Phoenicia

Phoenicia was an ancient civilization in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal plain of what is now Lebanon and Syria. Phoenician civilization was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread right across the Mediterranean during the first millennium BC. Though ancient boundaries of such city-centered cultures fluctuated, the city of Tyre seems to have been the southernmost. Sarepta between Sidon and Tyre, is the most thoroughly excavated city of the Phoenician homeland Although the people of the region called themselves the Canaani or Kenaani, the name Phoenicia became common thanks to the Greeks who called them the Phoiniki - Φοινίκη (Phoiníkē; see also List of traditional Greek place names); the Greek word for Phoenician was synonymous with the colour purple/red or crimson, ?????? (phoinix), through its close association with the famous dye Tyrian purple (cf also Phoenix). The dye was used in ancient textile trade, and highly desired. The Phoenicians became known as the 'Purple People'.

Persian and Hellenistic Phoenicia

Information on Phoenician cities and their hinterlands under the Achaemenid Persians is sparse. The famous event is the revolt of Sidon against Achaemenid rule in 345 BC and its destruction, dramatically (perhaps too dramatically) described by Diodorus Siculus. The arrival of Alexander the Great in 333 – 332 BC is the main turning point, for Hellenistic Phoenicia lost its influential mercantile role, and the distinctive culture of its cities was Hellenized under Alexander and his Macedonian successors. The responses of the individual Phoenician cities to Alexander's conquest of Persia varied: the ruler of Aradus submitted; the king of Sidon was overthrown (perhaps by internal plotters who valued the city more than their king). Tyre resisted with the most energy. It was captured after a prolonged siege, one of the most famous sieges in Antiquity (see Siege of Tyre), and Alexander was exceptionally harsh. He executed 2000 of the leading citizens, but maintained the king in power. A popular king who owed everything to Alexander, made for a more secure city than a deeply-rooted local oligarchy. If Tyre was meant to set an example, it was effective: the Phoenician resistance was utterly broken, and no Phoenician city thereafter seems to have resisted occupation. In the following decades, shifting frontiers between Ptolemaic armies, and Antigonid or Seleucid forces, required some flexible diplomacy and alacrity in accepting a new alliance. This is the period when the cult of Tyche, goddess of Fortune, reached a prominence it had never enjoyed before.

Related Topics:
345 BC - Diodorus Siculus - Alexander the Great - 333 - 332 BC - Siege of Tyre - Tyche

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In 287 – 225 BC, after decades of meaningless violence and small empty victories that simply ravaged the countryside, the Ptolemies regained some stabilized control of the cities (except for Aradus), and the last of the old Phoenician city-kings disappeared. In their new forms, the cities were scarcely different from the Greek cities interspersed along the coastal plain - all nominal republics with a very limited suffrage, and autonomy that was formal and local, while they were ruled from a distance by a great king at Alexandria. The center of Phoenician power had shifted westward to the Tyrian colony of Carthage, that had not merely gained its independence, but had become a major power in the Western Mediterranean in its own right. At the beginning of the 2nd century BC, the Seleucid monarchy had finally reasserted its primacy on the former Phoenician coast, but the last Seleucid kings' local power was increasingly a fiction, as the cities, now thoroughly Hellenistic, regained local independence.

Related Topics:
287 - 225 BC - Carthage - 2nd century BC

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