The Phoenicians

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Three thousand 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's

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 finally crafted pottery,

fine-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.

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 Queen, 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?

The people we call Phoenicians now were the people who lived in the ports of the Eastern

Mediterranean.

So what we 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're really what the 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, Tire, Siden, 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 almost kind of describes certain attributes of someone like, I think they're the word,

the Tarantine gets called later on for people 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 Phoenician

is a language very like Hebrew or even Arabic or in the ancient world, Aramaia, 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 in what we now call ancient Greek

cities spoke.

So I think to them, that's how they really, that's how these people seem so foreign to them.

That's why they can give them a kind of collective label because they sort of recognize the

type of person, sailors like themselves, city dwellers, people living city states, in fact,

and so on.

But they speak a really different language.

I mean, the actual name for Nichean, nobody's quite sure what it originally meant.

It can be, because of course it's a Greek name, so one thing that certainly was associated

with it in antiquity is the palm tree, the phoenix in Greek, but you know, the coast of the

Levant is by no means the only place in the Mediterranean to get palm trees.

So it seems like that's more of a kind of later association from the name, not it doesn't

explain the name.

Another idea is that another meaning of phoenix in Greek is a kind of red or sort of ready-ground

purpley color.

And one thing that these cities were very adept at, very early on, was producing a kind

of purple dye from a sea-stale, the remains of a sea-stale, have kind of squeezed them

for the dose, 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 profession, speciality of them.

But yeah, I think it becomes a very generic term for Eastern foreign trade a 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 plains outside

of the cities or where they very much kind of crammed up next to the coast.

What should we be thinking?

And then it's a good question that really crammed up is the answer, because if you think

about the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, the coast of the Levant, these are cities

like Beirut, would be another example, an ancient Venetian city that has kind of carried

on into the modern period.

You've actually got very little coastal plain before you're right up against mountains,

along most of this coast, not the whole way down, but for most of it.

And so actually these are not great agricultural cities.

I mean, every ancient city has to grow enough food to feed itself beyond what you can

get by imports and so on.

So it's not that 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 of 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 interest, the historian Herodotus fascinated by these people and

they're very big part of his stories of early Greece and so on, very lots of interaction,

settlement and sort of so on co-pokenspiracy 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, there's a Latin authors, we have preserved today

writing, these people are no longer really powerful.

So those cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, Tyre and Sidon and so on have kind of faded

over the course of the first millennium BCE and then their great Western colony of

Carthage is destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE.

So after that, you get a slightly different, it's a kind of heritage references to them.

There's still plenty of Phoenician speakers living in the Mediterranean, particularly the Southern

Mediterranean, North Africa and so on, but they are 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 to these enabors, because direct

neighbors, very close, speaking a language or dialects that were in many cases probably

mutually comprehensible with the big cities of the Hebrew Bible, sort of 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 to slave trading was clearly a big aspect,

certainly of Tyrian merchants.

They were moving people as well as nettles 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 Tyrian, my goodness, we'd love to have

more of ancient Tyrian than we do, but a great deal of it is still the city of the

modern, large, very large city of Tyrian.

There are some places like Carthage in particular that have become, and they're kind of getting

rebuilt now.

The 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 worrying 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 Phoenicians, 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, things like gravestones, those

are inscriptions, right?

You go to a cemetery then now or a graveyard, and you'll see, you know, a huge social

range of people and little facts about them and so on.

And it's really interesting, much more so often than the kind of people who are writing

the great literature of the day.

But the problem with this, you know, 10,000 plus inscriptions is that, you know, 9,990,

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 Venetian or claiming

to write about ancient Venetian myths and so on.

And that may well be true, but it's all kind of would be like people now writing about

the time of Shakespeare and so on, so it's just not quite the same thing, but without

having Shakespeare himself.

And there's the mystery here is that no one is quite sure why there's no Venetian 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 that just up the coast

to Ugrits, on the coast of Syria and the Bronze Age, the huge amounts of writing in a very

similar language to Venetian.

So for this kind of gap in the Venetian 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, 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, it's so dry, but further north, they don't survive.

And what we have from the Bronze Age, the Disadvant, is a thing's written in Cuneiform

script on clay tablets and then fired.

So they survive, not necessarily that that was the intention of firing them, but it's

the effect.

And so when people stop doing that, around a thousand BCE and they start writing on

Papyrus instead, often might think of that as a kind of step forwards, it's posted

of what we did, who is it right on paper, but actually it means it's much, much less likely

to survive.

So that's one thing, there may have been an incredible literature in Phoenician, and so

many, you know, factual accounts and histories and so on, that we just don't have anymore.

I mean, I have a different kind of theory about this, which is equally impossible to prove

or disprove, which is that in some cases people simply choose not to write things down.

And the Phoenicians, these Phoenician cities are the very interesting potentially problematic

relationship to the people around them in that they are just west of some pretty major

powers, whether we're talking about the great Mesopotamian Bronze Age kingdoms or later

the Persians, the Assyrians, I mean, very big, powerful agricultural empires who always

want to need to work with the people in these Phoenician cities in order to gain access

to the Mediterranean and their trading knowledge and so on, but the less they know about them,

the more they have to work with them rather than over them.

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. So 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 summarize, so the main cities

we should be thinking about, you know, it's a tire sidon.

Biblos is another very big one on that coast on the coast, 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, I mean, there are 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, Caddes, it's another big one even earlier, probably well, but 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, there's a, and indeed on the Portuguese coast, there are, so there's

sort of whole Mediterranean speckles, the sites that come from this tradition, if you like.

I mean, I would say, but I'm being a bit careful 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

settlements from the eastern Mediterranean. But in the kind of crazy way that ancient history is

getting updated, there's an amazing new study of ancient DNA was published in Nature last year

that showed 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 their founder 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 arenas, living in these cities. And essentially to ask, you know,

were they more left in time or more local? Like, is this a small colonial settlement or a big

colonial settlement? Dislike, you know, William the Conqueror or something that actually involves

an awful lot of settlement from abroad. And what they found, which is fascinating, completely

unexpected, was that the answer was, well, neither really, these cities are actually full of people

from all over the Mediterranean. Disillions, people from the Aegean, people, you know, and actually

ends, of course, some local people as well, particularly in North Africa, but not necessarily

majority, and almost no genetic signal from the wood 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 air.

Yes, a major spanner in the works of this idea of just lots of people from those cities just

going west at 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, to open her eyes and so on and that is certainly true to some

extent and particularly in Spain, there's been wonderful work done on all the new kinds of

army-eyed animals and so on who introduced in this period by people coming originally at least

from the Levant or some people coming. But this really suggests that that's not how even if that

was originally perhaps one idea or motivation, that's not how it worked out in the air.

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before we delve more into that kind of expansion and those settlements of further west and that

seafaring that key identity of these people. I'd like to focus on those those original cities

in the Levant a bit more because earlier Josephine you mentioned the Bronze Age and you mentioned

places like you Garrett. So can we link the rise that the rise to prominence of these cities

with the ever popular words set of words the Bronze Age collapse. Yes, yes,

I am very suspicious of the Bronze Age collapse. I was feeling 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 if I didn't look so so collapsing but anyway you're absolutely

right. So these cities go back well into the Bronze Age places like Tire and Sidon and we have

letters from them to Pharaoh in the 14th century so they are places that were existing as city

states really but as very small ones and very much under the power of bigger empires with the

Bronze Age so Egypt sometimes the Hittites and Anatolia and so on they're really kind of caught

between this sort of much bigger power games around them and they have to you can see in these letters

they have to tread extremely carefully you know sucking up to Pharaoh reporting on each other we

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 1200 BCE suddenly it kind of horizons open for these cities on

on the coast of the Mediterranean they've no longer got these overlords and of course that means

also they've 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 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 Tire to the

Straits of Gibraltar and 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 if somebody had be sailors based inside India who deal with their part of

the Mediterranean sailors based inside Cruse who deal with their part and stuff will move from one

side to the other but but not on the same ships and for the first time these ships seem to set out

from these the Mediterranean ports and go really quite suddenly all the way across the sea there's

very little evidence in the archaeological in the the sorts of objects that turn up in the furthest

away places are the earliest wow so yeah here at the earliest Tyrion pottery is found at

wellver 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 there's long been an assumption that the ways

its 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 other stops out but it's the other way around it seems that you go all

the way out of sight of land probably half the time and you get on the weather and and then it's

only when you've established that link and presumably established that it's worth going backwards

and forwards that you start to set up stops along the way and you know maintenance yards are in

our places and so on and Josephine I mean to say like a ship maybe for half a day also will go

beyond sight of land I mean it doesn't sound that impressive today but you need to remember back

then that was boozy 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

yeah because you can steer by the stars and so on but during the day I mean again depending

on the weather it really can be very difficult but you know people do do the Vikings of course

for another example of sea fairing 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 sort

about 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 the local populations there you know we

are people you want to trade with we've got these great things that we can we can exchange with you

so it's interesting they they the things that we know they bring and of course it depends a bit

on what remains in the archaeology are there's an awful lot of pottery which is very nice you know

lovely cups and bowls and so on but you can't imagine that people are going to go all that way

to sell some pots or give away some pots and you know that's just it's what tends to remain

you just you can't kill a pot as you can break into pieces but then you just have to put it back

together again two thousand years later it's really awesome so you've got to think why would they

doing this and there are other clues in terms not what's left directly behind but what changes so

wine making so we have the pots that that would have had wine in them of course most cases doesn't

survive anymore but we also have in the western Mediterranean vines have vines that actually make

drinkable wine for the first time and vineyard set out in a way that would actually you know work

so they're bringing not just things and goods they're bringing ideas and technologies as well

and to be honest all of this the pottery the wine all that kind of stuff is probably just the

the sort of social matter that smooths the way to the trade in metals because that's what it's not

what the Phoenicians are bringing to these places it's what they're taking away and what what you

get in the Atlantic is metals those mountains are just absolutely stuffed with minerals and metals

and in particular silver is a big draw in that part of the world and 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 BCE where we're 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 pottery also start to see a huge changes in the

mind much bigger much better technology for actually turning you know what what what comes out of

the mines themselves into something that you can use mold cell 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 that that one of the things that we

find out from the Hebrew Bible as a Tyrion's a 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 and

but it would actually make a lot of sense for them then to bring them across the Mediterranean to

actually work in places like Spain because I mean one of the kind of awful realities of the kind

of slave trading economies is that you want to move people as far away from home as possible you

want to put them in places where they don't know the language don't understand the systems and so on

where it's going to be hard for them to get away if you can kind of confine them on the coast that's

great because they don't have access to ships that there's nowhere for them to go so I think it makes

an awful lot of sense so again not something that can be proved to think that they're also bringing

human labor that can then be put to work particularly in these silver mines and other metal mines

so on I know it's probably not a resource that they would export because they needed

uh 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 center of their whole

system right and this is yeah this the cedars of Lebanon are still uh you know the kind of symbol

of modern Lebanon and how this is hugely important in the Phoenician story these cities particularly

perhaps bib losses is maybe most of all associated with this at an early stage so bib loss

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 the cedars

of bib loss 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 the area 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 merchants the merchant republics of later

centuries I mean how should we how are they socially structured well it's a really interesting question

and and one thing to say is that it varies that they're always set up fundamentally a city state

which is it's very broad category that counts for almost every ancient power in the Mediterranean

and medieval and and so on it's the norm rather than the exception within that you can have a great

deal of variety you know you can have oligarchies aristocracies democracies monarchies and and

probably all of the above are found in Phoenician speaking cities we know that the

eastern Mediterranean cities places like Tyre, Siden, 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 deemed to be founded by by these Phoenician speakers they tend to be republics and of course

that's often true of colonies you know anywhere in the world any time of history it's so it's rare

for settlers to go out and set themselves up under a king but it's not a

natural method of community formation from scratch I think they tend to be republics

and can we imagine that there was a lot of um especially in those original cities Tyre

sit on 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 a never

never a sort of political hole they do they they they they do cooperate sometimes

particular revolts against the Persians for instance you sometimes find cities working together

Tyre and Siden 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 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 where we don't we honestly don't know the the gory details there

and in the west as well they they they 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 but as a as a basic principle no they are

absolutely acting in competition more than together and Josephine I apologize because this is

almost well this is kind of two big questions in one with these various cities they say the ones

original ones and then of course the colonies as well but do we think they also shared the same

thank you very much for 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 west you can also differentiate further between the

dialects the different cities 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 tar and side and and what people are speaking

just down the coast in the cities of of kind of the Hebrew speaking cities it's probably you know

it's a spectrum it's not it's not too quite different languages so I would say that rather than

trying to cut that spectrum up anywhere rather a very high level say well these are all kind of

very similar north-westernatic languages everything would have been fairly comprehensible to each

other perhaps with some goodwill and effort or saying now each individual city who speak

north-westernatic languages should be treated as having their own individual language and perhaps

therefore identity and so on I think we can see it wasn't worrying too much about how it looks

in at each point in space we can see it in terms of that relationship between the languages these

people made sense to each other that doesn't mean they identified you know absolutely and completely

with each other but I think they made sense to each other and that that also goes for the gods

to 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 Taya has the god Melcart who's literally the milk cart the king of the city who also

it becomes quite an important god then in other Phoenician-speaking cities he's very important

in ancient cadres of Gadier in Phoenician but he's a sort of lesser god in places like Carthage or

even Biblos and so on a Biblos the main goddess is called the Lady of Biblos the Barla at Biblos

and she looks awfully like Ishtar actually and and also sometimes it's a bit like ISIS from Egypt

so do you get these there's a sort of shared pantheon where different different gods are top

of the pops in different cities but it's also shared with neighboring communities when later

Greek authors write about what they call Phoenician religion they include gods like Athena and so on

the great goddess of Athens she comes into the story she's given her city by the king of the

Phoenician gods elves on and and so there's there's a just ancient religion is a very porous

set of ideas essentially but again I think there is a kind of a greater density of shared

gods and ideas of gods in these Phoenician-speaking cities I mean I mean that porous nature of the

gods is fascinating we did an interview a few months ago now on in Anna from Severian times and then

of course Ishtar Aphrodite ISIS and then this goddess in Biblos as well once again you can see

those links together absolutely it's absolutely fascinating and when you were saying that

like 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

than 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 in the 21st century because

things like television podcasts radio mean that languages come together a lot more so as much

you do get of course local accents and so on some local vocabulary local I mean there are people

who 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 I found it easier to understand when I was

digging as a student in Italy where you really would have you know villages neighbouring villages

but on top of different hills where people really found it quite hard they certainly weren't

speaking Italian in any of these places and people found it quite hard to have lengthy conversations

with each other if they were just speaking the language of their own city so I've always been a

little bit suspicious of the idea of too easy mutual comprehensibility and having seen how places

in the relative 20th 20th century world you know really very close to each other can actually be

communication is not necessarily straightforward but but they did

they would have it would have been recognisably the same language type essentially

I don't make no measurement so I'll say the panchetta then I add the mushrooms large

gillic as you can't have too much room garlic pesto tomato paste

collaborate and chili season the taste order blue apron today

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what about customs then well 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 entire 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 case that there were some very distinctive things that people

entire and carthage do like or what I suppose the classic one is child sacrifice it kind of awful

aspect now as it seems now the 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 tire and and other places

and it's also the sanctuaries where this went on to the court of inscriptions are found in

sardinia and Sicily as well but not in Spain probably not on cypress 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

so I'd say that there are a cut I mean you could say the semi that's the most dramatic example but

you could say the same about a house architecture for instance or certain fashions and sculpture

that you can see so one of those would be the incredible sarcophagi stones sarcophagi 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 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

carfaginian furniture it's 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 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 what of localises them in some

ways to emphasize the connection so you could remember so it's not too far a stretch to perhaps

imagine yourself if you unless a caddis or carthage back in ancient times and they would both

have different stories about their you know the origins further east and the connections that

they're most proud of you know with these original cities though at the other end of the

Mediterranean do we think yeah exactly so so you know there's a good example so caddis has this

huge connection with this god melcart who is later and says another example of 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 melcart is clearly a god whereas Heracles is a kind of demi

god hero type figure but that's a really doesn't seem to matter it's like detail so you have this

god who has a huge temple at caddis sadly now lost but there are there's still some in the sea

from time to time make they find kind of sculptures 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

so that's sort of one example whereas a calf that we're doing is an idea is right in it if you

like kind of form or connections between caddis and tyre we don't actually know if it was in

facturians who founded caddis and honestly they probably didn't either but but that's a

kind of really big religious connection whereas in Carthage the story is a different one it is

also a story about tyre which is the biggest and most famous at the nichean city in the east so

most likely to be sending out settlers or having settlers leave from it also the of most obvious

place to attach a story to but the story there is of you know princess d'Ido who is a refugee

and escapes from her evil brother the king who's murdered her husband and she takes some of the

and senators with her and they go off to you know 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 that they do say later that they send back kind of gifts to the god of tyre

as well but he isn't he doesn't really become a big deal at Carthage itself for about 500 years

of the city's founded so you get this again different ways of relating to to what people

understand as their origins we're talking is it interesting for the question of identity as well

there's often an assumption identity has to be based in either some original identity ancestry

or in some sort of natural biological um 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 independent quite independent they remember their mother city

and the roots they have yeah but it's very much them creating mainly for trade but then establishing

connections with the local peoples and this amazing mixture of cultures you get as a result

it's I mean the Phoenicians get there first with their expansion and then the Greeks almost see

what they've done and do something very similar 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 come into contact so

Phoenicians are settling all around the Mediterranean so 10th 9th century Greek sailors start

through the same 8th century starting probably again with traders entrepreneurs and then kind of

settlers coming a bit later but the the kind of real boundary if you like is it the furthest

the the Greek the major Greek city that is furthest west is Missalia 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 Roman this is well before the rise of Rome as well which is what it's also so

fascinating about this Josephine I must ask about the alphabet uh did they create the modern alphabet

it was a simple answer is yes but what really so the alphabet's a really strange almost all

of human history people have chosen when they've chosen to write things down at all they've chosen

to write down syllables rather than sounds the alphabet is sounds right they should people chose

to write down syllables and even if you I'll say if you just sound the alphabet out say ABCD

these are syllables this answer we can't even say the alphabet in alphabetic concept so it's it's

really weird and almost all alphabets in use today go back to the alphabet that is used in these

Venetian cities which kind of extraordinary really it's 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 but this this

alphabet emerges in the Levant in these the Mediterranean it's first used to write down

levantine languages so the precursors of the Phoenician language and the Hebrew language and Aramaic

and so on probably around 2000 BCE a little bit of a suggestion that there might be stuff even

earlier than that but it's 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

2019 1800 BCE you're beginning to get definite alphabetic signs that you know are writing down

the precursor of the Phoenician language but you don't get them in in in Phoenicia this is what's

absolutely fascinating to me you get them in Egypt and it is it is people from the Levant workers

of some kind in Egypt there's a lot of them at the Royal Turquoise mines in Sinai whether these are

mine workers or managers well ever they're people being brought south from the Levant to Sinai

in order to work in these mines you also get a bit further south in some areas that are used by

the army quite a lot so clearly travelers 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 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 taught 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 a too much background noise you need to actually write it down so that they'll

really your own god will notice and see like how this is how this being like the sacred writing

that you're only getting temples exactly and they're in the same temples and what so it was

amazing is that when they're using this language I don't think it's just coincidence that we've

get the first examples in Egypt that actually these are the second or third examples or something

because every letter of the Phoenician alphabet that Levantine alphabet which means pretty much

every letter of the alphabet that you and I use they comes originally from an Egyptian hieroglyph

has no relation to what these hieroglyphs actually mean how best said they're sometimes used

back to front or upside down but it's they're clearly writing and so they're an appropriate tool

to adopt to do your own different kind of writing that's going to be an Egyptian hieroglyphs

the largely syllabit where they're not describing whole words and and so the to adapt them to the

alphabet to a phonetic system is it's it's it's such a leap of the imagination. It really is

what an amazing story and what a sound bite there as well I must admit and also it's it's

fascinated because we did kuneiform recently and hearing about the origins of kuneiform may well

be linked to like writing stuff down for trade and administration it's fascinating to think that

actually maybe the origins of our the alphabet today in the time of the Phoenicians was actually

maybe primarily to do with religion and that rather than with the trade that you might think with

the expansion of that. Yeah I think it's social I mean it is interesting because of course the

when and 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 that writing down a kind of early form of Greek but then there is no

writing in the Aegean for 400 years maybe something like that and then you start to get it again and

it's in a completely different system it's this alphabetic system that is is the Phoenician alphabet

they recycle some of the sort of letters that seem a bit strange to them the sound that they don't

make in their language they recycle them for vowels which aren't really needed in what

thematic languages in general but otherwise it's the same alphabet but that is definitely in a

trading context that the first places that you get these Greek inscriptions in the Mediterranean

are the big trading ports but again you get them in sanctuaries or this is a Greek thing you get them

in the kinds of pottery you use for parties which again may have something to do with trade but

sort of you know writing down little drinking songs it's really it's a really strange way because

it's great it's great tradition if the spread of the modern alphabet is but the spread of the

alphabet is linked to booze ups and there's also some really kind of dirty graffiti about drinking

and associated amusements in early alphabetic inscriptions in Greece very very carefully worded

there Josephine I can ask so many more questions I'm afraid we don't know too much our boy

Alexander the Great and the wonderfully named Abdalonimus of Sidon the garden 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

antiquies journals that that they must have done because how else would plot his cream of

Britain here's designed for these long ship journeys off the creamers bullet proof really

so the answer is there's no proof of it there's no reason they have to there were certainly

connections all the way up and down the Atlantic coast if Phoenicians because are operational even if

it's just in what's now you know Morocco and Spain and Portugal they would have their their

stuff they would have had contacts knowledge and so on going up the coast to Britain and Ireland

on the other hand there's no reason why they shouldn't have done particularly it's not

it's not by any means impossible navigationally in fact you know other people were doing something

similar whether they did it in sailing ships with the another question there's no proof of it

but it's not it's not an absurd idea it's enough 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 get they probably did actually because there are these stories stories

is not quite the right one historical reports of pharaohs sending ships out it says in one

particular pharaoh censorship 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 you know the Cape of

Good Hope and in 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 the say the 6th century BCE what a TV show what

a film that would be but I guess you know 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

the Biblos, Tio, Carthage and the like will ultimately decline I mean their legacy has endured to

the present day with the word Venetian well it's been just such a fertile ground for identity

since I don't think the ancient Venetians have much of a common identity of any but but it's been

a really useful idea for identities kind of ever since I mean the one very obvious example is in

modern Lebanon in 20th century Lebanon where the idea of being Venetian 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 20th century that was happening there were similar movements in Egypt and that it was

the fascinating moment in kind of self-invention in in this period when the nation state is a relatively

recent idea they're being made up by the old colonial powers all over the place some people

sometimes kind of taking the opportunity to make make their own kind of interventions in that

and in Lebanon it was 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 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 when that's literally as a

kind of Phoenician colony in some cases I've just you know inspired by Phoenician 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 robe so that Ireland can be Phoenician

wow yeah it's good there's a lot a lot of fun interpretation of archaeological features of

Ireland along those lines in 18th century we're Josephine I know we've just scratched the surface

I know we could talk so much more but what a fascinating chat this has been giving a great

overview and introduction to who the Phoenicians who they actually were and how important they

were in antiquity and they're 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 book published book in 2018 called in search of the Phoenicians

which was all about this kind of mystery of whether they knew they were Phoenicians or not

whether they how that actually played out in terms of identity and both in the ancient and

modern world so 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 the 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 will leave it on that note Josephine this has been absolutely wonderful it just

goes 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 that people who have biblos have sit on 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

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hey it's howie mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my how we do it gaming

team take on gilly de king and wallow 267's million dollars gaming in an epic global gaming league

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dot com everybody games

you