking Italian in any of these places and people found it quite hard to have lengthy conversations with each other if they were just speaking the language of their own cities. So I've always been a little bit suspicious of the. Of the idea of too easy mutual comprehensibility. And having seen how places in the relative 20th, late 20th century world, really very close to each other can actually be. Communication is not necessarily straightforward, but it would have been recognizably the same language type, essentially foreign.

Hayden (44:59)

Howdy ho and welcome to Fantasy Fan, fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.

Stephen (45:07)

And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.

Hayden (45:11)

And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Stephen here has not read Mistborn before.

Stephen (45:19)

That's right.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (45:20)

Hey Hei.

Stephen (45:20)

So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every, every single chapter.

Hayden (45:25)

And along the way we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.

Stephen (45:32)

Newsflash, I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday and you can find fantasy fan fellows wherever you

Dr. Josephine Quinn (45:37)

get your podcasts with Verbo care help is always ready before, during and after your stay. We've planned for the plot twists, so support is always available. Available because a great trip starts with peace of mind.

Tristan Hughes (46:09)

What about customs then? Could it be more recognizable? You see the similarities between, let's say, what people are doing in Carthage compared to what they're doing in Tyre. Maybe not via the language, but via the customs and the traditions that they were doing. Can you see more clear similarities there?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (46:24)

Yes, in some cases. So there are some very distinctive things that people in Tyre and Carthage do like I suppose the classic one is child sacrifice, a kind of awful aspect now, as it seems now they presumably didn't seem so to them, which is something that is practiced on a fairly broad scale, Carthage in particular, but they see as something that is inherited from practices probably I would say on the smaller scale at Tyre and other places. And it's also found the sanctuaries where this went on, these recorded inscriptions are found in Sardinia and Sicily as well, but not in Spain, probably not on Cyprus. There's a bit of a question mark about that. They're not found in other kind of parts of North Africa further to the west. So I'd say that there are, you could say the same. That's the most dramatic example. But you could say the same about house architecture, for instance, or certain fashions in sculpture that you can see. So one of those would be incredible. Sarcophagi, stone sarcophagy, kind of stone coffins, essentially very dramatic, very heavy, made of marble, extremely high class sculptures that you get in the Eastern Mediterranean. You get in some Western cities but not others. So all of these things you can see kind of networks of culture and taste and so on that are not certainly widely shared outside. Outside Phoenician speaking context though again, there's some porosity. Carthaginian furniture was very popular in Rome. Apparently they really like that, as we hear that from Roman sources. But you also, it's not universal. It's not like a kind of sea of cultural influence or something. There's quite a lot of picking and choosing from those traditions going on and quite a lot of reinvention. Anyone who's lived in America will know that the American idea of what it is to be Irish is very different from what it's actually like to be Irish in Ireland or most of the rest of the world. So there's a certain amount of kind of colonial reinvention of traditions which actually exaggerates or changes them or sort of localizes them in some ways to emphasize the connection.

Tristan Hughes (49:00)

So you could remember. So it's not too far a stretch to perhaps imagine yourself if you were in, let's say Cadiz or Carthage back in ancient times, and they would both have different stories about their, you know, the origins further east and the connections that they're most proud of, you know, with these original cities, you know, at the other end of the Mediterranean, do we think?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (49:23)

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, there's a good example. So Cadiz has this huge, huge connection with this God Melqart, who is later and this is another example that porosity, not that much later becomes identified by Greeks with Heracles, Hercules. And it's fun because it's not a direct mapping on, because Melqart is clearly a God, whereas Heracles is a kind of demigod hero type figure. But it doesn't really doesn't seem to matter like detail. So you have this God who has a huge temple at Cadiz, sadly now lost, but there is still some kind of in the sea from time to time they find kind of sculptures and so on this temple. And it's a great tourist attraction in antiquity. So Julius Caesar goes to visit this temple on his travels as a young man, so on. So that's sort of one example. Whereas at Carthage, you know, an idea very like kind of formal connections between Cadiz and Tyre. We don't actually know if it was in fact Tyrians who founded Cadiz and honestly, they probably didn't either, but. But that's a kind of really big religious connection. Whereas in Carthage the story is a different one. It is also a story about Tyre, which is the biggest and most famous a Phoenician city in the east. So most likely to be sending out settlers or having settlers leave from it. Also the most obvious place to attach a story to. But the story there is of, you know, Princess Dido, who is a refugee and escapes from her evil brother, the king who's murdered her husband. And she takes some of the senators with her and they go off to, you know, find this new world where they can be free and apparently sacrifice their children. And it's a very different sort of story. It doesn't seem to come with the God that they do say later that they send back kind of gifts to the God of Tyre as well, but he isn't. He doesn't really become a big deal at Carthage itself for about 500 years after the city's founded. So you get this sort of, again, different ways of relating to what people understand as their origins, which I think is an interesting. For the question of identity as well. There's often an assumption that identity has to be based in either some original identity, ancestry, say, or in some sort of natural biological fact about people. But actually what we see throughout history, and this is by no means the only example, is people creating, constantly creating and recreating identities based as much on relationships as on sort of the tyranny of origins.

Tristan Hughes (52:23)

It's very interesting how you can also see parallels with what the Greeks will later do, let's say, in southern Italy and the founding of cities there. Once again, not this idea of colonies, because it's very much their independent, Quite, quite independent. They remember their mother city and the roots they have, but it's very much them creating mainly for trade, but then establishing connections with the local peoples and this amazing mixture of cultures you get as a result. It's. I mean, the Phoenicians get there first with their expansion and then the Greeks almost see what they've done and do something very similar.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (52:52)

Yeah. Kind of fill in the gap in between. It's a sort of, I suppose, the point where those two kind of movements come. Come into contact. So Phoenicians are settling all around the Mediterranean. So 10th 9th century Greek sailors start to do the same in the 8th century, starting probably again with traders, entrepreneurs and then kind of settlers coming a bit later. But the kind of real boundary, if you like, is that the furthest. The major Greek city that is furthest west is Massalia, Marseille, modern Marseille, and the rivalry between Marseilles and Carthage as these two great Western cities sort of facing each other from the north and south Mediterranean, is a kind of wonderful theme in ancient history. Gosh.

Tristan Hughes (53:40)

Before Rome, and this is well before the rise of Rome as well, which is what's also so fascinating about this. Josephine, I must ask about the Alphabet. Did they create the modern Alphabet?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (53:51)

Well, the simple answer is yes. But what's really. So the Alphabet. Alphabets are really strange. Almost all of human history, people have chosen. When they've chosen to write things down at all, they've chosen to write down syllables rather than sounds. So the Alphabet is sounds. Right. People chose to write down syllables. And even if you. I would say if you just sound the Alphabet out, we say A, B, C, D, these are syllables, these aren't sounds. So we can't even say the Alphabet in alphabetic concepts. So it's really weird. And almost all alphabets in use today go back to the Alphabet that is used in these Phoenician cities, which is kind of extraordinary, really. It's invented, and it really is invented. This is the kind of thing that doesn't just emerge slowly among thousands or tens of thousands of people, because for something like a writing system, you all need to use it the same way. So, you know, you basically do need a person or a small committee of people to sort it out in the first place. And then, of course, it changes and develops and so on in different directions. But this Alphabet emerges in the Levant in the Eastern Mediterranean. It's first used to write down Levantine languages. So the precursors of the Phoenician language and the Hebrew language and Aramaic and so on, probably around 2000 BCE. A little bit of a suggestion that there might be stuff even earlier than that. But it's quite disputed as to whether we're looking at alphabetic letters or just scratches, because they don't look that different, especially early on. But by around 2000 or 20, 1900, 1800 BCE, you're beginning to get definite alphabetic signs that you know are writing down the precursor of the Phoenician language. But you don't get them in Phoenicia. This is what's absolutely fascinating to me. You get them in Egypt, and it is. It is people from the Levant, workers of some kind in Egypt. There's a lot of them at the royal turquoise mines in Sinai. Whether these are mine workers or managers or ever, they're people being brought south from the Levant to Sinai in order to work in these mines. You also get them a bit further south in some areas that are used by the army quite a lot. So clearly travelers, workers and so on, who actually write things down for the first time when they're abroad. They don't need to do it at home. They can just tell someone what they want. But abroad, they really need to write things down. It's especially for the gods. And it's amazing that some of the earliest examples are little dedications on tiny sculptures to Levantine gods. Again, the precursors of these Phoenician gods, we talk about precursors to the God of the Hebrew Bible. And they write these little alphabetic dedications on them, very simple things. And I think the idea must be that you need to write to gods in your own language and their own language to establish that relationship. And perhaps the idea is that just in an Egyptian sanctuary, you know, there's too much background noise. You need to actually write it down so that they'll really, your own God will notice and see it like hieroglyphs.

Tristan Hughes (57:24)

Is the hieroglyphs being like the sacred writing that you only get in temples?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (57:27)

Exactly. And in these same temples. And so what's amazing is that when they're using this language, I don't think it's just coincidence that we get the first examples in Egypt that actually these are the second or third examples or something. Because every letter of the Phoenician Alphabet, the Levantine Alphabet, which means pretty much every letter of the Alphabet that you and I use today comes originally from an Egyptian hieroglyph. It has no relation to what these hieroglyphs actually mean, how they're saying, said they're sometimes used back to front or upside down, but it's. They're clearly writing. And so they're an appropriate tool to adopt to do your own very different kind of writing. Egyptian hieroglyphs are largely syllabic, where they're not describing whole words. And so the. To adapt them to the Alphabet, to a phonetic system is. It's such a leap of the imagination.

Tristan Hughes (58:28)

It really is. What an amazing story and what a soundbite there, as I must admit. And also it's fascinating because we did cuneiform recently and hearing about the origins of cuneiform may well be linked to like writing stuff down for trade and administration. It's fascinating to think that actually maybe the origins of our. The Alphabet today in the time of the Phoenicians was actually, I mean, maybe primarily to do with religion and that rather than with the trade that you might think with the expansion and all that.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (58:56)

Yeah, I think it's social. I mean, it is interesting because of course, the when then they get passed on to Greeks. So Greek city states do have writing, some of them, at least in the Bronze Age. Linear B, that writing down a kind of early form of Greek. But then there is no writing in the Aegean for 400 years, maybe something like that. And then you start to get it again and it's in a completely different system. It's this alphabetic system that is. Is the Phoenician Alphabet. They recycle some of the sort of letters that seem a bit strange to them, the sounds that they don't make in their language. They recycle them for vowels which aren't really needed in Semitic languages in general, but otherwise it's the same Alphabet. But that is definitely in a trading context that the first places that you get these Greek inscriptions in the Mediterranean are the big Trading ports. But again you get them in sanctuaries or this is a Greek thing. You get them in the kinds of pottery you use for parties which again may have something to do with trade, but sort of, you know, writing down little drinking songs and things. It's really, it's a really strange way for kind of this great traditional art.

Tristan Hughes (60:18)

The spread of the modern Alphabet is. Well, the spread of the Alphabet is linked to booze ups of the Mediterranean.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (60:24)

There's also some really kind of dirty graffiti about drinking and associated amusements in early alphabetic inscriptions in Greece.

Tristan Hughes (60:35)

Very carefully worded there. Josephine, I could ask so many more questions. I'm afraid we don't know too much. Our boy Alexander the Great and the wonderfully named Abdelonymus of Sidon, the gardener who became king. I think we'll have to wait for another time. Yes, I will ask for a couple of quick questions on the extent of Phoenician exploration. My first one, Josephine, did Phoenicians reach Britain?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (61:03)

You know, there was a great story, an early 20th century Cornwall that did the rounds of the Antiquies journals that they must have done because how else would clotted cream have reached Britain? Here it's designed for these long ship journeys. Cream is bulletproof really. So the answer is there's no proof of it. There's no reason they had to. There were certainly connections all the way up and down the Atlantic coast. If Venetian speakers are operational, even if it's just in what's now, you know, Morocco and Spain and Portugal, they would have their, their stuff. They would have had contacts, knowledge and so on. Going up the coast to Britain and Ireland. On the other hand, there's no reason why they shouldn't have done particularly. It's not, it's not by any means impossible navigationally. In fact, you know, other people were doing something similar. Whether they did it in sailing ships would be another question. So there's no, there's no proof of it, but it's not, it's not an absurd idea. Fair enough.

Tristan Hughes (62:08)

And my other question is going the other way. Did Phoenician sailors circumnavigate not just get to sub Saharan Africa? Did they actually circumnavigate Africa?

Dr. Josephine Quinn (62:18)

Well, I guess they probably did actually because there are these stories. Stories is not quite the right word. Historical reports of pharaohs sending ships out. So there's one particular pharaoh sends a ship out that is supposed to have circumnavigated Africa. There's this tiny detail about it recorded by Herodotus that He thinks this is a reason it can't be true. But he says that the sun is rising on the other side when they go round the Cape of Good Hope. I mean, does that detail suggests that it probably is true? There are also quite a number of stories of people trying to do this and either failing or disappearing. So it's not a regular thing. But I don't think it's at all unlikely that at least one kind of very well resourced, funded, prepared expedition managed it back in say the 6th century BCE.

Tristan Hughes (63:20)

What a TV show, what a film that would be. But I guess you've done a lot of work on the kind of the identity of Venetians and how that's developed as time goes on. So if it was that although those cities, Byblos, Tyre, Carthage and the like will ultimately decline, I mean their legacy has endured to the present day with the word Phoenician.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (63:41)

Well, it's been just such a fertile ground for identity since I say I don't think the ancient Phoenicians have much of a common identity, if any, but it's been a really useful idea for identities kind of ever since. I mean, the one very obvious example is in Modern Lebanon, in 20th century Lebanon, where the idea of being Phoenician in some sense is right. Gave the Maronite Catholics a way to argue that they should be a separate nation from the Syrians, gave them a kind of identity that made them less Arab and more Mediterranean. And that was in a period of the early 20th century that was happening. There were similar movements in Egypt and that it was a fascinating moment in kind of self invention in this period when the nation state is a relatively recent idea. They're being made up by the old colonial powers all over the place and people sometimes kind of taking the opportunity to make their own kind of interventions in that. And in Lebanon it worked. But you also get going back a little bit further. There's a great idea in the 17th century of Britain itself was a Phoenician power, seagoing empire and so on. And the, the trick there was that France was always identified with Rome, great territorial power. And so to, to, to be Phoenician was not only a kind of heroic in a way, but it also made it clear that you were absolutely not like those awful French. And this is made extremely clear in some of the writings of the time. But then in Ireland in the 18th century it works completely the other way around. There's a, a real intellectual fashion for saying that the Irish are Phoenician, whether that's literally as a kind of Phoenician colony in some cases, or just, you know, inspired by Phoenicia. And the idea there is that like Carthage, you know, this is a great cultural nation that has been abused by their neighbors. So not Rome, but Britain, making Britain Rome so that Ireland can be Phoenician. Wow. Yeah, it's a lot of fun interpretation of archaeological features of Ireland along those lines in the 18th century.

Tristan Hughes (66:06)

Well, Josephine, I know we've just scratched the surface, I know we could talk so much more, but what a fascinating chat this has been, giving a great overview and introduction to who the Phoenicians, who they actually were and how important they were in antiquity and their, their enduring legacy down to the present day. It's been absolutely brilliant. Last but certainly not least, you have, of course you've written a few works related to Phoenicians, if I'm correct.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (66:31)

That's right. So I wrote a book, published a book in 2018 called In Search of the Phoenicians, which was all about this kind of mystery of whether they knew they were Phoenician or not, how that actually played out in terms of identity and both in the ancient and modern worlds and so on. And then I wrote a book that came out a couple of years ago called how the World Made the West, which is debunking the myth of the modern west as a self made miracle. And of course, one of the very big actors in that story of what we now call Western civilization coming out of, you know, millennia of connections and journeys and relationships with other parts of the world are those Phoenicians who brought an awful lot besides wine and slaves to the West.

Tristan Hughes (67:21)

Much more than wine and slaves. We'll leave it on that note, Josephine, this has been absolutely wonderful. It just goes to me to say thank you so much. Finally, we finally got you on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the Ancients.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (67:32)

Thank you very much for having me.

Tristan Hughes (67:38)

Well, there you go. That was the brilliant doctor, Dr. Josephine Quinn talking all things the Phoenicians, the Tyrians, the people of Byblos, of Sidon, of Aridus and so on. And the great legacy they left, the seafaring legacy, the Alphabet and so much more. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I really do hope you enjoyed it. If you are enjoying the Ancients, please make sure that you're following the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well. Well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up@historyhit.com subscribe. That is all from me. I will see you in the next episode.

Hayden (68:33)

Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.

Stephen (68:41)

And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.

Hayden (68:45)

And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.

Stephen (68:54)

That's right.

T-Mobile Advertiser (68:54)

Hey.

Tristan Hughes (68:54)

Hey.

Stephen (68:55)

So each week, you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every. Every single chapter.

Hayden (68:59)

And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.

Stephen (69:06)

News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy Fan fellows wherever you get your podcasts.

Tristan Hughes (69:13)

26 miles ain't no walk in the park, Especially for a guy with one leg. I'm Matthew. I'm running the Boston Marathon, presented by bank of America for the Heather Abbott foundation. With their help. 90% of the time, I forget I'm even an amputee.

Dr. Josephine Quinn (69:28)

Donate to matthewscause@bofa.com supportmathew bank of America supports everyone who asks what's possible. What would you like the power to do? References to charitable organizations is not an endorsement by bank of America Corporation.