Ep. 022 – Rise of the Phoenicians

The Phoenicians have finally arrived on the historical stage, at least as our humble podcast is concerned. In today's episode, we look at their place in the post-Bronze Age world, along with the rise of the island city of Tyre. The Phoenicians would create a widespread maritime network, leading to their recognition as the preeminent ancient maritime navigators and sailors. This all fell into place after King Hiram I helped Tyre rise to power through an alliance with Israel, after which they founded the first Phoenician colony at Kition on the island of Cyprus. Join us for the first focused look at the Phoenicians.

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Episode Transcript

In Episode 021 we looked at the “Balkanization” of the Near East in the decades following the Bronze Age Collapse. We discussed how the Phoenician cities fit into that process, and how the result by 1100 to 1050 BCE was that the Phoenician cities had withstood the changes and been sandwiched between the Neo-Hittite kingdoms to their north and the shaken up area to the south that saw the remnants of the Sea Peoples take up residence, along with the Hebrew tribes and others.

That’s merely the stage upon which the events of the early Iron Age began to play out. Today I’d like to start getting into a bit more detail about the era’s maritime history. No people group from this era is more synonymous with sailing and maritime matters than are the Phoenicians, so let’s now turn the focus in their direction and see if we can’t get to know them a little bit better.

Geographically speaking, it’s fairly apparent why they became the maritime culture that the ancients regarded them to be and that we still remember them as today. The “sandwich” effect that I mentioned a moment ago left them with a narrow strip of land within which the Phoenician cultural bases stood, the major cities being Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon, among others. Herodotus mentions these cities repeatedly and also connects the name Syria with the Phoenicians, part of the area they occupied later coming to be called Syria, the other part Lebanon. If you look at a map to see this area, you’ll notice immediately that it is narrow and that the long, vertical border to the east butts up against mountains and a desert. It’s the opposite border that is important to us though, the western border where the Phoenician port cities were dotted along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

As we saw last time, the major Phoenician cities had been around for thousands of years before 1100 BCE, which is a mind boggling thing to consider deeply. Byblos is seen by many as one of the oldest continuously occupied cities on earth, and Sidon also seems to have had prehistoric roots. In modern common reference to Phoenicia, you often hear the names Tyre & Sidon in conjunction, almost to the point that it seems to be a single unit formed of two cities. They became closely related after Tyre grew so powerful that it practically controlled Sidon, but initially they were just two power centers among several that are considered to have been Phoenician. The rise of Tyre will be a topic we consider more closely toward the end of today’s episode.

Now though, as we move into the story of the Phoenician people that occupy the history books, I wanted to make it clear that although I’ll refer to the Phoenicians on many occasions by that overarching name that describes their culture, they were really similar to the Mycenaeans in terms of their societal and cultural structure. We’d be on pretty firm ground to call Phoenicia a group of city-states, held together by a common culture, religion, and relative location. Beyond those commonalities, the Phoenicians did not view themselves as a cohesive political unit, no, there was in fact a good measure of competition between and among the various cities. Each city operated as a sovereign state, the term city-state will work from here on out, with each city or region ruled by a local king or leader. In a sense it is similar to the way in which the Greek city-states existed, but it’s also fair to say that the Greek cities had much more animosity between them at times.

The bottom line here is that geography, timing, and other factors all added up to a Phoenician culture that was at once a loose group of autonomous city-states, while simultaneously being a region that operated in a similar maritime merchant fashion on the sea. Braudel tells us that each Phoenician port city “saw itself as an autonomous world,” but that “having sited themselves on easily defended headlands or islands, they turned their backs on their mountainous hinterland” and faced the sea. Will Durant echoes that view by saying that “the mountains compelled them to live on the water.”

Their closest relationship may even have been on the water rather than on land. While the cities were autonomous then, I think that part of the reason that western academia has lumped the Phoenician city-states together is that for a long time, their place in the western view of history came by way of the Greek historians who were themselves far removed from the relevant time and place. Now I realize that I’m even further removed in both aspects there, but I hope that I can make an effort to present the Phoenicians in the terms in which they thought about themselves. That includes a effort to discern the reasons why the Greeks painted them in the light that they did, so here goes nothing.

The most revealing point in this aside is that the term by which we call these maritime traders, the word “Phoenician,” is itself a Greek invention. We know that the various Phoenician cities, though semi-autonomous, recognized that they shared an ethnic identity as Canaanites. So where did the term “Phoenician” come from then? That brings us to another reason why the Phoenicians stick out in modern memory, the color purple. And no, not the novel or the film: the actual hue purple.

Moving on then, I’m sure this topic will come up again in our Season 2 episodes, but what my young mind absorbed regarding the Phoenicians is what I would imagine that many modern minds have also absorbed if the school textbooks are where the study stopped. I remember being told that the Phoenicians were important because they invented the alphabet that later made its way to Greece, but also because they took the dye of sea creature that lived in the murex shell and used it to create the luxury fabrics of ancient times, garments and cloth dyed a deep purple. The Greek word for this color was phoinix, and as the Greeks equated these Levantine merchants with their purple dye, in the Greek mind they became the Phoinikes. Obviously this term in the English became Phoenicians, and as you can see, the very name we call these people today tells us more about how the Greeks viewed them than it does about how they viewed themselves or how the whole ancient world viewed them. That is, I think, okay; one term or another had to win out, that’s just reality, but that shouldn’t discourage us from attempting to get a deeper understanding of the role they played during the height of their influence.

In our bid to get that deeper understanding, a good jumping-off-point concerns the myths around the origins of Tyre; and, as is the case with most ancient myths, it all depends on who you ask. Herodotus has his version, telling us that Tyre was founded 2,300 years before he visited that city himself, so around the year 2750 BCE.

Another version of this myth was told by a much more obscure ancient writer, a Hellenized Egyptian named Nonnus of Panopolis. We know next to nothing about the man or his life, other than that he lived and wrote in the late 4th century CE, and that his legacy is the Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic concerning the life of Dionysus, his expedition to India, and his triumphant return to the west. This epic poem is actually the longest surviving poem from antiquity; at 48-books it is as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and even then it appears to be incomplete in its remaining forms. Nonnus frames his myth of Tyre’s founding within the journey of Dionysus. In the story, Dionysus stops in Tyre to admire the city’s beauty and to pay homage to a Greek hero who had been born in the Phoenician city. To make a long story short, Dionysus runs into the god Heracles, a Hellenized version of the Tyrian god Melqart, and asks him this question: “What god built this city in the form of a continent and the image of an island? Who mingled island with mainland and bound them together with mother sea?”

To again make the responding long story short, Heracles tells Dionysus the myth of the Ambrosian stones that floated freely on the Mediterranean, and how one day the god Melqart imparted the land-bound Tyrian ancestors with the knowledge to be able to build the first ship, Nonnus refers to it as a “chariot of the sea.” The newly minted mariners sailed the first ship to the Ambrosian stones, sacrificed its divine eagle to Zeus, and thereby broke the spell over the Ambrosian stones, anchoring them to the seabed in the location that became Tyre. Tyre was originally built on an island just off the Lebanese shore, making it the perfect location for a future port city.

For me, it’s significant to see that the Tyrians themselves viewed their god, the one who founded their city, as the same being who imparted them with the knowledge needed to construct the first ship. As far as that goes and in order to draw any conclusions about the Phoenician self-image, we unfortunately do have assume that the myth written down by Nonnus was some remaining form of the myth that was cooked up by the Phoenicians themselves. For being the progenitors of the first wide-scale phonetic alphabet, the Phoenicians didn’t write a lot about themselves. We have some letters from Phoenician cities amongst the Amarna Letters, but they date to an earlier period and don’t tell us about Phoenician culture really. 

No, as will be a recurring theme in our look at Phoenicia and their exploits, the surrounding cultures wrote down what they thought about their seafaring neighbors, but the Phoenicians set down very little about themselves. So now that we’ve gotten the Phoenician mythos in at the outset, let’s see what some later Greek historians had to say about Phoenician accomplishments and then we’ll zoom in to see why Tyre became powerful and how things progressed from there.

It’s ironic that the Phoenicians are seen as the impetus for the eventual widespread adoption of writing but they didn’t place any emphasis on writing things down about themselves. Now, although I’d love to expound on the importance of the Phoenician contribution to the existence of written language, this is not really the right podcast for such an examination. Perhaps it is enough to say that a main center of the phonetic alphabet’s development was Byblos, spelled “b-y-b-l-o-s,” and the Greek word for book was also biblos, spelled “b-i-b-l-o-s.”

Something I can speak to in more depth is the Phoenician contribution to navigation. Strabo, in his Geography, mentions the Phoenicians right off the bat in connection with the art of navigation by the constellations, an art that unlocked the ability to navigate on the open sea. He remarks that until after the time of Homer, the Greeks navigated only by the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, as it is a useful indication of true north. Strabo confesses, however, that it was the Phoenicians who introduced the Greeks to navigation by Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, and most significantly, the constellation that contains Polaris, the North Star and the cornerstone of celestial navigation since the Phoenicians popularized its utility. Until the Latin name Ursa Minor was popularized in Ptolemy’s Almagest, the ancients had acknowledged the Phoenician contribution by calling the constellation Phoinike or Ursa Phoenicia. Even the Greeks themselves acknowledged the Phoenician achievement, as is commemorated in this stanza from the Phaenomena by the Greek poet Aratus:

“Now the one men call by name Cynosura (Ursa Minor) and the other Helice (Ursa Major). It is by Helice that the Achaeans on the sea divine which way to steer their ships, but in the other (Ursa Minor) the Phoenicians put their trust when they cross the sea. But Helice (Ursa Major) appearing large at earliest night, is bright and easy to mark; but the other is small, yet better for sailors: for in a smaller orbit wheel all her stars. By her guidance, then, the men of Sidon (Phoenicians) steer the straightest course…”

Even Pliny in his Natural History acknowledges the Greek debt to the Phoenicians, saying simply: “We are indebted to the Phœnicians for the first observation of the stars in navigation.”

They were the first great navigators of the ancient world, an ability that was directly connected with the reputation that they assumed amongst their contemporaries, but also amongst the later Greek and Roman chroniclers of history. Even among their contemporaries, their neighbors, the Phoenicians were viewed as industrious maritime merchants, a reputation that did indeed carry down through to this day. As we mentioned early on today, their industry and their maritime mindedness were both products of their geographic location and their relative lack of resources because of the mountainous surroundings. 

The unfortunate reality of the historical and archaeological record is that we won’t be able to be as detailed with the Phoenicians as we’ve had the luxury to be with some of the other cultures we’ve covered to date. Be that as it may, we do have some detail regarding the rise of Tyre and the king who is generally credited with doing much to aid that rise, a king named Hiram I.

Just to reiterate here, Byblos and Sidon were the greater Phoenician cities prior to the Late Bronze Age Collapse, though of course, the inhabitants of those cities aren’t called Phoenicians in reference to those periods. They survived the collapse and maintained their strength for a while, but in time the smaller, weaker city of Tyre began to flourish thanks to the leadership of two kings, Abibaal and his son Hiram. Much of what we know regarding Hiram survives in the annals of the Hebrew kings, what we now call the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. A rough date for the ascension of Hiram and what we’ll now discuss is around 1000 BCE, give or take a few decades. It was in this period that the Jewish kingdom also came into its own, with the unification of Judah and Israel into one kingdom under a central figure of Jewish history, King David. Being that the Jewish kingdom and the Phoenician port cities were essentially neighbors in the Levant, it would appear that both parties were amenable to an alliance. 

By pursuing an alliance with King David, Hiram proves to be a strategically minded king, as we’ll flesh out here. And wouldn’t you know it, we can’t mention Hiram’s trade with David without a reference to the ever-present ‘cedars of Lebanon.” In the historic-sounding King James translation, 2 Samuel 5:11 says: “And Hiram king of Tyre sent messengers to David, and cedar trees, and carpenters, and masons: and they built David a house.” This was merely groundwork for Hiram, because when David died and was succeeded by his son Solomon, Hiram continued to seek an alliance. Strategically, such an alliance would make sense for Tyre, it was a city on the coast with a small measure of natural resources. It had open access to the Mediterranean, but any outlet eastward was closed to them without the cooperation of an inland power, a power like the Hebrews and become by Solomon’s ascension around the year 960 BCE.

Josephus and his Antiquities of the Jews is really the main source for what survives regarding the alliance between Hiram and Solomon in Tyre and Jerusalem. After expounding on the wisdom and prosperity of King Solomon (including the infamous “cut the baby in two story”), Josephus then tells us that Hiram and Solomon struck up a deal. King David had intended to build a temple in Jerusalem, but according to Solomon, his numerous wars and expeditions prevented that from ever materializing. Solomon wishes to fulfill his father’s intentions and sees Hiram’s famous cedar wood supply as a perfect source of building material. Solomon wrote to Hiram, saying: “I desire thee to send some of thy subjects with mine to Mount Lebanon to cut down timber, for the Sidonians are more skillful than our people in cutting of wood. As for wages to the hewers of wood, I will pay whatsoever price thou shalt determine.”

Hiram’s reply indicates a bit that he sees this alliance as being of long-term benefit, so he naturally demurs to Solomon as being more powerful. He says:

“It is fit to bless God that he hath committed thy father's government to thee, who art a wise man, and endowed with all virtues. As for myself, I rejoice at the condition thou art in, and will be subservient to thee in all that thou sendest to me about; for when by my subjects I have cut down many and large trees of cedar and cypress wood, I will send them to sea, and will order my subjects to make floats of them, and to sail to what place soever of thy country thou shalt desire, and leave them there, after which thy subjects may carry them to Jerusalem. But do thou take care to procure us corn for this timber, which we stand in need of, because we inhabit in an island.”

Hiram pays Solomon great lip service, but he also recognizes that Tyre can benefit by having friends on the inland border. Likewise, Solomon must feel that friends with access to the sea would be worth having, so the alliance falls into place quite neatly. Josephus says that the Hebrews sent large quantities of wheat and wine up to Tyre every year and that “the friendship between Hiram and Solomon hereby increased more and more; and they swore to continue it for ever.”

Nothing lasts forever, as they say, but this particular alliance seems to have continued strong for another few decades, at least. Josephus goes on to tell how Solomon gifted a few entire cities to Hiram, cities or settlements in northern Israel that Solomon may have described a bit too generously. Apparently, when Hiram finally laid eyes on his gift cities he found them displeasing enough to return them to Solomon with word that he didn’t like them. Supposedly the area from that point forward came to be called Cabul, which in the Phoenician language meant what does not please. 

Despite Hiram’s “no-thank you” to Solomon, the alliance remained strong thanks to the two highly desirable commodities that the Tyrians had to offer: the dye of the murex shell, prized by royalty and wealth throughout the near east and western Asia, along with the sturdy cedar wood of the Levantine mountains, useful for building and ship construction. Thus, as historian David Abulafia tells us in his tome about the Mediterranean Sea: “Tyre and its neighbors did not flourish simply as intermediaries between Asia and Europe. They had something of their own to offer.” In my view, we could add here a third thing to the Phoenician offering menu, something that’s more of a service than it is a good, but something that is just as synonymous with the Phoenician legacy as were the first two. 

That service was the Phoenician skill as navigators, sailors, shipbuilders, and merchants, and it’s a skill or service that also found a place in the Tyre-Jerusalem alliance. Josephus again, speaking of Solomon, said that even after Hiram’s decline of the gift cities, they continued to work together. He wrote: “Moreover, the king built many ships in the Egyptian Bay of the Red Sea, in a certain place called Ezion-geber: it is now called Berenice, and is not far from the city Eloth. This country belonged formerly to the Jews, and became useful for shipping from the donations of Hiram king of Tyre; for he sent a sufficient number of men thither for pilots, and such as were skillful in navigation, to whom Solomon gave this command: That they should go along with his own stewards to the land that was of old called Ophir, but now the Aurea Chersonesus, which belongs to India, to fetch him gold. And when they had gathered four hundred talents together, they returned to the king again.”

Whether or not the Jews ever actually held territory in the south of Egypt on the Red Sea, it’s not far fetched to think that they took advantage of the Phoenician navigation skills to open up trade routes on the Red Sea. The land called Ophir, where Josephus and Jewish tradition holds that Solomon obtained gold and silver and other precious items, Ophir is comparable to the land of Punt in Egyptian tradition. It seems to have been an actual place where the Jews obtained gold, but today no one knows where that place would have been.

As with Punt, many theories exist: some say it was a wealthy land on the African coast of the Red Sea, perhaps modern-day Zimbabwe or Ethiopia. Others take Josephus at his word and conclude that it was somewhere nearer to India and the east. H. Rider Haggard places it in South Africa as the site of King Solomon’s Mines, in the novel of the same name, a novel that’s definitely worth reading by the way, even if it’s historically untenable. The Allan Quartermain stories were a highlight of my childhood, I must confess. Ultimately, when it comes to the land of Ophir, we don’t know and we may never know, but the underlying revelation that the Phoenicians provided their services as navigators and pilots is an important one, and this is not the only example of that service being provided. Indeed, as we move forward in history now, listen for just how often Phoenician sailors and navigators were pressed into service by their more powerful neighbors, willingly so or not.

That comes a bit later in the Phoenician story though. Before we get there, we should briefly discuss the other building blocks that were assembled by the Phoenicians, blocks that together allowed the Phoenicians to establish the first trade network to cover the entirety of the Mediterranean Sea. We’ve seen how their navigational skills were integral, their use of the Pole Star giving them the ability to sail out of sight of land. That’s all nice and well, but without the ships necessary to transport goods around a maritime trading network, navigational skills are a bit useless. Such abilities and capabilities develop hand-in-hand though, so it’s no surprise that the Phoenicians managed to upgrade the already well-built ships of their Levantine predecessors.

Ship-building in the region goes back far before recorded history, we saw from many Egyptian depictions of Syrian merchants how their ships were more along the lines of a traditional ship as we think of it, not like the sewn-plank ships down in Egypt. The Uluburun merchant ship wreck is a good example of the Levantine merchant ship as it existed from the time before we call the area’s descendants by the term Phoenician.  The Phoenicians simply seem to have took this style of ship and made it bigger, and as bitumen was prevalent in the region just as it was with the Sumerian boaters you may recall from our inaugural episode, the Phoenicians had all the natural resources necessary to build large, sturdy, waterproofed seafaring ships whenever they wanted. 

We don’t have many depictions of boats from before the 8th century BCE when it comes to the Phoenician cities, but we can get a glimpse of the reputation that the Phoenician ships carried. The Greek word for the merchant ships of Tyre and Sidon was the word gauloi, and seeing as how this word also later came to assume a meaning related to the shape of a bathtub, we can see that the early Phoenician merchant ships must have been deep-hulled and steep sided, the perfect shape with which to maximize storage capacity, which is, in turn, a must-have quality for a merchant ship. It would seem that the Phoenician merchant ships were a spin on the Mycenaean galley idea as well.

There is no one perfect example to demonstrate all of these qualities in unison, but piecing together the Bronze Age evidence of Syrian merchant ships and the later evidence of Phoenician ships from the 8th century BCE and later, we know that the large gauloi ships were also fast, thanks to the addition of oarsmen who would have been useful, if not necessary, in navigating the rocky, windswept coasts of the Aegean in particular. Ultimately, the Phoenician merchant ships were quite similar to the Mycenaean galleys that developed in the Late Bronze Age, albeit with deeper hulls. The difference is that where the Mycenaeans were decimated during the collapse, the Phoenicians remained virtually unharmed, able to continue the maritime innovation and expansion of their trade network.

The Phoenician trade network has become their hallmark in historical tradition. According to legend they had established colonies as far west as Cadiz, Spain, by as early as 1100 BCE. Hard archaeology show that this is much too early a date for expansion so far westward. However, by the early 9th century BCE, the Phoenician cities had established colonies around the near east, something which isn’t altogether surprising really. The Mycenaeans had done the same in their time, and with their access to ships and their navigational prowess, the Phoenicians were simply taking up the mantle of near east trading leadership. Phoenician outposts in Asia Minor are evident, as are settlements on Cyprus and along the Levantine coast even outside the main concentration of major cities like Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. 

The establishment rate of these outposts appears to have undergone serious acceleration at about the same time that Tyre rose to prominence, during and directly following the reign of Hiram, so at around 950 BCE and following. I should perhaps clarify that these trade outposts didn’t yet rise to a level deserving of the name ‘colony.’ Initially, the Phoenician practice was to simply set up an enclave within the city or territory that was a trade destination for the Phoenician goods. Richard Miles cites the archaeological work of modern times to explain that these enclaves eventually evolved into more official relationships, he points to the existence of Phoenician perfume bottling factories on Crete, Rhodes, and Cos, all three Greek islands.

With the rise of Tyre, the Tyrian outlook began to change, with the rest of the Phoenician cities following suit in good time. We’ve seen on several occasions in our look at the Bronze Age how the island of Cyprus was a trade center for proto-phoenician merchants from the Levant, as well as for the Mycenaeans. It follows quite logically then that the first proper Phoenician colony would have popped up on the island. Cyprus was a rich source of copper and that metal seems to have been the draw for the Tyrian colonists. The city on the southern coast of Cyprus was called Kition and had originally been established by the Mycenaeans who were also drawn to the area by the copper deposits. We know what befell the Mycenaeans, and the city saw a period of sharp decline and near disuse for several centuries. With the rise of Tyre, however, the site became a Phoenician colony, settled not to serve as a trading enclave within an already established center, but instead to serve as a wholly Tyrian settlement. Copper was the main goal for them at Kition, but we’ll see next time how their far-flung colonization was undertaken for many and various reasons. 

The thing that allows us to call Kition a true colony is that it was treated as sovereign territory of the mother city, Tyre. A governor in the city reported directly to Hiram and the arrangement continued down to the next king and governor. A remnant of inhabitants had remained in Kition and had been subjected to Tyrian rule, so it’s also interesting to note the fact that when they attempted to rise up, Hiram sent in troops to quell the rebellion. This is, I would say, another good evidence that the city was seen by Tyre as a colony to be held on to and ruled rather than as a mere trading outpost in the territory of another country. There were elements of religious influence at play in Kition as well, and though such elements interest me personally, I will simply point you to the Miles book on Carthage if you are curious there. This is the Maritime History Podcast still, and I have found myself wandering a bit far afield in my research from time to time, please do forgive me.

This discussion of Kition and the first true Tyrian colony, the first in a very long line as we’ll discuss next time, but this topic brings us to a good closing point today. You see, it’s certainly possible that as the Iron Age world developed the Phoenicians may have begun a colony-building enterprise eventually regardless of the geo-political issues at play. However, as we look back on the factors that were at play during that time period and in that area of the globe, a major factor that pushed the Phoenicians to colonize seems to have been outside pressure from powerful empires east of the Phoenician coast. 

Between the reign of Hiram, which ended around 950 BCE, Tyre and the other Phoenician cities had been busy about the merchanting business in the eastern portion of the Mediterranean. They’d begun establishing colonies like Kition, but none further west than Anatolia, which is not altogether surprising. They had stable trade networks in place between themselves and Egypt, along with Cyprus, the Anatolian coast, and probably areas of the Aegean as well. Last episode’s Report of Wenamun showed us that Egyptian trade had dipped in the years between 1100 BCE and 950 or so, but during and after Hiram’s reign, this appears to have reversed course.

We’ll make our last stop today in Tyre in the first decades of the ninth century BCE, the year 880, give or take. The King of Tyre is Ithobaal I, and though his name itself doesn’t ring many bells in our minds today, his daughter’s name tends to ring bells. Ithobaal’s daughter was named Jezebel, and the Tyre-Israel alliance was still holding together over a century after it began, as evidenced by the Old Testament stories of the evil Queen Jezebel and her marriage to Israel’s King Ahab. Ithobaal and the resurgence of Egypt here is important because it was during Ithobaal’s reign that the second of Tyre’s two famous harbors was supposedly built. Tyre was famous for the man-made harbors that allowed it to become a trade power, one to the north and one to the south of the city. The northern harbor had helped Tyre eclipse Byblos and Sidon as the preeminent Phoenician city, but the construction of this second harbor would up the Tyrian game so to speak, and it would play a role in their colonization efforts. 

The harbor came to be called the “Egyptian” harbor, sitting on Tyre’s southern side, facing the land of the pharaohs. You see, Egypt had regained a semblance of it’s former strength, a strength that in the eyes of the Phoenician merchants meant a new trade partner. Tyre minted a new alliance with Egypt round about 875 BCE, thereby reestablishing large-scale trade with Egypt.

The culmination of Egypt’s rise back to power was a good opportunity for the Phoenicians. The only problem was that Egypt was not the only old power to return to form during the reign of Ithobaal I. The Old and Middle Assyrian empires were not shy of warfare by any means, but the Neo-Assyrian Empire that arose following the Bronze Age Collapse was infamously reputed to be an empire of cruelty, even barbarism in the eyes of some historians. Certainly listen to the most recent episodes from Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast to get a comprehensive feel for the standard operating procedure of the near eastern empire during this period. 

The bottom line for us is that, as Braudel writes: “In order to survive, Assyria had to stamp out those it conquered, crippling them with taxes or deporting entire populations, bringing them into its own territory where, in days to come, their large numbers would make them a permanent threat.” Entire histories have been written to contain to the story of the Neo-Assyrian expansion and conquest of the near east, but as it concerns Phoenicia, we can say that by the reign of Ithobaal, Assyria’s war machine had reached the Levantine coast.

Ashurnasirpal II led a conquest of Syria and the Phoenician cities between 883 and 859 BCE. He was smart about how he handled the Phoenician cities, we must give him credit there. As Braudel said above, Assyria tended to annex the cities it conquered, absorbing the people and resources into the empire, but when the Assyrian king hit the coast of the Mediterranean, he recognized that it would be far more beneficial to utilize these adept sailors with their already humming mercantile machine than it would be to dismantle that machine into comparatively useless parts. 

Rather, an inscription from Ashurnasirpal tells us that he merely received tribute from the Phoenicians and then let them remain fairly independent, assuming that the tribute continued into the future. The inscription said: “The tribute of the sea coast - from the inhabitants of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Mahallata, Kaiza, Amurru and Arvad which is an Island in the sea, consisting of gold, silver, tin, copper, copper-containers, linen garments with multi-colored trimmings, large and small monkeys, ebony, boxwood, ivory from walrus tusk, a product of the sea - this their tribute I received and they embraced my feet.”

From all historical appearances, it seems that the Phoenician cities were accepting of the tribute arrangement. While Syrian cities (along with Ahab of Israel) rebelled and met Ashurnasirpal’s son, Shalmaneser III, in battle at the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE, there’s no mention of Phoenician presence in the rebellious coalition. In fact, it seems that the Phoenician’s continued paying tribute to the Assyrian king. The magnificently ornate Palace Gates of Shalmaneser III depict a contingent of Phoenician ships bringing their tribute to the king. These ships appear to be vessels that would be used near the coast-line, not necessarily seafaring vessels, but they do have horse figureheads on each end of the ship, a common trait on Phoenician ships. 

So with the image of Phoenician ships bringing their tribute to the Assyrian king in 850 BCE, we’ll close this episode. In this image we get a glimpse of the motivation behind the Phoenician push westward, the colonization that we’ll explore in our next episode. While they were the enterprising merchants of the day, Assyria demanded tribute of ever-increasing quantities while simultaneously conquering the cities and resources in the land around Phoenicia. What do you do when your bullying neighbor seizes a major source of your commodities and then demands that you keep up on your tribute payments? You look for new sources of wealth.

Sources

• Abulafia, David, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2013).
• Aratus, Phaenomena.
• Aubet, Maria Eugenia, The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade (2001).
• Braudel, Fernand, Memory and the Mediterranean (1998).
• Casson, Lionel, The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times (1959).
• Durant, Will, The Story of Civilization, Vol I: Our Oriental Heritage (1935).
• Herodotus, The Histories (Robert Strassler, Ed., Andrea Purvis, Transl., 2007).
• Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book VIII.
• Nonnus of Panopolis, Dionysiaca.
• McGrail, Seán, Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times (2009).
• Miles, Richard, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization (2010).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Book VII.
• Strabo, Geographica.