A bronze jug in the Phoenician style
Phoenician-style ewer, ca. 7th–6th century BCE
Marked Tyre

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Phoenicians

From city-states on the coast of what is now Lebanon, Phoenician sailors traded across the Mediterranean, founded Carthage and Cádiz, sold purple dye and cedar wood, and spread their alphabet.

Place
Tyre · Sidon · Byblos · Carthage · Gadir (Cádiz)The Middle East, Africa, Europe
Laid out as
A routeA road, a sea lane or a trade network, followed stop by stop.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. Tyre
  2. Sidon
  3. Byblos
  4. Carthage
  5. Gadir (Cádiz)
  1. ITyre, Sidon and Byblos
  2. IIPurple from sea snails
  3. IIICedar for kings
  4. IVWest to Carthage and Gadir
  5. VThe alphabet travels
  6. VIDid they sail round Africa?

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Hiram of Tyre
  • Elissa (Dido, in legend)

Objects

  • Murex shells
  • Ivories from Nimrud
  • Phoenician inscriptions

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1200 BC to 332 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?