The Ancients - The Phoenicians

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Three thousand years ago, Phoenician ships sailed west across the Mediterranean, their holds packed with pottery, wine and enslaved people to trade. Passing beyond the fabled Pillars of Heracles, they were pushing at the familiar limits of the ancient world.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Josephine Quinn, to explore the story of the Phoenicians. From the bustling sea ports of Tyre and Sidon to the founding of famous settlements like Carthage, discover how these remarkable seafarers built vast trading networks across the Mediterranean. Tristan and Josephine discuss who the Phoenicians really were, how their reputation as master mariners took shape, and the enduring legacies often linked to them, including the spread of the alphabet and their influence on the ancient world.MORETyre: Jewel of PhoeniciaListen on AppleListen on SpotifyOrigins of CarthageListen on AppleListen on SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. 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 Heracles. 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 cedarwood 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 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. It's great to be here. Thank you. 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? 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. Is that why we primarily, remember the word Phoenician today, is it very much linked to that idea of exploration and sea travel? Yeah, I think so. I mean, the reason that we call these people Phoenician, so they

themselves would probably have thought of themselves in terms of the cities they came from, Tyre, Cydon, Biblos, 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. So it almost kind of describes certain attributes of someone like, I think that the word the Tarantene 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 labeled

a Phoenician. Is that the idea? Yeah, I think above all it's going to be the language they speak, because Venetian is a language very like Hebrew or even Arabic or in the ancient world, Aramaic, Acadian 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 recognise 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, that 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 you 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 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, and that, you know, was producing a kind of purple dye from a sea snail, the remains of a sea snail.

They kind of squeezed them for the dye. 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 this sort of professional. speciality of them. But yeah, I think it becomes a very generic term for Eastern foreign trader person. 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 planes outside of the cities or were they very much kind of crammed up next to the coast? What should we be thinking? No, it's a good question. They're really crammed up is the answer, 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 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. And so what types of sources, you mentioned, Phoenicia, 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? So a variety of things. There's no, unfortunately, nobody wrote, you know, a guide to the Phoenicians in antiquity in any language. So it's sort of 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-conspiracies. 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 Latin authors we have preserved today are writing,

these people are no longer really powerful. So those cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Tyre and Saiden 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're going to say, 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 neighbours, direct neighbours, very close, speaking a language or dialects that were in many cases probably mutually comprehensible with the big cities of the Hebrew Bible, so narrative of the Hebrew Bible, Jerusalem and so on. 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 archaeology and the Phoenicians is that these cities that they inhabited are so located in such excellent, strategic locations 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,

and 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. 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? Well, this is one of the frustrations and the mysteries of these people. So the frustration is that there are a 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, a graveyard.

and you'll see a huge social range of people and the 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. But the problem with this 10,000 plus inscriptions is that, you know, 9,900 and probably 50 of them say exactly the same thing. And they're basically from sanctuaries, their 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. They 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 Venetian language literature. There are some books written in Greek much later on when really we're not, we're talking about a 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. 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 neighbours 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. They're just up the coast at Ugarits on the coast of Syria and the Bronze Age. There are huge amounts of writing in a very similar language to Phoenician. 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.

Well, tell me about it, 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. On what we have from the Bronze Age, the cities of the Levant, is things written in Cuneiform script on clay tablets and then fired, so they survive. Not necessarily that that was the intention environment, but it's the effect. And so when people stop doing that around 1,000 BCE and they start writing on papyrus instead, he often might think of that as a kind of step forwards, it's closer to what we do, is it write on paper.

But actually it means that it's 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 are 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,

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. 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, so Tyre, Seidon. Bibloss is another very big one. on that coast, on the coast of what's now, Lebanon. We can also think of Beirut itself 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 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 12a, 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 coast of southern coast of Spain now, and indeed on the Portuguese coast.

There are, so the sort of whole Mediterranean is speckles the sites 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've been talking a year ago, I just would have said, well, this is, these are settlements, straightforward settlement from the eastern Mediterranean. But in the kind of crazy way that ancient history keeps getting updated, there's an amazing new, a study of ancient DNA was published in nature last year. that shows these 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 RNA, 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? Just like, you know, William the Conqueror or something that actually involves an awful lot of settlement from abroad. And what they found was just absolutely fascinating and 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 ends of course. 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, it 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 end. Gosh, yes, a major spanner in the works of this idea of just lots of people from those cities

just going west all the time. 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, you know, 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 that's not how it worked out in the end. 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 original cities in the Levant a bit more.

Because earlier, Josephine, you mentioned the Bronze Age and you mentioned places like Ugarrett. So can we link the rise, the rise to prominence of these cities with the ever popular set of words, the Bronze Age, collapse. Yes, yes. I'm very suspicious of the Bronze Age collapse. I feel like that's what it looked like if you were the king whose palace was collapsing around you. If 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 Seidon. And we have letters from them to. 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 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 are 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, 1,200 BCE, suddenly the kind of horizons open for these cities on the coast of the Mediterranean.

They've no longer got these overlords. And of course, that means also they've no longer got the enormous demands for metals and other resources moving around. But there's still a fair amount going on in the Mediterranean. 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 Sargentia who deal with their part of the Mediterranean, sailors based in Cyprus, who deal with their part, and stuff would move from one side to the

other, 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 sorts of objects that turn up in the furthest away places are the early. So, yeah, pottery. The earliest Tyrian pottery is found at Welver. 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 that 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 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&R places and so on. 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 move back then, that was bullsy, okay, that was pretty big deal. Yeah, I mean, there are no compasses.

We're a good couple of thousand years before the compass here. And nice, 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 people do 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. And what types of resources did they have available? What would they have brought with them to these distant shores to show their local populations there? You know, we are people you want to trade with. We've got these great things that we can exchange with you. So it's interesting. The things that we know they bring, and of course it depends a bit on what remains in the archaeology, 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 sell some pots or give away some pots. You know, that's just, it's what tends to remain. You just can't kill a pot. You can break it into pieces, but then you just have to put it back together again 2,000 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 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, it's 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 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 mine that's going on before people from the eastern Mediterranean turn up, so say, let's take the year a thousand, and BCE, we're really talking about here when 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 extremely advanced. But when we start to see Phoenician Potter, we also start to see huge changes in the mines, much bigger, much better technology for actually turning, you know,

what comes out of the mines themselves. into something that you can use, mould, 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 that Tyrians are slave traders are quite a big scale. And they seem to be acquiring humans for sale in the Eastern Mediterranean, a general sense, in Western Asia. 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 ship that 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 labour that can then be put to work, particularly in these silver mines and other metal mines and so on. 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 the seafaring, it feels like wood must be right at the centre of their whole system.

Right. And this is, you know, 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 Biblos is maybe most of all associated with this at an early stage. So Biblos was the first sort of really big power of the 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, you know, the Egyptians needed wood. And the cedars of Biblos, now of Lebanon, are really with 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. 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?

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 acceptance. 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, Sid and Biblos, 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 are seem to be founded by these Phoenician speakers,

they tend to be republics. And 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. It's not a kind of natural method of community formation from scratch, I think. They tend to be republics.

And can we imagine that there was a lot of, especially in those original cities, Tyre, Cydon, Biblos, and so on, I guess there must have been a lot of competition between them, a lot of interactions, diplomacy, but also competitiveness. Absolutely. I mean, there's never a sort of political whole. They do, they do cooperate sometimes, particular revolts against the Persians, for instance. You sometimes find the cities working together. Tyre and Seidon 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. We honestly don't know 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 acting in competition more than together. And Josephine, I apologise because this is almost, well, this is kind of two big questions in one with these various cities, let's say 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?

So it's a really interesting question. The language, I mean, some scholars differentiate between Phoenician in the East and Punic in the 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 Tahr and Saigon and what people are speaking just down the coast in the cities of the Hebrew speaking cities. It's probably, you know, It's a spectrum. It's not, it's not two quite different languages. So I would say that rather than trying to cut that spectrum up anywhere, rather at 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 now each individual city who speak Northwest Semitic languages should be treated as having their own individual language and perhaps their four identity and so on. I think we can see it,

while them worrying too much about how it looks at each point in space, we can see it in terms of that relationship between the languages. These people made sense to each other. That doesn't mean they identified absolutely and completely with each other, but I think they made sense to each other. And 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 are their own civic gods. So Tyre has the god Melchart, 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 of Gadiah in Phoenician. But he's a sort of lesser god in places like Carthage or even Biblos and so on. Biblos, the main goddess, is called the Lady of Biblos, the Balaggubur. And she looks awfully like Ishtar, actually. And also sometimes it 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 neighbouring 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, Elle, and so on. And so there's, 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. I mean, that porous nature of the gods is fascinating. We did an interview a few months ago now on Inanna from Siberian times. And then, of course, Ishtar, Aphrodite, ISIS, and then this goddess in Biblos as well.

again, you can see those links together. Absolutely. It's absolutely fascinating. And when you were saying that Phoenician 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? 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, 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, neighboring 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 idea of too easy mutual comprehensibility. Having seen how places in the relative late 20th century world really very close to each other can actually be communication is not necessarily straightforward. But they did, it would have been recognisably the same language type essentially. What about customs then? Could it be more recognisable? You see the similarities between, let's say, what people are doing in Carthage compared to what they're doing in Tyre, maybe not by the language, but by the customs and the traditions that they were doing. Can you see more clear similarities there? 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 at 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, it's 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 a, 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 sarcophagy, 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 Phoenician-speaking context, though, again, there's some porosity. Carthaginian furniture, it 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 is actually like to be Irish in Ireland or even 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 emphasise the connection. 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 the origins further east and the connections that they're most proud of with these original cities at the other end of the Mediterranean, do we think?

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, there's a good example. So Cadiz has this huge connection with this god Melchart, 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 Melchart is clearly a god, whereas Heracles is a kind of demigod, hero type figure. But that doesn't really doesn't seem to matter. It's like detail. So you have this god who has a huge temple at Cadiz, sadly now lost. But there are still some in the sea from time to time,

make 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 that's sort of one example, whereas at Carth, you know, It's an idea, it's very, if you like, kind of formal connections between Cadiz and Tyre. We don't actually know if it was, in fact, Turians who founded Cadiz. And honestly, they probably didn't either. 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 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 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 find this new world what 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. They do say later that they send back kind of gifts to the god of Tyre as well. But he doesn't really become a big deal at Carthage itself for about 500 years after the city's founded. So you get this 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. 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 they're 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. I mean, the Phoenicians get there first with their expectations. expansion, and then the Greeks almost see what they've done and do something very similar. Yeah, kind of fill in the gap in between. There's a sort of, I suppose the point where those two kind of movements 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 Greek, the major Greek city that is furthest west is Massalia, Marseille, modern Marseille, and the rivalry between Marseille 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, before Rome. And this is well before the rise of Rome as well, which is what's also so fascinated about this. Josephine, I must ask about the alphabet. Did they create the modern alphabet? Yeah, 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 sound. 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,

alphabet out, we say A, B, C, D. These are syllables. This aren't so we can't even say the alphabet in alphabetic concept. 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 Levantz, in 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. It's 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 2,900, 1800 BCE, you're beginning to get definite alphabetic signs that are writing down the precursor, 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 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, 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, travellers are workers and so on

who actually write things down for the first time when they're abroad. And they don't need to do it at home. They can just tell someone what they want. But abroad, they really, they really need to write things down, 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've talked 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 the hieroglyphus being like the sacred writing

that you only get in temples. 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. first examples in Egypt, but 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 said, they're sometimes used back to front or upside down. But they're clearly really really. writing. And so they're an appropriate tool to adopt to do your own very different kind of writing. It's going to mean, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the largely syllabic, where they're not describing whole words. And so to adapt them to the alphabet, to a phonetic system, is, it's such a leap of the imagination. It really is. What an amazing story. And what a soundbite there as well, I must a bit. And also, it's fascinating because we did Cunerrneur from recently and hearing about the origins

that Cunerre form may well be linked to writing stuff down for trade and administration. It's fascinating to think that actually maybe the origins of 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. Yeah, I think it's social. I mean, it is interesting because, of course, the women, they get passed on to Greeks. And so, Greek city states do have writing, some of them at least in the Bronze Age, linear B, 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 the Phoenician alphabet. They recycle some of the sort of letters that seem a bit strange to them, the sounds that don't make in their language. They recycle them for vowels, which aren't really needed in what, Semitic languages in general. But otherwise, it's the same alphabet. 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 poultry 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 because it's great, this great contradiction to start. The spread of the modern alphabet is, but the spread of the alphabet is linked to booze-ups. There's also some really kind of dirty graffiti about drinking and associated amusements in early alphabetic inscriptions in Greece. 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 Abdelonimus 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? You know, there was a great story in early 20th century Cornwall that did the rounds of the antiquities journals that they must have done because how else were clotted cream

have reached Britain? It's designed for these long ship journeys. Cotted 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 Phoenician speakers are operational, even if it's just in what's now Morocco and Spain and Portugal,

they would have 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 by any means impossible. navigationally. In fact, other people were doing something similar, whether they did it in sailing ships would be another question. So there's no proof of it, but it's not an absurd idea. 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? Well, yes, they probably did, actually, because there are these stories. Stories is not quite the right one. Historical reports of Pharaoh's sending ships out. It says in one particular ferro 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 around the Cape of Good Hope. I mean, just 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. 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, Biblos, Taya, Carthage and the like will ultimately decline, I mean, their legacy has endured to the present day with the word Phoenician. Well, it's been just such a fertile ground for identity since. I don't think the ancient Phoenicians have much of a common idea. identity, if any, but it's been a really useful idea for identities kind of ever since. I mean, 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 old 20th century, that was happening. There were similar movements in Egypt and it was a fascinating moment in kind of self-invention in this period when the nation state is a relatively recent idea that being made up by the old colonial powers all over the place. Some people sometimes kind of taking the opportunity to make their own kind of interventions in that. And in Lebanon, And it worked.

But you also get, going back a little bit further, there's a great idea in the 17th century of Britain itself. There's a Phoenician power, sea-going empire and so on. And the trick there was that France was always identified with Rome, great territorial power. And so 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

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 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, it's 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 neighbours, 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. 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, an introduction to who the Phoenicians, who they actually were,

and how important they were in antiquity and 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. 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, 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 for other parts of the world are those Phoenicians who brought an awful lot besides wine and slaves to the West. 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've finally got you on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the ancients. Thank you very much for having me. Well, there you go. There was the brilliant Dr. Josephine Quinn

talking all the things, the Phoenicians, the Tyrians, the people of Biblos, 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 to 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

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