PHOENICIA AND PHOENICIANS. - Phoenicians (Φοίνιτζες) is the name given by the Greeks to the inhabitants of the coastal region west of Lebanon, who instead gave themselves the name Canaanites (v. CANAAN and CANAANITES).
It seems that the Egyptian Fahra is the same word: etymologically φοίνιξ seems to derive from φοίνιξ: "red," which is the color of purple, the principal product exported from that region. Both the Greeks (cf., e.g., Odys., 4, 618) and the Israelites (cf. Deut. 3:9; Jud. 10:6, 12, etc.) also called the inhabitants of the whole of Phoenicia Sidonians.
Phoenicia properly so called, that is, the region extending from Ras en-Naqūrah (the present-day border between Palestine and Syria) to the Nahr el-Kebir (the ancient Eleutherus), is for the most part a narrow strip of cultivable land, wider only at the mouths of the rivers Nahr el-Qāsimijeh (anciently Litas) and Nahr el-Kebir, and behind the great coastal cities of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Byblos. Well irrigated by the waters coming from Lebanon, this land is very fertile (grain, figs, wine, olives); the lower slopes of Lebanon lend themselves to horticulture and the cultivation of the vine, while the higher positions were anciently occupied by forests of cedars and cypresses. The abundance of products, on the one hand, and the narrowness of the territory, on the other, drove the inhabitants from ancient times to export and to colonize, first in the neighboring lands: toward the south as far as Carmel, toward the north as far as Mount Casius (J. el-Aqra'); witnesses to this are the cities of Akko, Arados (Ruād), Ugarit (Raš Šamra) and, later, Tripoli (at the mouth of the Nahr el-Qadīšah). The entire region between Akko and Mount Casius was called Phoenicia in the broadest sense. Overseas colonization developed in a particular way in the 2nd half of the 2nd millennium down to about 800 B.C. on the northern coast of Africa, where Carthage (founded under King Pygmalion, 820-774) was the most important colony. Phoenician ships reached even Spain (Tarāš, Tartessus, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir).
The inhabitants of Phoenicia were, at least from about 3000 B.C., Semites, as their figures represented on Egyptian monuments attest, which are the same type as the "Canaanites" of pre-Israelite Palestine. So far it is not known of what race and origin the inhabitants who preceded them were. The language of the Phoenicians is known from many inscriptions found in Phoenicia itself, among which the oldest are the recently discovered inscriptions of the kings of Byblos
(from the 13th-10th centuries), from inscriptions found in the Phoenician colonies, and today in particular from the numerous texts found in Ugarit (Rās Samra). Phoenician is a Semitic dialect of the northwestern group, akin to Hebrew and Moabite (stele of Mesha), and to the language of the Canaanite glosses contained in the Amarna letters. The Phoenician language remained in use for almost 2000 years; the last complete inscription found is from the 1st century B.C.; but Lucian of Samosata (ca. 125-190 A.D.) still knows the difference between Hebrew and Phoenician (Alexandros, § 13). The Punic of which St. Augustine speaks is a Phoenician dialect.
History. - The oldest information about Phoenicia comes from Egyptian documents. Egypt, lacking timber, from the most ancient times imported it by sea from the forests of cedars and cypresses of Phoenicia. Such commercial expeditions, directed particularly to Byblos (v.), then the most important port of Phoenicia, were practiced from the first Egyptian dynasties, especially under the VI dynasty (ca. 2420-2280 B.C.) and the XII dynasty (ca. 2000-1785). As a result of such expeditions the Egyptians also acquired a certain political supremacy or at least a very notable interference in the government of some cities, as the excavations of Byblos and Ugarit (Rās Samra) attest. This Egyptian supremacy, suspended during the period of the Hyksos (ca. 1750-1580), was regained after their expulsion from Egypt (ca. 1580), especially under the powerful Thutmosis III (ca. 1501-1447), but it soon declined, as the Amarna letters attest, because of the invasions of the Ḥabiru and the intrigues of the Amorite princes settled beyond Lebanon, and it came to an end entirely at the time of the invasion of the "Sea Peoples" (ca. 1200 B.C.). Now begins the independent political organization of the individual great cities: Sidon, Tyre, Arados, Byblos, Akko, which contended among themselves for hegemony. From the 12th century the authority of Sidon prevailed, which, around the year 1000, was replaced by that of Tyre, whose king Hiram I (996-936) maintained political and commercial relations with David and Solomon (cf. II Sam. 5:11; I Kings 5:15-32; 9:11-14, 27; 10:11). Ittobaal (887-850), the third successor of Hiram, made an alliance with Omri and Ahab, kings of Israel (884-854), and under Pygmalion (820-774) Carthage arose (or arose again) (814-815), the most important colony of Tyre on the northern coast of Africa. But the expansionist policy of the resurgent Assyrian kingdom also threatened Phoenicia, whose northern part was made an Assyrian province by Tiglath-Pileser I (756-727), while the southern part became tributary. The political situation remained more or less the same after the defeat of Assyria under the Neo-Babylonian kings. The Persians, while leaving to the individual cities a certain autonomy, included Phoenicia under the V satrapy Abernahara (Syria): cf. Herodotus, III, 91. Conquered in part by Alexander the Great, Phoenicia became the object of the disputes of the Diadochi, until, in 64 B.C., the Romans occupied it definitively, uniting it with the Province of Syria. This situation remained substantially stable until the invasion of the Arabs (638 A.D.).
Phoenician civilization presents a very complex character. Since Phoenicia was a country of transit from the Aegean and from Egypt to Mesopotamia, its civilization was open to the influence of the cultures of all those countries, particularly of Egypt, as the excavations of Byblos and of Rās Samra prove. Nevertheless Phoenician art contains original elements, which are due to the uncommon artistic talent and the great technical skill of the Phoenicians. The opinion, attributed by the ancient writers
PHOENICIA AND PHOENICIANS - Inscription and reliefs from Karatepe (8th century B.C.).
Phoenicians to their people, of having discovered and transmitted to the other nations almost all the arts and crafts, is certainly false, but it remains nonetheless true that not a few Phoenician inventions and works of art passed to the Western civilizations, especially to that of the Greeks. The most valuable contribution made by Phoenicia to the West is the alphabetic script, which passed in the 11th or 10th century to the Greeks and was called by them Φανιλοξία γράμματα (Herodotus, V, 58).
Whether the Phoenicians were the inventors of the alphabet (v.) or received it from others is a question still debated. Until now the oldest Phoenician alphabetic inscription was considered to be that on the sarcophagus of King Aḥiram of Byblos (written probably ca. 1100 B.C.); but recently a brief inscription has been found that is dated to the 15th century B.C. and is much more archaic than that of the Aḥiram sarcophagus. The invention of the Phoenician alphabetic script therefore goes back at least to the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C.
The religion of the Phoenicians, previously known almost exclusively from the information given on the subject by Sanchuniathon (last third of the 2nd millennium [?]) handed down to us by Philo of Byblos (64-140 A.D.), is today illustrated by the monuments discovered in recent decades. The Phoenician pantheon is not fully identical in the different cities of Phoenicia, but the principal deities can be reduced to three fundamental types: an "elder" god (El), a female divinity representing the generative power (Astarte, Baalat, Asherah), and a "young god," representing the nascent and dying vegetation (Adonis; at Ugarit Mōt and Aliyan, at Tyre Melqart).
Alongside these fundamental types there are several other new ones, probably imported from abroad, representing either atmospheric phenomena (Reshef, Baal-Shamem, at Ugarit Baal), or other elements important for social life (hypostases of the arts, etc.). Compared with the Canaanite religion of Palestine, the Phoenician one shows the same background, but a somewhat different and richer development, due to the political separation of the two regions and to foreign influences, to which Phoenicia was more open than Palestine. The Punic religion, deriving from the Phoenician, underwent further modifications due to infiltrations coming from Libya and from the interior of Africa.
