In Our Time - The Phoenicians

Episode Date: February 6, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Phoenicians. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about a people from the Levant who were accomplished sailors and traders, and who taught the Greeks their alphabet. He called them the Phoenicians, the Greek word for purple, although it is not known what they called themselves. By about 700 BC they were trading all over the Mediterranean, taking Egyptian and Syrian goods as far as Spain and North Africa. Although they were hugely influential in the ancient world, they left few records of their own; some contemporary scholars believe that the Phoenicians were never a unified civilisation but a loose association of neighbouring city-states. With:Mark Woolmer Assistant Principal at Collingwood College, Durham UniversityJosephine Quinn Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of OxfordCyprian Broodbank Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at University College LondonProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In his masterpiece, the histories, the Greek writer Herodotus, describes how the alphabet first came to Europe. He explains that merchants from the Eastern Mediterranean settled in Greece, bringing a writing system which they taught to the locals, the first time, according to Herodotus, that the Greeks had seen or used in alphabet. These merchants were the Phoenicians, famed in the ancient world as sailors and traders. They seemed to have originated in what we'd now call Lebanon,

but in the second millennium BC, they spread their influence all over the Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria. Both the Romans and Greeks wrote about their activities, but the Phoenicians themselves left frustratingly little evidence over their activities, and the true extent in nature of Phoenician culture is still the subject of considerable debate. With me to discuss the Phoenicians are, Mark Woolmer, Assistant Principal at Collingwood College, Durham University, Josephine Quinn, lecturer in ancient history at the University of Oxford,

and Cyprian Broodbank, Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at University College London. Mark Wormor, can you tell us about the origins of the Phoenicians and their civilization? Good morning, yes. The Phoenicians are actually a fairly enigmatic people. They're quite difficult to trace. as you said in your introduction scholarship today considers that they were based in

modern day Lebanon at the borders of their territory roughly coincides with that of modern Lebanon beyond that where they came from when they first appeared in Lebanon is a matter of much debate Herodotus who you mentioned the Greek historian claims that they came from the Red Sea

and by the Red Sea he meant the Arabian Gulf or the Indian Ocean and he says that they migrated into the region. But it seems clear from archaeology and from other texts that this isn't necessarily the case. And we believe that from 3,400 BC, there was a group at the site of Biblos,

one of the main Phoenician city states, already living and dwelling and farming in that region. So it's been continually habitably habitation. inhabited from around 300, 300 BC. Would you say it was basically there were people of cities, they were defined more by their cities than by a particular area of land,

although you have named the area of land, but they would see themselves as people of Tyre or people of Biblos or people of sight. Is that the way they would look at themselves? Absolutely. Later taken up as it were by the Greeks, really, a man of Athens rather than a man of Greece. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's the most sensible way of thinking about the Phoenicians. The idea of Phoenicia, itself is an artificial concept as we'll come to look at, I'm sure, later in the programme. So yes, they would identify themselves by their city. So if you were from Thai, you would proudly proclaim that you were a Tyrian, if you were from Syden a Sidonian.

So their identity there was all tied up with their city-state. Now, we've got a handful, almost literally handful of five cities, down the coast there, down the coast, North Israel and Lebanon, that area. And it didn't take them all that long to stretch right across the Mediterranean,

which would have been an extraordinary adventure in those days to go from where they were, and the east of Mediterranean, right across the Spain. And how widely was the, not empire, because it was a trading area at the height of their powers? How widely spread was it? Well, it spread all across the Mediterranean, so we know that they had colonies all along the North African coastline. with the city of Carthage being perhaps the most famous. They made it into southern Spain. They made it into southern France.

They colonized the Aegean. So they colonized essentially the entire Mediterranean basin. When you say colonized, what do you mean? Do you mean settled or do you mean found places where they could exploit, which they could exploit for their own trade purposes? Both, really. They founded some trade colonies, so they would find an area which was rich in natural resources,

such as minerals, wood in Spain in particular. Or with Carthage, they would colonise the area. They would be on a main trading network, so it would be still connected to the trade routes. But the city would become equally strong, equally as powerful as one of the mother cities, such as Tyre in this case.

Were they working then when they spread across them as a unit, or was it Tyre who did this, and Biblos who did that, and Saiden who did the other? It was individual city states. They would send out colonies, send out groups to colonise particular areas. If they identified a region that was going to be particularly profitable for them, they would then want to get their hands on those resources,

so they would do that as an operation according to that city state. It wasn't a joint operation. So who colonised Carthage, and what did they get out of it? Tyre, Tire colonised Carthage. Tire was immensely rich, wasn't it? At various points, I mean, with all the Phoenician city states, they rise to prominence and fall away at various times. So at some points in time, Tyre is very profitable.

It's very rich, very wealthy, other times less so. But yes, I mean, it founded Carthage because it wanted to dominate the trade routes along North Africa and the North African coastline. And it also meant that they had routes into Italy and all the way across to Spain. So having Carthage cited where it was in North Africa gave them the opportunity to control all the important trade networks across the Mediterranean. Now Josephine Grin, I've been using the word Phoenicians and will continue to use it for reasons of convenience. But it's an odd word to use in a way because it's not thought that they themselves used it at all. No, that's right. And Phoenician is a Greek word.

The Greeks themselves weren't even quite sure what it meant. There was some debate as to why the Phoenicians were called the Phoenicians. The best bet that the Greek writers could come up with was that it was related to the colour purple. or perhaps dark red. And so possibly a reference the colour of their skin, but more likely a reference to the famous purple dye that they produced from carnivorous sea snails. The Murex snails.

The Murex snails. Which is extraordinarily expensive, as they were very well known for this. So the idea is they became known as the sort of purple people because of this extraordinary dye. They became the imperial class. Absolutely. Yes, it was supposed to be worth its weight in silver, literally.

So the Greeks have this word for them, and they have theories as to why they call them that. In the Hebrew and other near eastern sources, you hear about Canaanites. They'll call the people who live in these cities Canaanites. But we have to be no evidence at all what they would have called themselves other than the names of their cities,

as we were saying, Sedonian, Son of Tyre, that kind of thing. When did they come to be called Phoenicians? Well, the earliest evidence we've got is in Homer. So Homer talks about Phoenician merchants. Which is that, by 800 BC? Let's say about that. Yeah, some debate on that topic, but let's say 800.

Now, presumably Homer's not the first person who's using this, but it's the first surviving reference to it. They left very few records. Curiously enough, we're going to come later to them. the glorious remodeling of the alphabet, but left very few records. Why is that? And given that they didn't, where's the evidence? Well, what they've left, in the sense that the problem is that they actually left an awful

lot of inscriptions, more than 10,000 across the whole Mediterranean in Phoenician, except that they're almost all, I mean, 99% from sanctuaries. And so all of those say almost, almost all of them say exactly the same thing. thing. So it's not really very helpful. We know a great deal about one particular kind of dedication to the gods. Other than that, you're right. There's very little indeed. There are some very early text. There are some letters from the Bronze Age kings. So back in the second millennium BCE, when the pharaoh, the Egyptian pharaoh, is the overlord of the whole area of Phoenicia and beyond. The kings of the individual cities will write to him sort of report.

on local events and so on, usually complaining about each other. That's the main topic of these letters. But of course, as with all kind of historical royal correspondence, this is fairly tendentious and politicised stuff, so we don't learn very much from that. So really, we've got two main sources of evidence, are the archaeology on the one hand, and then what other people say about them,

what the Greek and Roman writers say about them, what the near-eastern sources say about them. And of course, when they're writing, when people from outside are writing about the Phoenicians, they're writing about the moments they encounter them. So in wars on the sea when they're trading, these colonies they settle and so on. They don't really know much about their home lives, their society. What are the theories for the lack of records? Well, this is...

Lack of written record. Well, there are two possibilities. One is that there was a huge amount of, there was a huge amount of Phoenician literature, poetry, epics, myths, of the kind that we find in other near eastern cities of this period, but it's all been lost. It was written on papyrus and has all been lost.

That's a pretty common and perfectly reasonable theory. However, it's also entirely possible that it never existed in the first place. Why should they not have written records and all around them did and when they came up to model the alphabet? Well, they would have had written records.

They would have had channels are just sort of basic records of events, records of treaties, that kind of thing. There would have been documentary records. And to be honest, they probably exist. It's very difficult to excavate in Tyre and Seidon because they have modern cities on top of them. But whether they had a sort of a more kind of poetical sort of what we might call a high literature is another question. Cyprian Brubank, one source of information is the Hebrew Bible. Can you tell us how the Phoenicians figure in that?

Yes, I think the Bible exemplifies the issue that Joe was raising earlier as to what we can and can't derive from an external perspective, from an outsider's view of the Phoenicians. On the one hand, we have enormously evocative and exciting firsthand descriptions, for example, the great city of Tyre, like a ship upon the sea, a beautiful ship. This is in the Hebrew Bible. This is all in the Hebrew Bible. This is mainly Isaiah and Ezekiel.

On the other hand, of course, the Phoenicians appear when they're touching upon the Hebrew narrative. The first phase, which is also the most complex in terms of how much we believe of the earlier books of the Bible, is the encounter between the United Monarchy of Solomon and the great Tyrian King Hiram I. they are said to have traded and exchanged. Interestingly, Haram sends fragrant wood from Lebanon and also specialist craft people to make the temple at Jerusalem and to make the palace. While in return, Israel sends back grain and olive oil, I think it is, and silver.

So about what date are we talking? We're talking the 10th century, the beginning of what's known as the high image. And later the idea is that they combine on joint ventures into the Red Sea, down the coast of the hijazz to collect the exotic fragrances in such like of Arabia. The problem with all this is there's a vast debate as to how much the Solomonic story has been gilded

in the later compilation of the Old Testament. When we move a little later... Just a second, because Hiram and Solomon, there are two wonderful names to start with, I'm sure, just spending a moment saying Hiram and Solomon. But what credence do you give the Hebrew Bible story of the two of them? Because it's a great story.

What do you think? That's really putting me on the spot. I think there's certainly something behind it. The archaeology shows there's plenty going on in Israel at this time. We know there's a House of David, for example. We know that Tyre at this stage is expanding into the leading Phoenician city on the coast, taking over from Saidan and Biblos and previous cities. So we know that the scenario is about right.

What we're unsure about is quite when these books are, of the Old Testament were written, and to what extent some of the later 9th and 8th century phenomena that we see, the rise of a much more powerful kingdom in the north, in Israel, north of Judah, has been in a sense projected on to this

earlier Solomonic golden age. But even if we take it with a little pinch of salt, we're still talking about a wealthy city that can give money to a king, Solomon, however ornamented and abelishly later became, to build the great temple in Jerusalem,

So we're talking about wealth transferring, we're talking about trade, we're talking about equality, even superiority in wealth at that stage, and a great cultural intercourse there. But as we don't seem to have access to many written records yet, although they could be discovered under the sand, fine dry. What about the archaeological evidence? I think the archaeology of the Phoenicians is really the great growth area because we have a real problem with the amount of textual evidence we have.

The archaeology is really what's telling us what their cities look like, what their material world look like. What did trade around the Mediterranean? Their fine, wheel-made, red pottery is found all the way to the Gulf of Cadiz and beyond. Their ivory is found all over the eastern Mediterranean. Their storage jars are made and imitated that transport olive oil and wine. We really know the Phoenicians through their archaeology

and what's particularly exciting is a sheer extent of Phoenician activity in the centre and west of the Mediterranean and the ever earlier dates we're picking up for that are really the results What do you mean by earlier in this country? We're going back, well, let me give you an example. If you had asked people 15 years ago,

they would have said nothing reliable before about 800 BC. We've now smashed right through that particularly extraordinary set of excavations by Spanish archaeologists in southeastern Spain, underneath Cadiz, but also underneath the great port of Huelva,

the modern port of Huelva, where they've gone straight through down to the bedrock and there lying on the mud and the sand are thousands of shards of Phoenician type, pot shards of Phoenician type, scraps of metalworking, they're obviously already after the silver and other metallic wealth of South East Spain,

scraps of writing, and really the whole Phoenician package. Dated? Ninth century at least, possibly even earlier. Right. Mark, Mark Wilma, they've often been depicted as skilled sailors. they were skilled craft makers

because Cyprian has told us something, but there was also glass making and there was also the making of this great purple cloth and so on. But sailors, the ships, the great ships, the sort of Vikings of the Mediterranean, as it were. Can you tell us something about the ships? Yeah, the Phoenicians were famous for their ability to craft the finest vessels.

One of the interesting things that all of the ancient sources agree on is the speed of Phoenician vessels. They were fast. and they were very, very quick. And this is because of one of the innovations that Phoenician shipwrights made, which was the cut water, which is a cut water. A cut water, which is essentially a conical projection

at the front of a vessel. And it cuts through the water ahead of the front of the ship, thus reducing drag on the hull and making the ship pass much quicker and much more easily across the surface of the ocean. So their ships were really fast, and this was really useful for trade. Did they row them or did they have sails? What did it happen?

They had both. They had sails and they had oars. So if you found yourself in the middle of the Mediterranean and the wind dropped and you're stuck, you could row. But it was mainly sales were the main form of propulsion. They would use oars to row into shore and into harbour. But they would use sails on the open sea. Do we know how they got so far ahead of their competitors? does after all the Mediterranean is ringed by cities and towns on the sea? Well, they had no option in one sense,

because of the geography and topography of Lebanon, ancient Phoenicia, on one side is the Mediterranean, on the other side is impenetrable mountains. There's very little farmland, there's very little agricultural land. So the one thing that they have an abundance of is timber. So they recognise that they can use the timber to manufacture boats and then harvest the benefits of the Mediterranean. So from a very early age, sort of even 1,300 BC,

we find depictions of Phoenician vessels, and they're using hockey stick like oars. They have masts. They even seem to have small sails. So they become a maritime nation from a very early date. And what they use their fleet for, apart from conquest, Josephine, is trade. Now, can you tell us about the... what they did in trade

why they were so good at it, the extent of it and so on. Well, I think one of the reasons they get so good at it is that they're their first. And for all the reasons that Mark's been saying, they're kind of forced out into the sea. These cities have to look out on the Mediterranean. And they also have this huge advantage in that they have the cedar trees of Mount Lebanon.

And that's what we hear about over and over again in the written sources by other people talking about wanting to get their hands on this timber. I mean, timber is a very scarce resource in the Mediterranean and to have this huge amount of it. And to be able to trade that gives them, I think, a real head start, especially in the early accounts of Phoenician trade. People really focus on timber.

When did people want the timber for? Well, perhaps for building their own ships for burning things is one thing that you need wood to burn anything. So any kinds of cremations, for instance, you need timber for, all sorts of kinds of building. There's a wonderful story that we hear in an Egyptian text called the Chronicle of Wen Ammon

when this priest of Amon in Egypt is rather senior sort of temple officials quite bumbling, get sent off to the Phoenician coast in order to get timber to build the sacred bark of Ammon so that he can presumably go up and down the Nile.

And this priest, because this is from a period when Egypt is no longer very powerful in the Levant, and this priest goes up and down between the different cities, negotiating with the various kings, trying to get his hands on the timber. They traded a great deal. And what it seems to me from reading about it, they traded in what was to hand. They became great glassmakers because they had fine sand on their beaches. The great purple dye and so on, because just off the shore, if you dive deep enough, there were these snails which had these glands

which produced this dye. So they made from what they had. They made from what they had, and then they built on that to make from what other people had. This is what's so interesting about Mediterranean trade, the trick that they seem to perform very early on, is they go from exchanging what they have,

so the cedar wood, murex, snails, dye, that kind of thing, for things that they want, which are usually metals, of what we hear about tin, all sorts of metals coming from the Western Mediterranean. And silver. And silver, absolutely.

But then they go beyond that very fast to trading in what other people have. They're really the middlemen of the Mediterranean. We hear about them trading in spices, in Egyptian linens, in monkeys, in slaves, and all these things. And they're not, so it's not just a sort of in-and-out trade. They're kind of at the heart of these very intricate trading networks

of the kind that we'd more normally associate with desert trade. Can we develop that, Cyprian Brood Bank, because this was their fame and their fortune, and developed their techniques and their skills and so on. What sort of settlement, I've mentioned Carthage, we can mention it again, but what sort of settlements did they set up in order to make sure they could conduct this in safety and with profit?

It'll come as no surprise that these are almost entirely cities on the sea. They are on promontories, on little offshore islands, tire itself clung to a reef, hardly sticking up out of the water. What you see today is a very different tyre because it's been joined to the mainland by the siege mole of Alexander the Great, as we're here later. And they identify similar kinds of locations right across the Mediterranean. Cadiz would then have been an island, a series of islands, in fact, off the Spanish coast. Where they can't find a natural island with a little sort of seymote,

which is close enough to the mainland to trade with their trade partners, but gives you a little bit of distance should things turn nasty locally. Where they can't find that, they'll take a promontory, they'll take any kind of natural embayment or harbour. A few of the cities are genuinely major centres of population, Tyre and Saidan back home, Carthage rapidly growing into one, but many of the others are tiny entreposed and are much more important for, in a sense, their projection of a Phoenician identity, the sheer size of the small number of houses, the warehouses, the harbour facilities, rather than for their actual population size.

And often there's to be actually due more archaeology of these smaller arthropos in the West we find how many local people are also involved in them. Was there resentment at their success? Did they meet opposition, or did they just sail in, do the business and sail out again, undisturbed? Well, there's clearly a lot of resentment and Schadenfreude in the Bible,

and I think there's a certain amount of it in the ambiguities we see in the Odyssey about these people as splendid seafarers, but also. Yeah, one of the things that's really interesting in the prophecies, Niziah and Ezekiel at Cyprian was talking about earlier, is that there is a whole series of great powers are supposed to fall. And when, for instance, Babylon is supposed to fall, everyone rejoices because the yoke is taken off. But when Tyre falls, everyone mourns, the people of Egypt mourn, the people of Tarshish mourn, because I think there's not mourning out of a sort of affection for this place,

but a worry about the financial consequences for other places in the Mediterranean if these great Phoenician trading cities are destroyed. Was it just a back one for a moment to do with Cyprian? These places, did they endure for a long time? These settlements we know a little bit about Cathay, but I know a little bit of Caled, you know a lot. Cadiz and so on. How long did they last? Some are immensely enduring the Phoenician.

had a very good eye for a place that would be a winner in terms of following centuries of maritime trades. So Cadeus in Carthage carry on for centuries. Indeed, Cadez has a continuous history of occupation, I think, right up to this day, which is why it's so difficult to excavate. A lot of the smaller ones are much more femoral and may have been tied to the ventures of a few merchants, and gradually, as time goes on, the more successful ones tend to accumulate more of the trade, more of the power, and the smaller ones wink out. Mark Mark Woolmore, what sort of governance did the Phoenicians themselves? Phoenician cities themselves have, and did they transfer this to their settlements?

They mainly had a king. The extent of the king's power is, again, still debated, but it seems that they had some form of absolute monarchy, so the king would have the ultimate say on all matters, really. The indication for this is that quite often the kings build lavish palaces. If you've got an oligarchy of democracy, you tend to, to spend the money on public amenities, such as marketplaces or temples or things like that.

So the fact that they lavish a lot of money on their tombs and they lavish a lot of money on their palaces would suggest a form of absolute monarchy. But again, because of the lack of evidence, because they're not like their other Near Eastern counterparts, they don't leave us large inscriptions detailing their accounts, what they did, what their great achievements were, their military victories.

We don't have the same type of evidence as we do for other Near Eastern monarchs. But we find that, this intriguing reference to the council of merchants or the council of elders so there does seem to be an advisory body at least

some form of advisory body that would give advice to the king. We've talked about trading. Did these boats these ships carry arms? Did they carry men at war? Did they have to use force to occupy these places at any say? They had two different types of ship. They had the merchant vessel

which the Greeks credit the Phoenicians were inventing the merchant vessel, the Gallos. And they also had warships. And they took very good care of their worship. And you see, they thought of their warships as being a living creature. It had a spirit that needed protecting

just like the crew themselves. And we get this lovely depiction from Valerius Maximus, who says that they launched their vessels over the captives or slaves to put blood upon the hull of the ship. And they did that. You just rolled the ship over these

prisoners or slaves to to put blood across the side of the vessel. And that meant that if you gave a gift of blood to the vessel now, it was hoped that there would be no bloodletting whilst it was at sea. It protected the spirit and it was an offering to the deities. So they clearly thought that their ships were living creatures. They painted apachepeic eyes so that the ship could see where it was going. When they finally copy the Greeks for once,

rather than the Greeks copying the Phoenicians, they introduced the ram onto the front of the ship and we finally put devices like Apotropaeic horns at the front of the vessel to imbue the ship with the strength of Baal, this storm deity whose symbolist the horns so that when you gore into the enemy you had the strength of Baal whose totem animal was the bull

and he gave you the strength and power to mull and goar your enemy so warships were just as important as merchant vessels because you also had to deal with pirates and piracy And as I understand, Xerxes would always have a, the great Persian king would always select a Phoenician worship as being the best way to travel. Right, Josephine, we've got a king, but he's also the chief priest, isn't he, as I understand it? In a lot of cases. And there's a priest, the aristocratic priestly cast under him, and then under them there are the merchants and the artisans and then the freed men and slaves. That's about it, isn't it?

That's what we could see. And does that lot transfer to that? settlements. Is that the sort of pyramid you have across the Mediterranean? Well, no. And this is one of the things that's very interesting about looking at the development of these cities over time, both in the colonies and in the

homeland. So in the colonial settlements, everything's a lot flatter. There are smaller numbers of people at least to start off with. There's some evidence for a king at Carthage, although it's a bit dubious. There's certainly no evidence for kings in any

of the other colonies. So it looks like they're being run by assemblies from the beginning, which is a fairly standard thing in Mediterranean colonies, probably mostly made up of these merchants. So essentially, when you move abroad, you sort of lose the top slice of society and come to what you might call a more republican, possibly even more democratic form of government.

And then what's interesting is that back in the homeland, the kings begin to fade away, over time. You get assemblies coming in, getting more power, it seems. And there's a question mark over, you know, the extent to which the home, the mother cities and the homeland are actually being influenced by these very successful colonies. I think the only way to put this is bluntly. What about child sacrifice on a big scale? Right. Big scale in the west. A lot of evidence. The west of the Mediterranean. The West of the Mediterranean. What do you mean by that? From Sardinia, West. No. Interestingly, in a really small area. So Carthage is the main place, more than two. 20,000 burials of infants in the child sacrifice sanctuary there. And then there are another nine or ten sanctuaries, and they're all very close together.

So there's one at Carfid, then there's one on Western Sicily, less than a day's sail away, several in southern Sardinia, all around the Straits of Sicily. They seem to begin around the same time. So it's as if one community of people has moved to one particular area of the Mediterranean and started to do this. Do you have any explanation for that? I think it's part of the bid by Carthage to establish its own identity. Carthage, after all. But how do you establish your identity by child sacrifice?

What's the point? It's a religious and ideological focus. It's a way of drawing people together. It seems very strange to us. I think Cyprian's right. There is enough evidence that it happens in the Levant. It happens in the homeland. How are we talking about one year old, two year olds?

No, much younger. About between one and two months. when the bones have been looked at. So too old to be natural death, because if under normal circumstance, without access to modern medicine, you'd expect most of the sort of natural death in very young children to occur really very young,

first month, first week. So a little bit too old for that, but still very young. So it's there, but it's local and it's as yet unexplained. What can be explained is there are there great skills, briskly, in, first of all, in navigation. They're supposed to have been the first people to have sailed right across the middle, of the Mediterranean, let's say, without hugging the coastline.

Absolutely. Although I think here, in a sense, Phoenicians are as much made by the Mediterranean as makers of it. They're inheriting thousands of years of skills seafaring, traditions from all over the Mediterranean. And indeed, once one starts to move westwards into the Mediterranean,

we've already seen that Phoenician is a rather problematic collective term back in the east. What a Phoenician really is in the centre and west becomes very complicated. So I think probably a lot of people's skills in maritime activity, navigation, celestial, but also knowledge of the coast and of the currents and the winds, which is absolutely crucial in the Mediterranean, is being gleaned and brought together and packaged in a sense under this term Phoenician. But in many ways, in many things, they bring it together. And as we understand from examining the agricultural system, it was not only intensive, it was complex and sophisticated. Absolutely.

and by this stage we're no longer thinking about agriculture which is about subsistence farming. We're looking at cash cropping, we're looking at complex agronomy. The olive oil and the wine that they trade around the Mediterranean would have been minutely subdivided into different brands and tequila and vintages and such like. This is a very sophisticated marketing system and this is capital-intensive agriculture. We I think have an interesting deep inheritance there because after all Lebanon is part of the fertile crescent, part of the hearth of still about the earliest agriculture in the world. They've got 8,000 years of experience of cultivating, grafting, fruit crops, etc.

By the time they become the Phoetians. Can we turn to the fact we've been talking about them almost as independent entities, free as the winds, sailing across the Mediterranean, settling here, conquering there, trading there. But for a lot of the time, these Phoenician cities were enthralled to or occupied by great, powers around them from Egyptians, Assyrians, Macedonians, right through eventually to the Romans. So can you tell us about that? Well, that's right. These kings are always in a power sandwich, basically. Their own local prestige, power, wealth, crucially, depend on a bigger power above them, usually a king.

In the second millennium BC, it's the Egyptian pharaoh. In the first millennium BC, it's the Mesopotamian monarch, whether that's the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians. Yeah, then the Macedonians, and the Seleucic kings, and then the Romans. And one of the effects of this is that it makes them extremely competitive with each other, these cities. They're competing for the attentions and favour of the king above them. They're competing for respect from the rest of the world

because they are not really as powerful as they're pretending to be. And so, for instance, they'll claim to. to be each other's mother city. Tyre will claim to be the mother city of Saiden. The next year, Saiden will issue coinage saying it's the mother city of Tyre. They'll steal each other's myths. I mean, it's a difficult situation

that they find themselves in. But you're wondering, I was going to speak, Mark. One of the defining features of Phoenician culture is their ability to negotiate their way through empire. What's really interesting is that all of these empires come in, but actually treat the Phoenician cities fairly leniently.

So whereas a lot of the other city states of the Near East get devastated by an invading power, they recognise that they could use the wealth of Phoenicia. So the Phoenician city states are left intact, and they can be quite cheeky. We go back to the Amarna letters that Joe referred to earlier. Some of the language that they use is not the official language that you'd be, I bow down before Pharaoh, I prostrate myself.

It's actually, well, if you don't give me what I want, I'm actually going to join your enemies, and you rely on us to provide you information, because one of the things that we haven't mentioned, which comes with the trade networks, is access to communication and speed of communication. They could garner information from across the Mediterranean world in a very short period of time,

and that was useful for any empire. You talked about the empire-streetingham rather tenderly. Alexander the Great didn't. He came in, and he smashed them, and particularly Tyre, which threatened to resist him. It was an island. I prayed after Russia's because I wanted to get under the alphabet. And so being Alexander the Great, he built a causeway.

I must have seen this thing coming for years, this causeway getting nearer and nearer and nearer. And then he went in and slaughtered as many people as he could find. Well, he had a reason for that. I mean, the other Phoenician city states were actually quite willing to join him. They'd lost prestige under the Ekemenid dynasty, under the Persian Empire. they'd lost their status, they'd lost their power. Taya, on the other hand, have profited.

So when the other states, the other Phoenician cities, were willing to join Alexander, with token pretence at resisting his invasion, Taya said, well, we've got Carthage who promised support, we've grown wealthy from this alliance with the Persians, we're not going to resist. And they actually threw Alexander's envoys off of the fortifications, the city walls.

So when he said, open your gates and I will come worship at the Temple of Melkart, who he equated, with Heracles and I'll let everybody live. They took up his envoys and threw them off the battlements and said we would rather stand against you. And so realizing that they also had the most powerful navy, he couldn't leave that city without defeating it

because it would be a thorn in his side. It could disrupt all of his logistical routes, all of his supply routes, it could in jeopardy any form of reinforcements. So he had to take the city. But he didn't have to, then crucify 2,000 of them. In his thinking, I do you tell you.

Right. There's something, I'm going to move straight to the alphabet because it's too important to rush. The Phoenicians are widely credited with bringing the alphabet to Europe, Josephine, and we now know they got it from the first draft, let's put it that way was that you've got it's script, but the Phoenicians did a great deal to remodel it. Can you tell us what happened?

Well, they, yes, this is right. They inherited script from, other powers in the region, particularly Ugarit, and essentially simplify it and they're using it. I think that's almost the most important thing is that because they're trading everywhere, because they're meeting people and they've got suddenly this incredibly efficient way of communicating where you only need, say, 20 signs and you can do everything with them. And so all the people who meet them are trading with them are going to say, what a good idea.

I think I'll have some of that, please. and the early Greek alphabets are very similar to the Phoenician ones and then they develop in a variety of ways after that. But what's funny is that the Phoenician script is used all over the Near East for a long time and gradually everyone else develops their own versions that start to look more and more different, whereas the Phoenicians kind of keep something much closer to the original one. So it's as if the actual number of people using the Phoenician alphabet

gets smaller and smaller over time. But the influence of the alphabet is... Is enormous. Can you flesh that out a bit, Mark? I mean, what did they do when they remodeled it? So, one of the scripts is that you'll get. I've called it the first draft. That'll do for the moment.

What do they get and what did they turn it into? Joseph Bees talking about 20 signs. It seems to me one of the greatest inventions that there's ever been. What an active imagination to decide that everything that he said can be compressed into. Anyway, you talk about it. Well, the interesting thing. about the alphabet is it's used for commerce and it's used for

proving ownership so you could stamp your name on something and actually prove this is mine. You could use it to record what's on the ship so you've dispatched a ship with this many amphire of wine. When it arrives at the other end have you got that many amphire of wine? You can

use it to create contracts so you can now, instead of having to have a witness say yes I heard them both agree to this you can write out a contract and one of the earliest examples of a contract we have is from Ugarit, who has a contract which mirrors the later Greek contracts.

Do we have any evidence whatsoever of how they actually did this and who actually did this? Short answer is no. There's a lot of theories, there's a lot of dates. Give us the best theory, because you're running out of time. Well, it seems that it would have spread via Kittian on Cyprus, that this was

the first, this was a Phoenician and Greek city, where Greeks and Phoenicians lived side by side, that the alphabet would have been used by the Phoenicians and then seen by the Greeks and then spread back to the Greek mainland. And again, some of the earliest Greek writing that we have is records of ownership. So again, it's clearly seen to be useful from a commercial perspective. And so you're talking, most scholars now think that this happened at around 950 BC. We've been talking, and we've been talking Cyprian, Submian, Blue Bank, in terms of the almost easy dominance of Phoenicians in many ways.

But you've also made sure that it is more complicated than that, which it was. Was there a time when the Phoenicians could be seen to fall from their dominance? And when was that and how did it happen? I wonder if they ever really did decline or fall in the sense that we often expect ancient people to do in the kind of traditional narratives. In the East, certainly the increasing power of... empires on land, creates an increasingly difficult position for Phoenician cities to negotiate with. Taya buys its way out. Basically, there's a very influential and very attractive theory that a lot of

it's trade with the far west and bringing in the silver all away from Spain is to pay tribute money to Assyria to keep Assyria off its back. That becomes an increasingly difficult line to walk. And in the east, at least, you start to see Phoenician cities increasingly drawn in as subordinate to empire. Obviously, the Persian fleet, what we call the Persian fleet, at Sanamis is largely a Phoenician fleet, for example. But, of course, further west, it's a very different situation. There are no superpowers out there at the time. It's a much more of a calder and a free-for-all.

And after all, Phoenicia, in a sense, transforms into Carthage. But then Greece heaves into Beaux, doesn't it? It does. The Grecian cities. Increasingly the Mediterranean starts to be partitioned up from the 7th and 6th century onwards into spheres of influence. But in the far west, Carthage, transforms into a mercantile empire,

and it doesn't need a decline, it's bludgeon to death by Rome. Well, we'll end on bludgeon to death by Rome, Cyprian and Cyprian Brut Bank, Mark Woolman, Josephine. Thank you very much. Next week we'll be talking about chivalry, the medieval Knights Code of Honour. Thanks for listening.

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