Ep. 024 – Go West, O Tyre, Go West

This week we follow the Phoenicians to the western extremity of their trade network and colonization. While it is difficult to paint a chronological picture of when each colony was established, the city of Cadiz, or Gadir, quickly became the hub of western trade. Ancient historians confirm that the rich source of silver in Andalusia was the main attraction for Tyrian merchants, and the wealth that eventually began to flow back east from Tartessos had an influence on Assyria's relationship with Phoenicia. We also discuss a few depictions of Phoenician warships, an evacuation of Tyre, and the role of religion in controlling colonial government and trade, so today's episode is a long one!

Episode Transcript

Last time we took an overview look at early Phoenician expansion in the Mediterranean. We saw how they began integrating themselves into the settlements of more localized peoples, a perfect example coming from their presence on Sardinia and relations with the Nuragic people there. The Phoenicians also reconnected the Euboeans and other Greek predecessors with the larger Mediterranean networks, and as the Phoenicians pushed west they did the same by plugging into various smaller trade networks. We ended somewhere in the middle of the 8th century BCE, a point where the Phoenicians had begun establishing independent colonies of their own. This shift in focus can be seen as an indication that the Phoenicians were attempting to extend their control even further west, the area to which our focus will also turn today.

Although last time we painted the Phoenician presence on Sardinia and in the Tyrrhenian Sea as being a “Middle Ground” for their expansion in the Mediterranean, that area did not prove to be the strongest or most enduring site of Phoenician presence. It was certainly integral to their initial push west, and we’ll start there today before we witness the emergence of Tyre’s main colony in the far west. We’ll end today with the name of the Phoenician city that, arguably, left a bigger historical legacy than did Tyre herself. I’ll give you exactly one guess as to which city I mean, the answer to come at the conclusion today.

At the risk of explaining the obvious, the title of today’s episode is a nod to the 19th century American phrase “go west, young man, go west.” It was often attributed to author Horace Greeley, he supposedly popularized the phrase in an editorial where he praised the notion of America’s westward expansion. Now I don’t know exactly how this would translate into the Phoenician tongue, I’ll not even venture a guess, but hopefully by the end of today’s episode we’ll have painted a picture that reveals a very similar mindset behind the colonization efforts of Tyre and the other Phoenician cities.

Before we get there though, let’s revisit a debated topic that I alluded to briefly last time. I mentioned one theory about where the city or region the ancient called “Tarshish” could have been located. Given the surmised Phoenician reach in the 10th century BCE, it seems logical to align with Josephus in placing Tarshish in Asia Minor. However, today we need to examine the second theory related to Tarshish, a theory that relies more heavily on the Nora stone and on a terminological similarity. You see, the ancient name for a resource-wealthy region of southern Spain was Tartessos, and, well, I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound astoundingly similar to Tarshish.

As we established last time, much of the Phoenician expansion in the Mediterranean seems to have been driven by their desire to find natural resources. Over time, especially as we near 750 BCE, they’d begun to found colonies at resource-rich locations. Rather than try to connect-the-dots in a chronological way as they continue to push west, let’s just talk about the regions they settled in Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. We can get a good idea of why they focused on that area and then we can fill in any other regions we may have missed before we set up the next episode and its focus on that one city that you still have time to guess her name.

Natural resources were a main attraction of Iberia for the Phoenicians, for Tyrians in particular, so let’s start with a Greek historian’s take on just how wealthy the land of Tartessos was. The following quote comes from Diodorus Siculus, he was a Greek historian remembered for writing the unviersal ancient history Bibliotheca historica. As most Greek histories did, this one included discussions of geography, so the following portion is taken from his discussion of the geography and supposed history of Europe’s various regions. Diodorus said:

“Since we have set forth the facts concerning the Iberians, we think that it will not be foreign to our purpose to discuss the silver mines of the land; for this land possesses, we may venture to say, the most abundant and most excellent known sources of silver, and to the workers of this silver it returns great revenues. Now in the preceding Books which told of the achievements of Heracles we have mentioned the mountains in Iberia which are known as the Pyrenees. Both in height and in size these mountains are found to excel all others; for they stretch from the southern sea practically as far as the northern ocean and extend for some three thousand stades, dividing Gaul from Iberia and Celtiberia. And since they contain many thick and deep forests, in ancient times, we are told, certain herdsmen left a fire and the whole area of the mountains was entirely consumed; and due to this fire, since it raged continuously day after day, the surface of the earth was also burned and the mountains, because of what had taken place, were called the Pyrenees; furthermore, the surface of the burned land ran with much silver and, since the elementary substance out of which the silver is worked was melted down, there were formed many streams of pure silver. Now the natives were ignorant of the use of the silver, and the Phoenicians, as they pursued their commercial enterprises and learned of what had taken place, purchased the silver in exchange for other wares of little if any worth. And this was the reason why the Phoenicians, as they transported this silver to Greece and Asia and to all other peoples, acquired great wealth. So far indeed did the merchants go in their greed that, in case their boats were fully laden and there still remained a great amount of silver, they would hammer the lead off the anchors and have the silver perform the service of the lead. And the result was that the Phoenicians, as in the course of many years they prospered greatly, thanks to commerce of this kind, sent forth many colonies, some to Sicily and its neighbouring islands, and others to Libya, Sardinia, and Iberia.”

Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica

Now despite his unabashed exaggeration and his typically Greek disdain for the Phoenician merchants, Diodorus is right to make the point that Iberia was a region immensely rich in natural resources, particularly silver. The earliest Tyrians appear to have begun making expeditions as far west as the Pillars of Hercules back even near 900 BCE. It was around this time that the cultures present on the southern portion of the Iberian Peninsula had reached a level of economic sophistication high enough to become attractive to the Phoenicians and their quest for economic opportunities. The study surrounding the native populations of the Iberian Peninsula is one that’s at the forefront of current archaeological work in Spain and the surrounding regions. There’s a wealth of material that’s already been found there with more being unearthed all the time. To an understandable degree, this work has focused closely on the native populations and how the arrival of a foreign trade power may have influence the local development and industry. That subject is interesting and important, but I’m going to focus a bit more on the Phoenicians themselves and their trade network, along with the major pieces of the network as well.

As I said, they appear to have arrived in the far west sometime in the early 9th century BCE. In the century or so that followed , the Phoenicians began to settle in native populations along the southern coast of the region we call Andalusia, beginning further east, still within the confines of the Mediterranean. We’ve already seen how the Phoenician sites that were independent ‘colonies’ largely aligned with the characteristics of most other Phoenician sites, they were founded at river mouths and near natural resource deposits, miniature echoes of the mother city Tyre. This pattern held true, for the most part, as Phoenician settlements pushed west, through the Pillars of Hercules, and began to take root along the Atlantic coast of southern Iberia, though this trickle into the Atlantic would come a bit later.

The list of sites that later grew to relatively large sizes is surprising, I’ll summarize here briefly to give you an idea of where the Phoenicians ended up, though much of their expansion into the Atlantic didn’t occur until the 7th century BCE. Their major sites included places like Montilla, Málaga, Huelva, even Lixus on the western coast of modern-day Morocco and the island of Mogador, almost 400 miles south of Gibraltar along the west African coast. These sites were all important to the Phoenician foothold in the far western reaches of the Mediterranean, to be sure. Huelva in particular shows marvelous evidence of the typical situation that emerged in the area. The site was an already existing port used by the natives, and they’d already instituted procedures for mining and processing the local silver and iron ore, there is archaeological evidence of almost industrial scale smelting furnaces and works.

As the Phoenicians did across the Mediterranean, they arrived and connected this source with a ready market back in the Levant and the surrounding connected areas, even connected via the overland routes further east and south. Before long the Huelvans were pumping out the metal ingots and the Phoenicians merchants were making round trips. To the Iberian Peninsula they’d bring shiploads of jewels, ivory, bronze, glass, and the ornate pottery and dyed cloths of the Levant, Egypt, and Greece. Such rare items were readily traded for in Iberia, and the rich source of silver and iron was also readily parted with by the locals, leaving the Phoenicians in possession of a commodity that was much desired around the Mediterranean. The Phoenician merchants had cornered the silver market you might say, and as Diodorus recounted earlier, this was one of the most important parts of their success. In a bit we’ll look at how they went about keeping a firm grip on their dominance of the silver market in the Mediterranean.

First though we need to make a pit stop in Cadiz. Now just as Tyre had emerged to lead the pack back in the Levant when the Phoenicians were first taking over the merchant game, Cadiz would emerge to become foremost among the western colonies. It was able to lay claim to that title thanks in large part to it’s amazing location, as I said before, the Phoenicians certainly had an eye for the locations that would make for an effective port colony.

At first glance, the location they chose for the colony doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; yes, it made total sense on a local level, it sat at the end of a lengthy, narrow promontory. Inside this landform was a beautifully enormous natural harbor, and the city’s location on the promontory meant that it had water on three sides, easily defensible and easily accessible for our Phoenician seafarers. The Phoenicians themselves knew the city as Gadir, in their language this word meant something along the lines of “stronghold” or “fortress.” However good a location this might have been, it is was still over 2,000 miles from Tyre. But, the distance was ultimately outweighed in Tyrian eyes by the city’s other feature: the harbor was situated at the terminus of the Guadalete River, a river that runs inland for about 100 miles. Combine the perfect harbor with a river that provides access to the ore mines of inland Tartessos and you get the classic Phoenician city. In the case of Cadiz, it was also very close to the Guadalquivir River, the largest navigable river in Andalusia and the main connection between the inland resources and the Iberian coast. In this ideal location with access to two main rivers, the city of Gadir quickly grew to become the western hub of Phoenician trade. Tyre, naturally, stood as the eastern hub.

Connecting these two major ports were literally hundreds of smaller Phoenician settlements strung along the coasts of the Mediterranean and its island formations. In Andalusia particularly, a Phoenician settlement could be found every 10 kilometers or so. Many of these smaller locales were self-sustaining to a large degree, although they each did their part to contribute the local material or product to the greater trade network. The density of Phoenician sites, especially in the west, can probably be attributed to their very strong efforts to keep their trade network insulated from influence by outside cultures, particularly the Greeks as time goes on. The expanse of this “chain” of trade meant that more links in the chain were necessary. Keep that chain analogy in mind later on, because once the network was fully stretched across the entirety of the Mediterranean it became apparent that some central support was much needed.

Back to Gadir for now though. The concerted Phoenician trade presence led to the founding of the city of Gadir itself, the earliest traces of the city structures are generally dated to the middle of the 9th century, 850 BCE or so. As there always is, some debate accompanies this date, but 850 to 825 is a date span that’s received more backers at this point in time. Part of the problem in relation to accurate dating at Cadiz is that the modern city grew up right atop the Roman sites which were themselves built atop the ancient-most city, stratification that complicates modern studies hoping to reach the bottom most layers. In recent excavations Phoenician burials have been found, dated to the late 7th century BCE, but it’s thought that these date to a period well after the city’s founding. Because of the archaeological situation in Cadiz, few deductions can be made, but based on the archaeology of other nearby sites like Toscanos, which lies in Malaga, we can deduce a thing or two.

The main deduction is based on the city structures and layout, from the very beginning these cities consisted of large and relatively luxurious houses, almost all of which were laid out in an organized grid of streets. The dating of these houses in addition to the dating of remains in the city’s graveyard indicate that the founding of these colonies in the west, for the most part, was carried out by well-prepared contingent of the colonizing population, not simply by sailors or explorers who erected crude dwellings and waited for others to eventually join them. It is possible that this happened at some locations, and further archaeological work may shift this supposition in another direction, but given the Phoenician’s maritime capabilities and their knowledge of the material wealth in the west, it would be quite reasonable to see the colonization process as being very organized and carried out on a large scale.

The largest scale of all in that process belonged to the city of Gadir, a place which presents a few interesting points from the broad view. If you remember back to Episode 022 you might recall that I mentioned the Phoenician god Melqart in relation to their myths surrounding the origin of Tyre and the overall Phoenician view of their relationship with the sea itself. Religion undoubtedly played a role in the state’s control of trade in the east and around Tyre itself, but as we move further west, further outside any direct Tyrian state control, the role of religion becomes a bit more interesting. You see, colonies that were closer to the mother city of Tyre often had governors who were dispatched to oversee the colony and its place in the grand scheme of trade, direct state control was just easier when you knew that the preeminent city was not too far distant to exert some direct control when necessary.

Gadir, and many other colonies in the western reaches of the Mediterranean, instead fell under the sway of commercial agents who were appointed by Tyre’s king to function as governors, but not in that official capacity. Maintenance of trade was their main focus, and as semi-autonomous overseers are want to do when overseeing from a distance, they tended to become more independent. It doesn’t seem that the Tyrian kings minded necessarily, they realized that merchant princes were driven by the lure of profit. All the king needed was a means by which he could exert a symbolic control such that the emphasis always pointed to the mother city’s connection with the colony. With such an emphasis in place, the mother city would always benefit from the merchant network, or, at least the decisions would be made with the mother colony’s benefit in mind. This symbolic control is where the Phoenician religion comes into play, particularly in Gadir.

In this city’s origin myths, just like the myths of its mother city, a god or oracle is the main impetus for the decision to found a colony at the precise location where Gadir took root. In Strabo’s Geography he tells the story after receiving a command from the oracle to found a new colony near the Pillars of Hercules, sailors were dispatched. They roved the area near the Straits of Gibraltar, making shore at locations that appeared amenable to their purpose. Each time, however, they offered sacrifice to the oracle and owing to the unfavorable result of their offerings they abandoned the proposed site and moved on to the next possible site. Supposedly on attempt number 3 the oblation was favorable, and the site became Gadir. Strabo may be way off on his dating, he says that Gadir was founded in 1100 BCE, but he appears to have gotten the religious connection to the city right at its core. He said that one of the first acts undertaken by the Tyrian colonizers of Gadir was to build a temple. After some debate about whether the Pillars of Hercules contained or ever were themselves actual, physical pillars, Strabo then gives some description of the Phoenician temple at Gadir. In the ancient tradition, Gadir’s temple to Melqart was enormous, spanning the entire eastern half of the island promontory where the colony was located.

Despite sitting on the promontory between the Atlantic ocean and the harbor, the temple contained a famed freshwater pool. It was also reputed as a possible location for the actual pillars of Hercules. Strabo compared the theories of various ancient historians as to what the pillars were: perhaps they were the mountains in Iberia and on the North African coast, perhaps they were just the land masses that formed the straits. Strabo then says:

“Others pretend that they are the pillars of brass eight cubits high in the temple of Hercules at Gades, on which is inscribed the cost of erecting that edifice; and that the sailors coming there on the completion of their voyage and sacrificing to Hercules, rendered the place so famous that it came to be regarded as the termination of the land and sea. Posidonius thinks this view the most probable of all, and looks upon the oracle and the several expeditions as a Phoenician invention.”

Strabo, Geographica.

In any event, it is clear that the presence of such a vast temple to Melqart in Gadir is symbolic to a very high degree. It is a grand physical and mental representation to the Phoenicians that for all intents and purposes, Gadir was the anchor of the western colonies. The fact that a temple to Melqart also stood in Tyre is yet more evidence of the strong link between Tyre and Gadir and their place in the Tyrian trade network. This link is, in my view at least, confirmed by the account of Herodotus that upon his visit to the temple in Tyre, he “saw two pillars in it, one of refined gold, the other of emerald so magnificent that it glowed in the dark.”

The worship of Melqart at Gadir and the various rites undertaken in the temple contain in them some intriguing connections to the sea. For one, we must consult with Philostratus, a Greek writer and philosopher writing around 200 AD during the time of the Roman Empire. In what is perhaps his most well-known surviving work, he tells of the life and journeys of Apollonius of Tyana, a man who was a Pythagorean philosopher and teacher during the first century. Without going into the detail behind the book or who Apollonius was, I’ll just say that Philostratus was examining the various beliefs of Apollonius and where he got them from. In talking about the ocean tides and what exactly caused them to be, the writer alludes to Gadir and says that there the Gaditeans believed that while the ocean tide was high, the souls of the sick would not depart their bodies, this would only happen during the time of low tide. 

Perhaps the most interesting of Phoenician religious rites in connection with the sea involves their god Melqart and their typically Semitic rituals to celebrate, perhaps even instigate the resurrection of Melqart following the annual rainy season. The Greeks called this ritual the egersis, which meant something akin to a rising up from sleep or death, and it typically involved an actual cremation of the god in effigy, fire was viewed as a means by which to awaken the god from death into immortality. Because the egersis happened on an annual basis at the beginning of spring, the ritual takes on a decidedly agrarian connotation. This springtime, agricultural association is perhaps what we would normally assume an ancient spring ritual to be connected with, but Melqart was associated more closely with the sea than with anything else, an association that even found its way into the rite of the egersis.

Ancient accounts of the ritual indicate that all foreigners were expelled from Gadir on the day of the ritual, so as to preserve the sanctity of the great ceremony. An account retold by the Greek geographer Pausanius paints a rather enigmatic picture of how those foreigners viewed the Phoenician religious rituals. A foreigner present at Cadiz told how he and his companions left the city on the egersis day, and “on their return to Cadiz they found cast ashore a man of the sea, who was about five roods in size, and burning away, because heaven had blasted him with a thunderbolt.” In all likelihood this was the effigy of Melqart, put to sea and burned during the ritual to resurrect him. Therefore, despite the possible agrarian origins of the rite, the Phoenicians at Gadir, and probably those in other cities, connected the sea with Melqart. He was, after all, the Phoenician god of the sea, later coins depict him astride a hippocamp, the mythological sea-horse type creature typically depicted as half-horse, half-fish.

As much as the Phoenician temples of Melqart symbolized their connection with the sea and served as religious icons, it can be argued that the temple served as the most important common element in the Phoenician colonization of the Mediterranean. In her very comprehensive book about the Phoenicians, probably the most comprehensive work on their expansion and role in the ancient world to date, archaeologist and historian María Aubet describes the central role that the temple of Melqart played in controlling the trade and economy of the Phoenician colonies, stretching all the way back east to Tyre herself. To put it simply, when the economic concepts of fair trade, uniform weight measures across great spans of territory, and overall disdain for fraud, when these ideas are melded to the more sacred and imposing ideas contained in the worship of a god such as Melqart, then the violation of the commercial norms becomes much more weighty, it is essentially then also a transgression against the deity and the temple.

In a very literal sense then, in ancient Gadir the temple of Melqart was also the commercial center. The god protected the weights and measures, the quality of merchandise bought and sold, the temple even kept a register of transactions. Notably, the ancient Phoenicians were very slow to adopt a minted coinage, they did not do so until long after the Greeks had done, but their reticence to adopt coinage owed to the fact that we will now see: the temple controlled trade and ensured many of the same outcomes that a uniform coinage would also ensure. Business deals were often sealed by the swearing of oaths to the god, and the temple also utilized hallmarks to guarantee the purity and weight of the metal bars or ingots that were basically the Phoenician currency. Their wealth of metal resources also seems to have played a role in their slow adoption of coinage; they had no need to use the smaller minted coins, metal bars were readily available. In return for functioning as a trade regulator, the temple received taxes and dues from the merchant class.

This religio-commercial marriage was also present in other main port cities on the Phoenician trade route, places like Cyprus, Malta, and Nora. In sum, and in the words of Aubet: “In distant places where Melqart possessed a temple, his function was a very concrete one: to ensure the tutelage of the temple of Tyre and the monarchy over the commercial enterprise, thus converting the colony into an extension of Tyre, and also to guarantee the right of asylum and hospitality which, in distant lands, was equivalent to endorsing contracts and commercial exchanges.” In ancient parallel that is seen in other trade empires down through history, a uniform religion acted as a glue that held the vast network together and facilitated its trade and profit.

There’s one thing worth noting here as concerns the Phoenician relationship with the locals on the Iberian Peninsula. Obviously the word “colony” carries with it a lot of modern baggage, use of the word itself immediately colors the perception of what was going on as the Tyrian merchants arrived in the west and proceeded to set up settlements and cities that shipped the local resources back east. In his book The Great Sea, Cambridge Professor of Mediterranean History David Abulafia explains that the relationship between the Phoenician colonists and the Tartessian natives was by no means an “exploitative, colonial relationship of ‘unfair exchange’.” Rather, he portrays the natives of Tartessos as “enthusiastically setting to work, extracting and smelting not just silver but gold and copper at mining centers across southern Spain and Portugal,” all of this done under a structure where “the local Iberians controlled ‘every facet of production’,” remaining “firmly in control of their own resources” and reaping for themselves a profit from the trade right alongside the Phoenicians who did the overseas transport of the end product. 

As we move toward wrapping things up today, let’s try to place the city of Gadir within the broader context of Phoenician colonization, and then we’ll see how events that transpired back in the Levant had an effect upon the Mediterranean network of trade. The city that we now call Cadiz was founded during period of history where the Assyrian Empire experienced a slight decline. Between 830 BCE and 750 BCE or so, the period when many of the western colonies saw their true start and flowering, the domineering empire that had pushed the Phoenicians to expand westward let off the gas a little. It certainly also helped that in their push westward, the Phoenicians tapped into the wealth of mineral resources needed to sate what greed the Assyrian beast still possessed. This appeared to have been a success for them, perhaps they even grew comfortable as the calendar pages quickly fall off screen in our scene where time speeds up and we jump forward to the next major narrative point.

As that scene jolts to a halt, we witness a more harrowing scene in the homeland of Phoenicia. The Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III has decided to depart from the precedent of the kings who ruled before him; he’s decided that despite the hefty tributes flowing in from Tyre and the coastal cities that he now wants to possess them for his own. His predecessors had continued to observe the unspoken agreement where the Assyrians would leave Phoenicia be in return for tribute from their merchant network, but in the 730s BCE, Tiglath-pileser III marched his armies to the coast and seized control of a fair few cities. On the face of things he technically left Tyre her independence, there was no military occupation of the city. In reality though, he began to exercise more control over her trade by sending in customs officials and inspectors to tax and oversee the import of certain items important to Assyria, things like cedar wood and the enforcement of a trade embargo with Egypt, who had until this point been a main trade parter of Tyre. One of the two major harbors of Tyre was named the “Egyptian harbor,” so this must have had a distinct impact on Tyrian trade.

Despite the decidedly negative impact that Assyrian movement had on Tyre and Sidon, the developments of the late 8th century did result in a few Assyrian depictions of Phoenicians ships, even if those depictions were all made in Assyrian palaces as a show of their pleasure at having essentially cast the Phoenician cities under their shadow. One wall relief from the palace of Sargon II shows Phoenician ships towing timber, perhaps the cedar wood that was affected by the tax overseers. In any event, the ships appear to be of the same style as those we saw last time depicted on the Tell Balawat gates over a century earlier: both depictions show flat-bottomed ships bearing horse-head figureheads, and the ships are being propelled by rowers with oars.

The next two depictions are the most detailed depictions of Phoenician ships from so late a date, from right around 700 BCE. To make things even better, the depictions include both merchant ships and a few Phoenician warships, so let’s describe them a bit here and you can check out the website to view the images for more detail.

The first I’ll mention is a depiction of a lone warship, a fragment of a larger wall-panel relief from an Assyrian palace in Ninevah. This depiction has typically been dated to around 700 BCE, and the warship it depicts seems to be of the same type as those depicted in the second image I’ll mention here momentarliy. The warship itself is powered by rowers, there appears to be two levels of rowers with oars. The upper level of rowers are shown with their heads visible through an open portion with what almost look like windows. They have oars in their hands, but a second, lower level of oars are lined up beneath them, the handles disappearing into what are assumed to be oar ports, with a bottom tier of rowers sitting invisible in the lowest portion of the ship’s hull. Then, above the top tier of rowers is a third level, a raised platform on which stand passengers and armed men. In the depiction, this top level is set apart from the rowers beneath by a series of alternating plain and cross-hatched panels, above which are hung a row of circular shields. In the end, it is difficult to reach a firm conclusion based only on these two-dimensional warship depictions. They could be triremes, but they could just as easily be biremes with a raised catwalk type platform above the ship’s main hull and rowing stations. In the end, the most notable feature of the warships is the pointed ram affixed to the ship’s bow. Vertical incisions seem to depict ropes which were used to lash the ram to the ship’s hull, so in these depictions we have an early evidence of the ram-equipped warships that we will encounter with much more frequency in the Greek and Roman periods.

The second interesting depiction from this period carries a bit more weight, I think. It comes from the palace of Sennacherib, who ruled between 705 and 681 BCE. His rule began about two decades after Tiglath-Pileser, who was the one responsible for the increase in Assyrian aggression. As the cities around Tyre and Sidon were engulfed by Assyrian control one-by-one in the years following 730 BCE, the main Phoenician cities felt the figurative noose tighten. They still had their connection with the trade route that had unfurled westward, but as the cities of the Levant came under Assyrian control, some of them revolted. The military might of Assyria put down the rebellions with relative ease. The Assyrian king put Tyre under siege between 724 and 720. They also took control of the island of Cyprus for a few years, using ships they’d taken from subjugated Phoenician cities. When Sennacherib took the throne in 705 he put Tyre under siege again, and this is the scene that is depicted in Sennacherib’s palace. On the right stands the city of Tyre, devoid of its people save for one figure on the dock. This figure is helping the final evacuee get into a merchant ship. The image has been lost since its discovery, but the archaeologist who discovered it in 1848 drew a copy of the relief. To the left of Tyre and the dock lays the city’s harbor, and in the harbor are 12 Phoenician ships containing the king of Tyre, named Luli, his family, royal house, and other citizens and soldiers of the city. In the harbor are 6 warships of the same basic style that we discussed a minute ago. In this second depiction the warships also have a mast stepped or raised amidships. The masts are outfitted with stays and also are braced from the yardarm. Finally, there are sails furled to the yard, so the indication seems focused on the evacuation of the city and not on the voyage they then undertook. A bit of gloating from Sennacherib, perhaps.

In addition to the warships, which again have rams on the bow, there are 6 merchant or cargo ships. These have extremely curved hulls and symmetrical raised ends. These cargo ships are possibly the gauloi ships described by the Greeks, remember that they adopted this word to describe the Phoenician cargo ships because they were deep-hulled, shaped like a bathtub of sorts. The deep hulls may have been intended to store the maximum possible amount of silver, iron, and amphora, but in 701 when Tyre’s king and a major portion of the city evacuated to Cyprus, they were probably packing as many people as possible into those same holds.

The Tyrian king’s exile wasn’t permanent, but as the 7th century BCE dawned, Assyria continued its work to curtail Tyrian independence as much as possible without technically assuming rulership of the city. I’ll not get too far down the line in discussing how the Assyrian Empire continued to control the Levant, but from the 730s when Tiglath-pileser began Assyria’s renewed aggression, down to the middle of the 7th century BCE, Assyria refrained from subjugating Tyre herself. Access to her vast network of colonies and the attendant trade network was the entire point of Assyria’s continued policy toward Tyre, they knew that they couldn’t dismantle the symbolic control that Tyre and her god exercised over the colonies, this was the glue that held it all together as we saw earlier. From 730 onward, though, their gradually increasing functional control over Tyre’s trade in the east, her access to ports, her ability to trade with Egypt, all of these regulations enforced by Assyria began to wither Tyre’s status as the preeminent Phoenician city. Simultaneously, the western trade network continued to flourish. 

This situation that emerged in the late 8th and early 7th centuries BCE would have one major outcome, at least, we know that now looking back on how it all played out. With the western network continuing to funnel the wealth of Iberia back to Tyre, the mother city was able to survive in spite of Assyria’s meddling. However, in the center of the long Mediterranean route one specific colony had begun to eclipse many others. This rise was partially due to location, it lay in the middle of the east-west route between Tyre and Gadir, but it also lay at the southern end of a north-south route between northern Africa and the regional network around the Tyrrhenian Sea, the one we introduced last time. This is where I want to conclude today, before we really begin to focus on a city that plays a major role for the next several centuries of history in the Mediterranean and in maritime history as well. I’m sure you guessed it at the top of the episode, but here it is for you, just in case. The colony that had begun as just another colony in the great Tyrian trade network was called by the Phoenicians Qart-ḥadašt, or, “New City.” In the Latin this morphed into “Carthāgō,” and now we know her simply as Carthage.

Sources

• Abulafia, David, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2013).
• Aubet, Maria Eugenia, The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade (2001).
• Aubet, Maria Eugenia, From Trading Post to Town in the Phoenician-Punic World, Proceedings of the British Acad., Vol 86., pp. 47–65. (1995).
• Aubet, María Eugenia, Political and Economic Implications of the New Phoenician Chronologies. Beyond the Homeland 2008, pp. 247-259.
• Braudel, Fernand, Memory and the Mediterranean (1998).
• Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, 5.35.
• Markoe, Glenn, Phoenicians (2000).
• 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).
• Moore, Karl, & David Charles Lewis, The Origins of Globalization. (2009).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Pausanius, Description of Greece, 10.4.6.
• Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, 5.1–4.
• Phoenician ship, wall panel/relief, The British Museum.
• Strabo, Geographica.
• Tyrian coin, Melqarth on hippocamp.