Ep. 025 – Carthage: A New (City) Hope

This week we follow the fleeing Elissa, princess of Tyre, to Qart-ḥadašt, the "New City" that would come into wider fame as Carthage. We start with some talk of the mythical founding of Carthage, some conjecture about when the city was really founded, and an overview of the city's early growth. Then, we look at two Phoenician shipwrecks discovered over 33 nautical miles off Asheklon, Israel. The Tanit and Elissa are two of the oldest Phoenician shipwrecks discovered to date, and then can tell us a fair amount about Phoenician shipping practices, also about their religious practices in relation to maritime travel. Another long episode with the Phoenicians it is!

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Episode Transcript

Think of any great city, nation, or empire and I bet you could fairly quickly also think of its foundation story. Rome is perhaps the most well known and the myth of Rome’s founding is also easy to recall, the city’s name hearkens back to the brother who prevailed in the mythical sibling rivalry over which hill should be the site of the new settlement. Athens was likewise named for Athena after she prevailed over Poseidon in their competition. Myths sprouted quickly after the founding of America as well, time plays no favorites when it comes to such matters. This line applies to places as well as times, take the foundation myths of Tenochtitlan, for instance; most if not all peoples around the world have mythologies to explain the origins of their major cities and their societies as a whole. We’ve already discussed the foundation myths behind the great Phoenician city of Tyre, and today we move on to her greatest colony and how it may or may not have begun.

The myth surrounding the foundation of Carthage is a tangled web running through the mythologies and histories of Greece and Rome. Sources cited in the Greco-Roman versionsare lost to us today, and the prejudice that the Greek and Roman historians so liberally sprinkled throughout their versions makes our task all the more difficult. I’ll not necessarily attempt to untangle the web entirely, but we can hit the main points and sources in the myth of Qart Hadasht, Tyre’s ‘New City’ in northern Africa.

Virgil is probably the most well-known source of one version of the myth. Being the Roman historian that he was, Virgil back-dated the foundation of Carthage to the time of the Trojan War. He did this because his mention of Carthage came in the Aeneid, which he wrote down in the years around 25 BCE. Given that Virgil then wrote during Augustan Rome, which occurred over a hundred years after the last of the Punic Wars, it should come as no surprise that when he claimed Trojan ancestry for Rome, he also sought to foreshadow the rise of one of Rome’s greatest enemies.

I wanted to try and summarize both the Aenied’s treatment of Carthage and how 1st century Roman feelings toward salted-over Carthage factor into Virgil’s poem. However, after some thought it seemed that such a discussion would probably fit better into our discussion of the Punic Wars themselves, that we’d be able to get a better grasp on all the dynamics at play. So, just keep in mind that Virgil gave us his treatment of the Carthage myth in the Aenied. Also, the cover image for today’s episode is a painting by Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, it’s inspired by the Aenied’s depiction of the Carthage founding myth, and it was the only decent image I could find that would work as cover art, so there you go.

Now beyond Virgil there were much older sources for the founding myth, and the most complete of those comes from a contemporary of Virgil, a man named Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus. The actual history written by Trogus has also been lost, but a writer named Justinus wrote an epitome of the original Philippic History. An epitome was a summary of a larger work, so Justinus probably summarized matters in his own words, sprinkling a few quotes here and there. Perhaps we should rechristen the podcast, “An Epitome of Maritime History: The Podcast.” Anyway, since Trogus summarized by Justinus is also writing late in the game, we should take his tale with as large a pinch of salt as we’d take with Virgil’s version. The Trogus tale does however carry fewer overtly political undertones, despite its being brought up in the context of Carthaginian military activity against Rome and Greece. So some historians do hold the view that the version we’re about to look at could contain within it some traces of Carthaginian influence, remnants of their own myths perhaps.

In the Trogus version of the story, the action is centered on a woman named Elissa, she’s called Dido in the Aenied. The story goes that in 831 BCE the king of Tyre died. Before his death, he’d decreed that the kingdom was to be divided between his son Pygmalion and his daughter Elissa. We’re not told why the king wished to divide his kingdom, but in the end the king’s order didn’t matter much, the people rose up to crown Pygmalion the sole ruler, and in an attempt to solidify his control over Tyre, he had Elissa’s husband killed. It’s not necessarily relevant to the story, but it relates to our talk of Melqart last time, so I’ll mention that Elissa’s husband was the high priest of Melqart in Tyre. You’d think that killing the high priest might set loose some bad karma upon Pygmalion, but he supposedly reigned for a long time. We’ll come back to that possibility a bit later.

Elissa’s murdered husband had been a wealthy man, and after some sneaky planning she managed to gather some ships, some disaffected nobles, and a rather healthy stock of gold and other wealth. In a nod to the Tyrian tradition of seeking Melqart’s blessing before founding a new colony, as we saw with Cadiz last time, Elissa and the other fleeing Tyrians sacrificed to the god before they boarded their ship and fled Tyre, en route to Cyprus. During a brief stop on the island, Elissa’s contingent managed to add 80 Cyprian daughters to their number, not exactly 80 willing daughters, but 80 women of child-bearing age nonetheless. Elissa intended to found a new city, you see, and a fertile group of settlers is important for any colonizing venture as I’m sure you well understand. The stopover in Cyrus also gave Justinus, the chronicler of the story, a chance to drop a hint about where the story would go. Pygmalion heard about his sister’s flight rather quickly, Cyprus isn’t a long sail from Tyre, and he purposed to pursue her and seize the traitors and their gold. His intentions solidified, Pygmalion was dissuaded by the gods, who told him that “he would not escape with impunity, if he interrupted the founding of a city that was to become the most prosperous in the world.” By this means some respite was given to the fugitives, and their stories carries on.

They arrive in Africa, at the Phoenician colony of Utica in fact, and the locals welcome them with open arms. As the Phoenicians did not yet use coinage, the locals and the newcomers bartered, it seems a common theme in colonial histories that the arrival of foreign goods was the trigger for a barter barrage. Elissa, being the shrewd royalty that she was, concocted a plan when a local offered her people possession of whatever land she could cover with an ox hide. She commanded the Tyrian refugees to cut the hide into very thin strips, and laying the strips end to end in as big an area as they could enclose, they “covered” an area that proved to be much larger than the offeror had anticipated. He couldn’t break his word though, so Elissa ended up with an area of ground that became known as the Byrsa, it was still called this after Carthage had become a powerful city and a walled citadel on the city’s central hill assumed the name Byrsa. 

This name is one point around which theories swirl, where some historians believe that an ancient artifact of linguistics may lay buried in the sands of mythology. It seems likely that the name of the city’s central hill was derived from the Akkadian word for fortress or citadel, the word birtu. However, there’s also the possibility that the Greek historians who ultimately wrote down these myths of Carthage were just importing a double-meaning, they never could pass up the opportunity to drop in a witty or unique homonym. The Greek word for an ox hide was bursa and the hills’s name was also Byrsa so maybe the Greeks just added in the ox hide elements to the story to give their Greek readers a chuckle. Who knows.

In any event, the city was founded, a horse head dug up in the foundation site portending that the people would be warlike and powerful. The traditional date of the founding then is 814 BCE. The conclusion of the story is almost more of a tragic scene from Shakespeare than it is an ancient myth. The city grows rapidly, almost immediately becoming a hub of trade in the central Mediterranean. Elissa’s success and growing influence becomes a focus of jealous resentment for a nearby king, though. His name was Hiarbus of Libya, and his personal solution is to threaten war unless Elissa marries him. Elissa though remains loyal to the memory of her murdered husband and to the promise of her Qart Hadasht, her new city. She tells the town elders to construct a pyre so she can sacrifice to the memory of her dead husband before she makes her personal sacrifice of marriage in order to save the city. The curtain drops, however, after she stabs herself to death while falling into the flames, a solution that saves the city and her wish to remain loyal to her husband’s memory. A post-script tells us that “As long as Carthage remained unconquered, she was worshipped as a goddess.”

That is the least Hellenized of Carthage’s founding myths, but let’s see what we can dig up in the way of actual history, see if we can find any confirmation of this myth’s truth or falsehood.

To start, let’s tackle the date when the city was founded. Getting it placed in the timeline properly will help us get a good idea of how it related to everything else going on in the world. The traditional date, as we saw, is 814 BCE. This date is derived from the fact that several ancient historical sources all contained the date in their claims, and that until recently the oldest archaeological finds at the site of the original city were dated between 750 and 700 BCE. Timaeus of Sicily uses this date by saying that Carthage was founded 38 years before the first Greek Olympiad, but most scholars agree that the dates given by Timaeus are notoriously unreliable.

More recent archaeological work has revealed a different and more complete picture, it seems. Now I realize that such dating work can be controversial and that different archaeologists back different theories. That gets even more complicated with a city like Carthage, since it was infamously subjected to merciless conquest by Scipio’s Roman legions, or at least that’s how the story goes. Augustus later sacked part of the ruins in order to rebuild the Roman version of the city, so no matter what, the ancient most parts of the city likely underwent major transformation at points in the distant past. In any event, some of the ancient most layers survived in part and today they’re buried over 5 meters beneath the Roman city, not far above sea level in fact. 

Digs to study these bottom-most layers of Carthage have revealed “traces of dwellings with walls of sun-dried brick, streets and wells, forming a structure of large isolated houses, separated by squares of gardens.” The key part there is that recent digs have only revealed ‘traces’ of these things, but traces are enough to reach some broad conclusions. Those conclusions actually align quite nicely with those we saw last time in our look at the founding of the western colonies like Gadir and Malaca, or Cadiz and Malaga. For a long time it was thought that those colonies were founded later in Phoenician history, around 750 BCE or so, but recent work has pushed that date back to around 900 BCE or so. The same holds true for Carthage. Current dating places the oldest Phoenician level of the city at 865 BCE, give or take a few decades. Obviously it takes a little time to build a city, so the ballpark date of 900 to 870 BCE for the founding period is within reason. Really, this trend is promising and I think it will prove that these theories hold water.

Although some ancient historians used the 814 date, perhaps in simple repetition of a date they’d seen elsewhere, if we look to other ancient historians we actually find some support for the earlier dating. Strabo, for instance, connects the founding of the Iberian colonies with the founding of Carthage, saying that they occurred during the same period of Phoenician expansion and colonization. Still other historians help us verify the founding timeframe, not by talk of the city’s founding necessarily, but by linking matters back to Elissa, the fabled founder of the city, and her family of Tyrian royal blood. 

The short version is that Josephus discussed the Phoenician cities and Tyrian kings in relation to his history of the Jews, remember how we said that Jewish kings were involved in treaties with King Hiram and the Phoenician shipping machine was put to use in the building of Solomon’s temple. Well in discussing the kings of Tyre, Josephus takes his material from an older historian, Menander of Ephesus. Menander wrote a history of Tyre, and even though it’s been lost to us, Josephus preserves at least a few ideas from it, one of those being some bits of chronology. Supposedly Tyre kept a royal history, the Annals of Tyre it’s called, and when Tyre was conquered by Alexander the Great the annals were sent to Carthage for safekeeping. Carthage didn’t prove to be any safer in the long-run, as you probably know, and the annals were lost for good.

Anyway, Menander, through Josephus, gives a chronology that establishes Carthage as being a little bit older than the traditional date, his timeline puts it nearer to 870 BCE. This timeframe would align it with the establishment of the other colonies further west, it would really make Carthage just another among Tyre’s many established colonies during the period when the Assyrians and Syrians were becoming more aggressive back east, but just before Tyre had it’s hands tied in earnest. The archaeology seems to be confirming this earlier date, even the historical existence of the king Pygmalion seems to be looking more likely; his name was on the Nora Stone that we discussed in relation to Sardinia, it’s also been found on a gold pendant in an early Carthaginian grave.

In the end, not all historians feel that Carthage’s founding mythology aligns with any actual history. Most who discount the historicity of the Elissa story say that it paints the Carthaginians in a decidedly negative light: they use subterfuge several times, to flee Tyre, to steal the women of Cyprus, and then to circumvent the ox-hide condition for the land deal in Africa. The theory is that this stereotype of Carthaginian merchants was a common one in latter-day Greece, and that the Greek historians who set down the Elissa story intended to portray the Phoenicians in a negative light. If the Carthaginians had played any role in telling this story or if it contained any basis in actual history, surely it wouldn’t portray the main characters so unkindly, would it? Ultimately it’s hard to know, the untangling of these ancient origin stories that were then passed down by later historians with baked in prejudice against the foreigners whom they were portraying, it’s just tough. Really sounds similar to much of modern history too, doesn’t it!?

In the end, that’s the story and it seems to have some basis in historical reality, we’re just not sure how much. What we are sure of though is that Carthage was founded, somewhere in the same timeframe that the other colonies were founded. Initially it was just one among many, the myths say that it grew rapidly and there is some evidence of this quick growth, but that belief could also just be backwards projection after the city had risen to it’s height of power. No matter what theory you choose to back, you can’t argue with the reality that the location of Carthage would prove to be ideal.

It’s again a little hard to know if the location Carthage occupied was purposefully chosen as the ideal site for a central trade hub, fleeing refugees aren’t well known for choosing resettlement sites based on their potential for long-term growth. But, given that the Elissa story was probably apocryphal for the most part, it seems that the location for Carthage was hand-picked, possibly because of it’s proximity to the older Phoenician colony at Utica. No matter what, the location was hard to beat. Carthage sat smack in the middle of the east-west routes between Tyre, Gades, and every smaller port in between. It also sat at the southern terminus of a regional network within the Tyrrhenian Sea, which was enclosed by front of the Italian boot, along with the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.

We’ll get a bit more into the Tyrrhenian Sea network and the various cultures that were plugged in there next time as we start to look at the Greek colonization of the Mediterranean. Carthage though, despite it’s prime location, didn’t become the predominant city in the Phoenician world until Tyre began to decline. Tyre’s decline began around 730 BCE, as we saw last time, when Assyria finally gave in to the urge to take control in every meaningful sense of the word. They left Tyre her symbolic independence, but forbade her from trading with Egypt and strangled her with other regulations.

Before Tyre finally succumbed to the pressure, long before actually, Carthage seems to have reestablished her connections with the Phoenician mother city. It’s possible that the connections were never in fact severed, that this perception is rooted in the Elissa myth that Carthage was the settlement of Tyrian refugees who’d been running from the Tyrian king. Either way, Diodorus leans toward a view that discounts the refugee element, he paints the Carthaginian founders a colonists who held “the custom to send to the god a tenth of all that was paid into the public revenue.” So the Carthaginians sent a tithe tribute to Tyre at first, but eventually they phased that out as Tyre’s influence declined.

Last time we sketched an outline of Tyre’s decline as Assyria became more belligerent in the near east, so I don’t want to rehash that discussion here today. Rather, I’ll say simply that as the clock ticks down toward 700 BCE, Carthage begins to wax, while Tyre continues to slowly wane. In a sense then, Carthage was founded as the “new hope” of the refugee Elissa, and as Tyre began to decline, the new city, Qart Hadasht, would become the new hope of the Phoenician trade network as a whole. See, I knew I could work the “new hope/new city” phrases in somewhere, but please don’t ask me to use the rise of Carthage in metaphorical connection with Star Wars in any way, there’s not much there to draw a parallel, at least, not that I could come up with.

Carthage being the “new hope” is not to say that trade with Tyre ceased immediately or that Carthage immediately became the central focus, but the trend was certainly becoming more noticeable by 700 BCE. Next time we’ll fill in some gaps regarding the other players involved in the Mediterranean scene at this time. We mentioned the early Greeks a bit previously, we saw how the Euboeans were actually involved in trade with the Phoenician colonists. Next time we’ll focus more closely on the other early Greeks, the development of their colonial network, and their gradual growth into the Greeks we typically think of.

Before that though, we should take some time to look at a pair of Phoenician shipwrecks from  off the coast of modern-day Ashkelon, Israel, these are some of the oldest examples of Phoenician shipwrecks found so far. These two, unfortunately, are wrecks that long ago lost any trace of the ship hull itself, underwater organisms disposed of any trace we could hope to study. This is also the case with almost all of the Phoenician shipwrecks that have been found so far, wrecks between 1000 BCE and 400 BCE in the Mediterranean are few and far between: the cargoes of ships that went down in this period remain in their resting place, but the wood and timber of the ships have been eaten away.

That is the case with the two shipwrecks off Ashkelon, the first has been named the Elissa after the queen of Carthage who we spent a lot of time discussing already. The second was given the name Tanit. The goddess Tanit was a deity worshipped by the Phoenicians, she took on more significance in Carthage while many other Phoenician colonies preferred the god Melqart instead. Borrowing her name for the Phoenician shipwreck is a bit of an inside joke, since she was also one of the main deities worshipped by Phoenician and later Punic mariners, they looked to her for protection and in this particular case, she apparently looked the other way.

Anyway, both of these wrecks leave no trace of their hull or timber which would give us a window into the state of shipbuilding and relevant techniques in the Phoenician world. The wrecks have been dated to the 8th century BCE, 800 to 700, mostly on the basis of their amphora cargo which we’ll get to in a moment. Since the ships themselves have disintegrated, both wrecks were found because of the hull-shaped mounds of amphora on the sea floor. The circumstances of their discovery were rather interesting too. 

In 1997 a U.S. nuclear research sub was sent to the eastern Mediterranean to aid the Israeli military in a search for the Dakar, an Israeli diesel submarine that had been lost in the 1960s and never found. Their main goal was not accomplished, they didn’t find the remains of the Dakar. The U.S. submarine’s sonar did however pick up the locations of three shipwrecks, two of them about 33 nautical miles offshore and resting in over 400 meters of water. Needless to say, this great depth and distance from shore made a dive to study the wrecks impossible, it’s also why they hadn’t been found previously. The initial find was videotaped though, and almost immediately upon looking at the grainy video, archaeologists knew that they had Iron Age shipwrecks, this deduction based on the distinctive torpedo-shaped amphoras.

Given that the military mission that located the Tanit and Elissa was there for one reason only, it wasn’t until 1999 that a research team returned to the wrecks to conduct further study. On the team was Robert Ballard. With the team was the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Jason, a proto-type of which was used to remotely explore the interior of the Titanic wreck back in 1986, that’s likely where you’ve heard Ballard’s name before too. Anyway, over the course of the study on each wreck site, the crew set up high tech transponders and other sensors to help them map the wrecks. They ended up with many photos and other data, stitching it all together to form a digital mosaic image that gives a very accurate depiction of the amphora and other objects as they were distributed on the sea floor. Even back in ’99, the technology was advanced enough that they mapped each entire wreck in only 12 hours a piece, the Tanit site was spread over an area of 4.5 x 11.5 meters and the Elissa over an area of 5 x 12 meters. Both wrecks had about 400 amphora visible with more undoubtedly buried beneath the top layer, as the mound grew in height near what would have been the ship’s keel, forming a reverse of how they’d have rested within the vanished hull.

The digital mapping work was done first, and then a handful of objects were recovered from each wreck in order to be studied up close. As they’d suspected from the initial photographs, the amphora proved to be like those taken from archaeological sites throughout Israel and Phoenicia. Similar amphora have been found only in connection with other Phoenician colony sites, and one proposed destination for the cargoes of each ship was the colony at Carthage, similar examples of amphora have been found at Carthage and dated to the city’s early periods. As I said, it’s on the basis of these amphora and their distinctive shape that the wrecks have been dated to the middle of the 8th century BCE, so even as Tyre began to suffer under Assyrian oppression, ships were still active on the Mediterranean, ferrying cargoes of wine in amphoras between Tyre, her nearby neighbors, and the far away colonies somewhere to the west.

Not to get too technical in talking about the amphora at the wreck sites, but these particular jars were purpose built for maritime transport, it seems. Their unofficial name, though I must say their most descriptive and easily recalled one, is ‘torpedo’ amphora. They’re called this because they’re tall, narrow, and have a bottom that is rounded to a point, thus making them easy to stack upright in the hold of a Phoenician ship. They weren’t made to be stored on a flat surface, and if they were stored like that, perhaps on an ancient dock while the ship was being loaded, they’d have been laid on their side and stacked in an alternating fashion. Torpedo amphora like this were manufactured in Phoenician holdings during the mid-8th century BCE, kilns where they were fired have been unearthed in Sarepta, with other evidence of amphora presence in Tyre herself.

The amphora were the main items on each wreck, but the research team also recovered some cooking pots, handmade bowls, and an incense stand from what they called the galley of each ship, what would have presumably been the crew’s quarters at one end of each ship where the smaller cooking a personal effects-type items were located in the wreck site distribution. The bowls and pots were typical to ships of that period and all others, sailors have always had to eat. The artifacts were typical of the time and region as well, but the incense stand is more unique to the aromatic offerings that Canaanite sailors would make to the protective deities during their voyage. There’s a depiction of a Canaanite ship in an Egyptian tomb, the tomb of Ken-Amun, where a sailor on board the ship holds an incense burner and offering cup in the air, seeming to give thanks to the god or goddess for the safe conclusion of their voyage. The incense stand and an offering cup were both recovered in the wreckage of the Elissa, adding more evidence to the belief that ancient Canaanite sailors had a standard practice of invoking the protection of the deities.

Beyond the deductions I’ve already outlined, the location of these wrecks over 30 nautical miles from shore leads to the conclusion that Phoenician merchant ships of this period took to the open water and aimed for their destination on a straight line, shortest route possible. This isn’t surprising really, we’ve already seen how they could navigate by the stars and had large sea-worthy ships, especially the ‘bathtub’ gauloi ships. Their torpedo amphora cargo contained wine, presumably the finest wines of the regions around Phoenicia, and given the number of amphora in each wreck it’s probable that each ship carried over 10 tons of wine. 

The timeframe of these wrecks, their Phoenician origin and crew, their cargo of wine: it’s all wonderfully in line with the Old Testament passage where the prophet Ezekiel pronounces his prophecy regarding the great city of Tyre. The prophecy is from at least a few centuries after the Tanit and Elissa would have gone down in the deep sea off Ashkelon, but I’d like to read the passage anyway, it’s likely that the dynamics at play during Ezekiel’s day were similar to those of earlier Phoenicia, and as Tyre has begun to decline in our narrative, this passage is all too appropriate. He mentions the wine being shipped from Helbon, and the “east wind” that sinks the ships of Tyre.

Ezekiel Chapter 27 says the following:

1) The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying,

2)Now, thou son of man, take up a lamentation for Tyre;

3)And say unto Tyre, O thou that art situate at the entry of the sea, which art a merchant of the people for many isles, Thus saith the Lord GOD; O Tyre, thou hast said, I am of perfect beauty.

4)Thy borders are in the midst of the seas, thy builders have perfected thy beauty.

5)They have made all thy ship boards of fir trees of Senir: they have taken cedars from Lebanon to make masts for thee.

6)Of the oaks of Bashan have they made thine oars; the company of the Ashurites have made thy benches of ivory, brought out of the isles of Chittim.

7)Fine linen with broidered work from Egypt was that which thou spreadest forth to be thy sail; blue and purple from the isles of Elishah was that which covered thee.

8)The inhabitants of Zidon and Arvad were thy mariners: thy wise men, O Tyre, that were in thee, were thy pilots.

9)The ancients of Gebal and the wise men thereof were in thee thy calkers: all the ships of the sea with their mariners were in thee to occupy thy merchandise.

10)They of Persia and of Lud and of Phut were in thine army, thy men of war: they hanged the shield and helmet in thee; they set forth thy comeliness.

11)The men of Arvad with thine army were upon thy walls round about, and the Gammadims were in thy towers: they hanged their shields upon thy walls round about; they have made thy beauty perfect.

12)Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs.

13)Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, they were thy merchants: they traded the persons of men and vessels of brass in thy market.

14)They of the house of Togarmah traded in thy fairs with horses and horsemen and mules.

15)The men of Dedan were thy merchants; many isles were the merchandise of thine hand: they brought thee for a present horns of ivory and ebony.

16)Syria was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of the wares of thy making: they occupied in thy fairs with emeralds, purple, and broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and agate.

17)Judah, and the land of Israel, they were thy merchants: they traded in thy market wheat of Minnith, and Pannag, and honey, and oil, and balm.

18)Damascus was thy merchant in the multitude of the wares of thy making, for the multitude of all riches; in the wine of Helbon, and white wool.

19)Dan also and Javan going to and fro occupied in thy fairs: bright iron, cassia, and calamus, were in thy market.

20)Dedan was thy merchant in precious clothes for chariots.

21)Arabia, and all the princes of Kedar, they occupied with thee in lambs, and rams, and goats: in these were they thy merchants.

22)The merchants of Sheba and Raamah, they were thy merchants: they occupied in thy fairs with chief of all spices, and with all precious stones, and gold.

23)Haran, and Canneh, and Eden, the merchants of Sheba, Asshur, and Chilmad, were thy merchants.

24)These were thy merchants in all sorts of things, in blue clothes, and broidered work, and in chests of rich apparel, bound with cords, and made of cedar, among thy merchandise.

25)The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market: and thou wast replenished, and made very glorious in the midst of the seas.

26)Thy rowers have brought thee into great waters: the east wind hath broken thee in the midst of the seas.

27)Thy riches, and thy fairs, thy merchandise, thy mariners, and thy pilots, thy calkers, and the occupiers of thy merchandise, and all thy men of war, that are in thee, and in all thy company which is in the midst of thee, shall fall into the midst of the seas in the day of thy ruin.

28)The suburbs shall shake at the sound of the cry of thy pilots.

29)And all that handle the oar, the mariners, and all the pilots of the sea, shall come down from their ships, they shall stand upon the land;

30)And shall cause their voice to be heard against thee, and shall cry bitterly, and shall cast up dust upon their heads, they shall wallow themselves in the ashes:

31)And they shall make themselves utterly bald for thee, and gird them with sackcloth, and they shall weep for thee with bitterness of heart and bitter wailing.

32)And in their wailing they shall take up a lamentation for thee, and lament over thee, saying, What city is like Tyre, like the destroyed in the midst of the sea?

33)When thy wares went forth out of the seas, thou filledst many people; thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with the multitude of thy riches and of thy merchandise.

34)In the time when thou shalt be broken by the seas in the depths of the waters thy merchandise and all thy company in the midst of thee shall fall.

35)All the inhabitants of the isles shall be astonished at thee, and their kings shall be sore afraid, they shall be troubled in their countenance.

36)The merchants among the people shall hiss at thee; thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more.

In a sense, this prophecy had come true before it was even uttered by Ezekiel. The great overland trade of the east that was described would cease to be funneled through Tyre and onto Phoenician ships bound for the west. The Assyrians would see to that. Carthage would quickly rise to take top billing in the Phoenician world, so much so that historians cease to use the term Phoenician, they begin to use the term ‘Punic’ to delineate the connections to Carthage as the predominant power in what used to be a Phoenician world. 

That seems to be a good spot to put a bookmark in things for today.

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).
• Ballard, Robert D., et al., Iron Age Shipwrecks in Deep Water off Ashkelon, Israel, Am. J. of Archaeology, Vol. 106, No. 2 (Apr., 2002), pp. 151-168.
• Braudel, Fernand, Memory and the Mediterranean (1998).
• Christian, Mark A., Phoenician Maritime Religion: Sailors, Goddess Worship, and the Grotta Regina, Die Welt des Orients, Bd. 43, H. 2 (2013), pp. 179-205.
• Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, Book XX.
• Finkelstein, Israel, et al., Phoenician "Torpedo" Amphoras and Egypt: Standardization of Volume Based on Linear Dimensions, Egypt and the Levant, Vol. 21 (2011), pp. 249-259.
• Gertoux, Gerard, Dating the foundation of Carthage.
• Josephus, Against Apion. 1.17.
• Justinus, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus. translated, with notes, by the Rev. John Selby Watson. London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Convent Garden (1853).
• Markoe, Glenn, Phoenicians (2000).
• 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).
• Vergano, Dan, A new day surfaces for deep sea archaeology, USA Today, June 26, 2002.