32 - Phoenicia and Phoenician colonization

Summary

SETTING AND HISTORY

‘Phoenicia’ in the widest sense was the name given by the Greeks to the coasts of what is now Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. (For the name ‘Phoenicia’ see CAH II. 2,520.) In a narrower sense it was interpreted as the coast from about Dor in the south, northwards to about present-day Tripoli (an area referred to as Metropolitan Phoenicia in this chapter). It consisted of a chain of towns situated in a narrow coastal strip of land seldom more than 3 km in width backed by the Lebanon mountains and the Carmel range. Of these Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, all flourishing towns in the Late Bronze Age, remained important throughout most of the first millennium B.C.; they were the Phoenician towns best known to ancient writers and have provided the bulk of Phoenician inscriptions of any historical importance. Together with Arados (modern Arvad or Ruad), the island town off the Syrian coast (Pls. Vol., pl. 129), these three issued the main Phoenician coinages during the fifth century. From these inscriptions and coins certain broad historical and cultural information may be gleaned. All other direct sources of Phoenician history have been lost; even the Phoenician inscriptions are not noted for the historical information they contain. Tyre at least kept historical records, written down probably in annalistic form. We gather from the Wen-Amun story that Byblos also had chronicles. Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century A.D., made use of the Hellenistic historian Menander of Ephesus (Contra Apionem, 116ff; Ant. Jud. VIII.144; IX.283), who had derived from Tyrian chronicles a list of the kings of Tyre together with their individual lengths of reign and other details, some of which Josephus reproduced.