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Overview: Of all the peoples of the ancient Near East, the Phoenicians are among the most recognizable but also perhaps the least understood. The Phoenicians never built an empire like the Egyptians and Assyrians; in fact, the Phoenicians never created a unified Phoenician state but instead existed as independent city-state kingdoms scattered throughout the Mediterranean region. However, despite the fact there was never a “Phoenician Empire,” the Phoenicians proved to be more prolific in their exploration and colonization than any other peoples in world history until the Spanish during the Age of Discovery. The Phoenicians built colonies on the African and European sides of the Mediterranean, and likely led trade expeditions to the British Isles and some unidentified parts of Africa, becoming the first people in the ancient Mediterranean to sail beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Some ancient sources even claimed they went far beyond that – according to the 5th century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, contemporary Phoenicians claimed to have circumnavigated Africa about 1,500 years before Vasco da Gamma did it for the Portuguese at the end of the 15th century. Later, when the Achaemenid Persians conquered most of the Near East in the 6th century BCE, the Persians used the Phoenicians to lead their navy as they conquered kingdom after kingdom, eventually engaging the Greek city-states in the Greco-Persian Wars.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
There is no doubt that the alphabets and forms of writing employed by most European languages comes directly from the Phoenicians, but the process by which that took place is still a mystery. Some of the ancient historians provided theories concerning how the Phoenicians gave their alphabet and system of writing to the Greeks, and Herodotus offered an account that is probably more accurate than most. He claimed, “The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus – amongst whom were the Gephyraei – introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first, they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as time went on, and they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighborhood were Ionians; they were also taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations, for their own use, continuing to refer to them as Phoenician characters – as was only right, as the Phoenicians had introduced them.” (Herodotus Histories, V, 58).
Like many of Herodotus’ other passages in Histories, there is truth wrapped with some errors. The Greeks certainly knew of the concept of writing before the Phoenicians, as the Mycenaeans used the Linear B script, but that knowledge had vanished at the end of the Bronze Age (Morkot 1996, 18). Perhaps what makes Herodotus’ account accurate and most interesting is his description of how the writing evolved. He mentions how the Greeks “changed the shape of their letters”, which is the normal course when any group of people adopts a script to write their native language. For example, there are slight variations in the Latin script employed by most modern Western European languages, such as the umlauts in German or the various accents in French and Spanish. The Eastern European Cyrillic script is another example of how a group of people (the Slavs) took the Greek script and altered it to fit their own languages. Herodotus’ account clearly demonstrates that the source he consulted was knowledgeable concerning the transfer of writing and scripts, and there is no reason to reject the assertion that it was the Phoenicians who first brought writing to Europe.
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