The Phoenician Culture

The Phoenicians have long been regarded as amongst the first and best seafarers in Ancient Human history. Their advancements in nautical technology and their peoples’ skill on the sea allowed for them to create colonies throughout the Mediterranean Basin and create legends of possible African circumnavigation and while no evidence has been found, journeys across the sea into the Western Hemisphere. What allowed these Levantines to become such capable seafarers and what had forced them to turn their culture to the sea? Many answers can be given to these two question when one looks at both the political environment, the geography, and the technology of the kingdoms in the Near East that allowed for the Phoenician culture to emerge. The Phoenicians
The home cities of the Phoenicians of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos lay on a strip of the Levantine Coast that stretched just under 200 miles, they were hemmed into the strip from the east geographically by Mt Lebanon that spanned for 110 miles of land occupied by the Phoenician cities stopped any spread eastward. Farm land was fertile but not enough to feed a growing population . One of these key resources that the Phoenicians had in their corner where the forests of trees that grew on the slopes of Mt Lebanon, trees like pines, cypresses, and the famous Lebanese cedar. Expansion by land however was not a reasonable option for the Phoenicians. Politically the region that the Phoenicians settled in did not give them much chance to turn into a land empire either. With the Egyptians to the south and Hittites to the north that continually fought over the area of the Levant sending armies up and down the coast, Egypt fought to keep the Phoenician states free as a friendly merchant state and the Hittites trying to take control of the region for their own control and eventually Assyrians to the north east. The Phoenicians were faced against three very large empires that all but stopped their growth by land which of course gives the Phoenicians one last direction to expand, the west to the Mediterranean Sea . The Phoenicians were in a unique position however as
First in Cyprus and then Northern Africa, Western Sicily, the islands of Corsica and Sardinia and Southern France, they spread across the sea looking for new people to trade with always setting up trade posts in the cities they found spread across the region, as their interaction with the city grew over time so did their influence till eventually these cities became Phoenician colonies through emersion as most of these colonies had evidence of occupation before the arrival of the Phoenicians. Many believe that their ability to start expanding across the Mediterranean is tied with the alliance between King Hiram of Tyre and King Solomon of Israel, as gaining an ally that is fully capable of defending itself an is very close by would be a benefit to the Phoenicians . In Cyprus, the Phoenicians traded with other merchants for other types of lumber and copper they used the island as the first main trade hub for ships to either sail north to Greece and Rhodes or west towards Italy and Spain or south towards Africa. Phoenician colonization first targeted the city of Kition on the South-Eastern coast of the island and follows the idea stated above as there were human inhabitants well before the Phoenician merchants arrived and that it became their first colony around the 10th century because of immersion through contact rather than being founded by the Phoenicians . They then expanded westward to Sicily around