Recovery from the disasters of the twelfth century was slow. It is unclear how deep the recession in the Aegean lands was, but much was lost: the art of writing disappeared, except among the Greek refugees in Cyprus; the distinctive swirling styles of Minoan and Mycenaean pottery vanished, except, again, in Cyprus; trade withered; the palaces decayed. The Dark Age was not simply an Aegean phenomenon. There are signs of disorder as far west as the Lipari islands, for in Sicily the old order came to an end in the thirteenth century amid a wave of destruction, and the inhabitants of Lipari were able to preserve some measure of prosperity only by building strong defences.1 The power of the Pharaohs weakened; what saved the land of the Nile from further destruction was the falling away of raids from outside, as the raiders settled in new lands, rather than any internal strength.
By the eighth century new networks of trade emerged, bringing the culture of the East to lands as far west as Etruria and southern Spain. What is astonishing about these new networks is that they were created not by a grand process of imperial expansion (as was happening in western Asia, under the formidable leadership of the Assyrians), but by communities of merchants: Greeks heading towards Sicily and Italy, consciously or unconsciously following in the wake of their Mycenaean predecessors; Etruscan pirates and traders, emerging from a land where cities were only now appearing for the first time; and, most precociously, the Canaanite merchants of Lebanon, known to the Greeks as Phoinikes, ‘Phoenicians’, and resented by Homer for their love of business and profit.2 So begins the long history of contempt for those engaged in ‘trade’. They took their name from the purple dye extracted from the murex shellfish, which was the most prized product of the Canaanite shores. Yet the Greeks also recognized the Phoenicians as the source of the alphabet which became the basis of their new writing system; and Phoenicia was the source of artistic models which transformed the art of archaic Greece and Italy in an age of great creative ferment.
Although the towns of the Lebanese coastline shared a culture and traded side by side, any sense of unity was limited: ‘maritime trade, not territory, defined their sphere’.3 However, the practice of archaeologists is to call the inhabitants of the Levantine littoral Canaanites up to about 1000, thereafter calling them Phoenicians.4 This convention masks an important but difficult problem: when and how the Phoenician cities became great centres of Mediterranean trade, and, more particularly, whether they were able to build on the success of the earlier trading centres of the Levantine coast such as Byblos and Ugarit.5 Ugarit had, as has been seen, been destroyed around 1190 BC; the coast had been settled by people such as the Tjekker of Dor. Disruption undoubtedly occurred; old markets in the west were lost as Crete and the Aegean disappeared from the commercial map. Pirates mauled the traders. But important features of the old Canaanite world survived, sometimes with extraordinary strength.6 The language of the Canaanites became the standard speech of the peoples who inhabited the Levantine lands: Aegean Philistines, Hebrew farmers, town-dwellers in Tyre and Sidon. The religion of the Canaanites was also adopted – with variations – by all but one of the peoples of the region, and even those who opted out – the Hebrews – were not quite so exceptional, for their prophets berated them for following Canaanite practices. The Israelites also knew the Phoenician practice of sometimes immolating their first-born children in sacrificial rituals that incurred the wrath and horror of the biblical prophets and subsequently of Roman writers: ‘you shall not give any of your seed to set them apart for Molech’.7
There was, then, a greater degree of continuity in this corner of the Mediterranean than in Greece or Sicily. Prosperity declined but did not disappear in the eleventh century. But to say that the Phoenicians were a significant commercial presence in the tenth century BC is not to say that they already dominated the trade of the sea. They had other avenues to explore, and selling their purple dyes to the wealthy, militarily irresistible Assyrians in northern Iraq made more commercial sense than hawking it to impoverished peoples across the sea.8 This was not, however, how the Greeks saw the early Phoenicians. Classical writers were convinced that Tyre was founded a few years before the fall of Troy, in 1191 BC; but Tyre itself is a far older site, and its king, Abi-milki, was a significant figure in the fourteenth century, to judge from the correspondence of the Egyptian Pharaohs. The Romans insisted that the Phoenicians were already founding settlements far to the west within a century of the supposed foundation of Tyre: Cádiz in 1104 BC, and Utica and Lixus in North Africa around the same time. This seemed to demonstrate that the early Phoenicians defied the onset of the Dark Age and carved out a network of trade routes, commemorated in the biblical references to a land far to the west, Tarshish, which sounds much like the Tartessos known to classical writers. Though several Roman writers mentioned the very early foundation of Cádiz, they were in fact parroting the opinions of the historian Velleius Paterculus, a contemporary of the Emperor Augustus, who lived 1100 years after the supposed event. Such early dates are not corroborated by archaeology. Even in Phoenicia the archaeological record from the eleventh and tenth centuries is surprisingly poor – this is partly because it is difficult to dig underneath the densely populated cities of modern Lebanon, but partly because the Levantine cities suffered so severely from raids by the Sea Peoples.
The Bible insists on the wealth and power of the kings of Tyre as far back as the tenth century BC. According to the Book of Kings, the alliances between Hiram, king of Tyre and Solomon, king of Israel (who acceded around 960) culminated in a treaty which assured the Tyrians of grain and oil supplies; in exchange they provided timber and craftsmen who built the Temple in the new Israelite capital of Jerusalem.9 The biblical description of the Temple offers an unrivalled account of the appearance of an early Phoenician cult centre, and matches the foundations exposed at Hazor and elsewhere: an external altar, a shrine entrance flanked by two pillars, and then a progression through a larger outer chamber towards an inner Holy of Holies. Israelite amphorae found at Tyre, with a capacity of up to twenty-four litres, prove that the trade in foodstuffs from the lands settled by the early Hebrews continued throughout the ninth and eighth centuries.10 In return for help with the Temple, Solomon is said to have given the king of Tyre a group of settlements in the north of Israel; the Bible calls them cities, but remarks that King Hiram did not like them when he saw them, so evidently Solomon’s estate agents had shown a gift for exaggeration.11 The Israelites had emerged as a force in their own right after centuries herding sheep and growing barley in the hill country east of the Philistine settlements. They knew that Tyre lacked a proper agricultural hinterland; this city, which may have contained 30,000 inhabitants a century or two later, could survive and grow only if it had regular access to grain supplies. The forests full of high-quality timber, rising to great heights behind the city, had to be exploited in trade and exchange if the city were to feed itself.12 The Hebrews were also attracted by the murex shells; though forbidden to eat the shellfish within, they were commanded to colour the fringes of their garments with the dye extracted from these molluscs. This purple dye in fact varied in colour from a vivid blue to a rusty red, depending on how it was treated. Tyre and its neighbours therefore had two great advantages: a luxury product highly prized in the textile trade of western Asia; and a staple product without which house-building, ship construction and the production of countless small household objects was impossible. Thus Tyre and its neighbours did not flourish simply as intermediaries between Asia and Europe. They had something of their own to offer.
The great advantage the Phoenician cities possessed in the eleventh to early ninth centuries was independence from a higher power, and often from one another. The sharp decline in Egyptian influence over the Canaanite lands provided a marvellous opportunity for the Phoenicians to press ahead with their own schemes free from outside interference. The arrival of Assyrian armies from the east in the ninth century acted as a brake: the ‘wolf from the fold’ swept up the coastal cities, just as it eventually absorbed the kingdom of Israel in the hinterland; but the Assyrians were wise enough to see that Phoenicia could remain a source of wealth, and extracted tribute from the continuing trade of Tyre and its neighbours. Until then, Tyre was only one of a series of independent cities along the Phoenician coast, but it became the best known to outsiders such as the Greeks and Hebrews, and it was the mother-city of the leading Phoenician settlement in the west, Carthage, supposedly founded in 814 BC. The rulers of Tyre sometimes exercised dominion over Sidon, and both in Homer and in the Bible they are actually called ‘king of the Sidonians’ (Homer never uses the term ‘Phoenicians’, always ‘Sidonians’).13 This may appear to make Tyre exceptional, but Tyre was typical of Phoenician trading centres in several remarkable respects. Like several later Phoenician colonies, and like Arvad to the north, it stood on an island. Its well-defended position earned the site the name Tzur, for ‘Tyre’ means ‘rock’ or ‘fortress’; only after Alexander the Great built a causeway to link Tyre to the mainland in the late fourth century BC did the city become permanently attached to the coast. These small islands possessed natural defences, but water supply was a constant worry, and late classical accounts describe a water pipe that supplied Arvad from the mainland, though water was also conveyed to the cities in tenders and rainfall was stored in cisterns.14 By the time of Alexander, the island of Tyre had two harbours of its own, one facing Sidon to the north and the other facing Egypt; a canal linked them.15 In the sixth century, the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel imagined Tyre as a fine ship made from the cypresses of Mount Hermon and the cedars of Lebanon; silver, iron, tin and lead arrived from Greece and the west, while the kingdom of Judah sent grain, wax, honey, tallow and balm.16 He gloomily predicted that the magnificent vessel of Tyre was now heading for shipwreck. And yet he provided a periplus, or route map, of the Mediterranean and western Asia, seeing Tyre as the focal point in which all the goods of the world were concentrated – the wealth of Tarshish in the west, of Javan or Ionia in the north, of Tubal and other mysterious lands and islands.
Tyre only gradually became this glorious city. Short trips to Cyprus, Egypt and southern Anatolia continued even during the bleak period after the fall of Ugarit, though economic difficulties in eleventh-century Egypt weakened Tyre, which had relatively intimate ties with the Nile Delta, while Sidon, looking more towards the Asiatic hinterland, was more successful.17 It is not surprising that the artistic influences felt in Phoenicia came from the long-established cultures of western Asia and Pharaonic Egypt. What emerged was an eclectic amalgam of Assyrian and Egyptian styles.18 Some eighth-century ivory fittings from King Omri’s palace at Samaria, the capital of the kingdom of Israel, betray heavy Egyptian influence: two heavenly figures face one another, their wings facing forward; their faces are exposed, and they wear striped headdresses of typically Egyptian design. Though ivory mostly came up the Red Sea or by way of Egypt, it was sent westwards, and Phoenician silver and ivory objects appear in a noble tomb from Praeneste (Palestrina), south of Rome, dating from the seventh century. Gradually, then, the Phoenicians began to open up a new set of routes, into the central and western Mediterranean.
Some of the finest Phoenician products had to be presented to powerful rulers as tribute payments. The bronze gates of Balawat in northern Iraq, now in the British Museum, were built for Shalmanasar III of Assyria in the ninth century; they show Ithobaal, king of Tyre, loading a cargo of tribute on to ships standing in one of the harbours of Tyre, and an inscription solemnly announces: ‘I received the tribute from the boats of the people of Tyre and Sidon’. Yet the tribute cannot have been sent from Tyre to northern Iraq on sea-going ships. The bronze panel portrays the fact that the Canaanites of the seaboard acquired their wealth from sailing the Mediterranean.19 This is confirmed by the annals of Assurnasirpal, an Assyrian king, who died in 859 BC, and who claimed to have acquired from Tyre, Sidon, Arvad and other coastal cities ‘silver, gold, lead, copper, vessels of bronze, garments made of brightly coloured wool, linen garments, a great monkey, a small monkey, maple-wood, boxwood and ivory, and a nahiru, a creature of the sea’. Here we can see a mixture of the exotic and the day-to-day, commodities carried across the Mediterranean and others produced in Phoenicia itself, as well as rare items such as the monkeys, which probably arrived via the Red Sea.20 The Red Sea trade that fed into the Mediterranean was remembered in the biblical account of the ships of Ophir, sent out from Eilat by Solomon and Hiram.21
The Phoenicians traded without minting money, though they did not simply rely on barter.22 For large payments they made use of ingots of silver and copper; sometimes too they paid or were paid in cups made of precious metals, presumably of standard weight (a memory of this is preserved in the biblical story of the cup that Joseph hid in the grain sack of his younger brother Benjamin, and in the story of Wenamun).23 The employment of standardized weights such as the shekel provides clear evidence that, even without coinage, the Phoenicians were able to operate what might be called a market economy; or, put differently, they were familiar with a money economy, but money takes many forms other than coinage. Only much later, the Carthaginians began to mint coins; but their aim was to facilitate trade with the Greeks in Sicily and southern Italy, who were enthusiastic users of coin.24 Metals, though, were the foundation of Phoenician trade in the Mediterranean: the first identifiable base of the Phoenicians was quite close to home, in copper-rich Cyprus, near Larnaka, and was established in the ninth century. Known to the Greeks as Kition and to the Hebrews as Kittim, among the Phoenicians the town generally went by the simple name ‘New City’, Qart Hadasht, the same name that would later be applied to Carthage in North Africa and Cartagena in Spain.25 What was important at Kition was the attempt to create a colony and to gain dominion over the land that surrounded it; an inscription of the mid-eighth century indicates that the governor of the ‘New City’ was an agent of the king of Tyre, and he worshipped the Baal Libnan, the ‘Lord of Lebanon’, though Kition also contained a massive temple dedicated to the female deity Astarte.26 The granaries of Cyprus were as great an attraction as its copper. Without regular supplies of food not just from the grain lands of Israel but from Cyprus they could not cope with the boom in their own city, whose increasing wealth was reflected by growth in population and greater pressure on resources. Unfortunately for the Tyrians, their success in Cyprus attracted the attention of the Assyrian king; Sargon II (d. 705 BC) acquired dominion over Cyprus, an event that marked the brief but significant arrival of the Assyrians in Mediterranean waters. An inscription recording Sargon’s dominion was set up in Kition; he continued to receive tribute from the island over several years, without interfering in its internal affairs, because his aim was to exploit the island’s wealth.27 Its attractions as a source of copper were not, of course, lost on this warrior king. Later, the Assyrian hold on Cyprus weakened, for King Luli of Sidon and Tyre fled from Tyre to safety in Cyprus; the event was commemorated in a relief that portrayed the humiliated king scurrying away on a Phoenician boat.28 But Cyprus was only the most important place in a network of contacts that brought Phoenician merchants regularly to Rhodes and Crete.
By the end of the ninth century, then, Phoenician commerce across the Mediterranean had taken off. There is room for argument whether this take-off preceded that of the Greek merchants and of other mysterious groups such as the ‘Tyrsenians’ who are mentioned in the Aegean and Tyrrhenian Seas at this time. Whoever reached Italy first, the Phoenicians must be given credit for the elongated routes they created, stretching all the way along the coasts of North Africa.
The best way to trace the trading empire of the early Phoenicians is to take a tour of the Mediterranean some time around 800 BC.29 This tour will also pass through the Straits of Gibraltar, to reach Cádiz and beyond, for one of the distinctive features of Phoenician trade in the Mediterranean was that these merchants from the extreme east of the Mediterranean also exploited the point of exit at the extreme west, giving access to the Atlantic Ocean. Taking into account the prevailing winds and currents in the Mediterranean, and the certainty that they travelled in a relatively short open season between late spring and early autumn, they must have taken a northerly route past Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete, then across the open expanse of the Ionian Sea to southern Sicily, southern Sardinia, Ibiza and southern Spain. Their jump across the Ionian Sea took them out of sight of land, as did their trajectory from Sardinia to the Balearics; the Mycenaeans had tended to crawl round the edges of the Ionian Sea past Ithaka to the heel of Italy, leaving pottery behind as clues, but the lack of Levantine pottery in southern Italy provides silent evidence of the confidence of Phoenician navigators. Once in the waters around Málaga, westward-bound Phoenician ships often stalled. Weather conditions in the Straits of Gibraltar can be treacherous; there is a strong inflow from the Atlantic, and fogs alternate with contrary winds. This could mean a lengthy wait before tentatively taking passage through the Straits towards Cádiz and other commercial outposts. Fortunately, it was easier to enter the Mediterranean from the Atlantic than to leave it, this time taking advantage of the winds and currents that blocked their exit. On the return journey to Tyre the Phoenicians coasted along the great long flank of North Africa, but even then enormous care was needed: there were treacherous shoals and banks; nor, for long stretches, was there as much to buy as could be found in the metal-rich islands of Cyprus, Sicily and Sardinia.30 On the other hand, Carthage, with its sizeable harbours, offered a refuge and helped to ensure the safety of waters very far from home in which Greek and Etruscan pirates abounded.
The ships can be reconstructed from carved bas-reliefs erected in the Assyrian palaces at Nineveh and elsewhere. Marine archaeologists have begun to expose the remains of Phoenician ships: there are some very late examples of Carthaginian vessels from western Sicily, of the third century BC; rather more fragmentary are two early Phoenician wrecks found thirty-three nautical miles west of the ancient Philistine port of Ashkelon, carrying pottery of the late eighth century.31 The overall impression is that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians favoured heavier ships than those that were developed by the Greeks. There is a strong impression of continuity from the days when the ships of Byblos and Ugarit plied the eastern Mediterranean; and yet the Phoenicians have also been credited with important innovations. There were the sharp beak-like rams which were such fearful weapons in the naval warfare of the classical period, having been copied by the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans. By developing the keel the Phoenicians weighted their boats skilfully and made it possible to carry large cargoes in reasonably stable conditions across the open sea. The art of caulking ships with pitch is also supposedly a Phoenician invention, of obvious importance in making ships watertight during long voyages.
All this points to a real increase in carrying capacity in the trade of the Mediterranean at this period. The vessels themselves were not significantly larger than those of ancient Byblos: some ships of Ugarit, around 1200 BC, could carry forty-five tons of cargo, and the maximum capacity of Phoenician ships was only a little more.32 What improved was the stability of the ships. It was this that made voyages as far as Atlantic ports such as Cádiz and Mogador realistic, and perhaps even enabled the circumnavigation of Africa, attributed by Herodotos to the sixth century BC. The rounded ships used for long- and medium-distance trade were three or four times as long as they were broad, and could achieve a length of as much as 30 metres, though the Ashkelon wrecks were about half that length.33 Portrayed on the Balawat gates, they have high prows, decorated with the image of a horse’s head (perhaps in homage to a god of the sea similar to Poseidon, who was also a horse-lover);34 eyes might be painted on the bows, while at the stern, beyond the quarterdeck, the planking was gathered together in what looks like a fish-tail. A square sail was raised on a mast which, the biblical prophets say, was often made of cedarwood from Lebanon; some ships also made use of oar power. The rudder consisted of a broad oar attached to the port side. The impression is of sturdy boats with good carrying capacity, well suited to the trade in grain, wine and oil, and not simply fast flyers carrying small quantities of exotic luxury items. This is confirmed by the two early wrecks, which, between them, carried nearly 800 wine amphorae, making a cargo (if the amphorae were full) that weighed twenty-two tons. There were also smaller vessels, not greatly dissimilar, which serviced the short trade routes between the scattered ports of the Phoenician trading network; examples of these small vessels, about half the size of the Ashkelon ships, have been found in the waters of southern Spain, carrying lead ingots, wickerwork and local southern Spanish pottery.35 These were the tramp steamers of the very early Mediterranean. Trade networks were dedicated as much to primary products such as foodstuffs as to high-value goods such as the ivory objects and silver bowls found in princely tombs in southern Spain and Etruria.36 A different type of vessel evolved for use in warfare, characterized by the sharp bronze spike with which Phoenician captains tried to ram their opponents’ ships. These ships were about seven times as long as they were wide, and they had a foremast as well. The warships also differed from the round cargo boats by making use of oar power for manoeuvring, especially at the battle scene.37
The earliest Phoenician object to have been found in the west is an inscribed tablet from southern Sardinia, the ‘Nora stele’, from the late ninth century; it mentions the building of a temple dedicated to the god Pumay, whose name appears in the common Phoenician name Pumayyaton (in Greek, Pygmalion). The inscription was made be-shardan, ‘in Sardinia’, so the island already possessed its name. Since the south of Sardinia offered a great medley of fine metals, including iron and silver, it is no surprise that Phoenicians appeared there. Possibly those who erected the inscription were pioneers, but the fact that they built a temple suggests they intended to stay in the area; building a temple was often one of the first acts of Phoenician settlers. And it was in the area of the Mediterranean due south of Nora that the Phoenicians were beginning to create substantial settlements of lasting importance.
Outstanding among these settlements was Carthage. Virgil happily backdated its foundation to the period of the Trojan War, when Aeneas visited its queen, Dido (also known as Elissa); but Virgil’s Aeneid was a meditation on the past and future of Rome, and it is not surprising that he found in his book a role for the most potent enemy republican Rome had ever faced. Other classical writers, including the Jewish historian Josephus, provided alternative accounts of the birth of Carthage, in which once again Dido-Elissa appeared, fleeing from her tyrannical brother Pygmalion, who had assassinated her husband, the high priest of Herakles (the Greeks assimilated Herakles to the Canaanite god Melqart, Melk-Qart, that is, ‘king of the city’). Her first port of call was Kition in Cyprus, another Qart Hadasht or ‘New City’; then she decided to head westwards and gathered together eighty young women who were to serve as sacred prostitutes and ensure the continuation of the Phoenician cult in the lands the refugees would settle.38 They made straight for North Africa, landing at the site of Carthage; they were not the first Phoenicians to arrive in the region, however, and the men of nearby Utica were on hand to greet them. They were also warmly welcomed by the Libyans who inhabited that area; it was these locals who first called Elissa Dido, meaning ‘the wanderer’. The Phoenicians were not prevented from settling, but when it came to purchasing land, the Libyan king was less generous. He said that Dido-Elissa could buy as much land as could be covered by an ox-hide. The queen astutely countered this by cutting an ox-hide into very fine ribbons, which were laid out to trace the outline of the hill of Byrsa, the acropolis of Carthage. Attractive though this foundation legend is, it was no more than an attempt by Greek writers to explain the origin of the name of the hill at the heart of Carthage, for byrsa meant ‘animal hide’ in Greek. What they actually heard was the Canaanite word brt, meaning ‘citadel’. Even after this deception, the Libyan king was still powerfully attracted by Dido. He insisted on marrying her; but she was intensely loyal to her husband’s memory, and immolated herself on a pyre to avoid marriage, whereupon the settlers began to worship her as a goddess.39 Tendentious though this account is, it has two important features. One is the persistence of the story of the self-immolating queen, which Virgil would pass into the mainstream of classical and subsequently European literature. The other feature is the apparent accuracy of some of the small details: the dating – about thirty-eight years before the first Olympiad (776+38=814) – accords with archaeological evidence that it was just at this period that the area was settled by Phoenicians. The Carthaginian elite continued to call themselves the ‘children of Tyre’, bene Tzur, or simply ‘Tyrians’, and later classical writers reported regular gifts from Carthage to the temple of Melqart in Tyre. Possibly, too, the self-sacrifice of Dido is a later attempt to portray something that was real enough in the Phoenician world, and was practised with especial fervour in Carthage: a human sacrifice, intended to secure the good grace of the god Melqart at the moment of the city’s foundation.
It is disappointing that there are no objects from Carthage that can securely be dated to the first half of the eighth century; the archaeological record begins with burials, starting around 730 BC, and fragments of pottery from about 750 BC onwards. Strikingly, the earliest objects to survive are Greek, not Phoenician, geometric wares from Euboia in the Aegean, though, as will be seen, the Euboians had recently founded a colony of their own in the Bay of Naples, so some of this material could have come from there.40 Early Carthage was not, then, sealed off from the developing world of Greek trade and colonial settlement. Homer’s contempt for ‘Sidonian’ traders was the result of contact between the Phoenician and Greek trading spheres. Remarkably, the Greek pottery was deposited as a foundation offering underneath the shrine known as the tophet, where child sacrifices took place, of which more in a moment.
Carthage rapidly became the queen of the Phoenician colonies. The usual explanation for its rise is that the city was well placed for merchants travelling to and from southern Spain. However, objects of Spanish origin are hard to identify in the lowest levels of ancient Carthage. Other explanations would emphasize its origin as a place of refuge for Tyrian exiles, for migrants from Kition in Cyprus, and for the population overspill of the increasingly prosperous Levantine coastal cities; it also absorbed many local Berbers. But the real key to the success of Carthage lay not in Spain or in Phoenicia but at the gates of the city: the agricultural wealth of the region impressed classical writers, who described the villas and estates that surrounded the city, while a fifth- or fourth-century treatise on agriculture by the Carthaginian author Magon was translated into both Latin and Greek on the orders of the Roman Senate.41 The aristocracy of Carthage derived its wealth from grain, olive oil and vineyards, not from purple dyes, cedar forests and ivory panels, as had the people of Tyre. All this accords well with the evidence from the round ships which, as has been seen, were much better suited to the carriage of jars full of oil and wine, and sacks of grain, than to the purveyance of costly luxuries. Carthage was clearly large and flourishing well before 600, and this would have been inconceivable without good local supplies of food. Carthage emerged so strongly because it became the focal point of a network of its own. This included other Phoenician settlements in the region; Utica lay not far away on the coast of North Africa, and was older, but it never managed to compete with Carthage. Motya in Sicily, on the other hand, was in certain respects more like Tyre or Arvad than Carthage; it has been described as ‘a model of Phoenician settlement’.42 Motya was founded in the eighth century on a small island a short distance from the western tip of Sicily, near modern Marsala; the island is well sheltered, lying between a reasonably substantial ‘Isola Grande’ and the Sicilian coast.43 Another feature reminiscent of Tyre was the existence of purple dye factories, and so it was more than a trading station: it was a centre of industry, including the production of iron goods. Its boom period was the seventh century BC, and at this time child sacrifices became increasingly common, though why this should have been so is far from clear. The Motyans shared with the Tyrians the lack of an extensive hinterland under their own control. But this stimulated them to build friendly ties with the native Elymians of western Sicily, whose closest major centre was the great shrine of Eryx (Erice), standing on a peak towering above the western Sicilian coast. It was from the Elymians that they obtained the grain, oil and wine they needed, which was abundant in the west of Sicily. The Motyans also had access to the wide, white saltpans of Trapani, on the coast below Eryx; and where there was salt there was also an opportunity to preserve fish, such as the abundant tuna that appears seasonally off the coasts of Sicily. Fish was a speciality of the Carthaginians, who are credited with inventing the foul-smelling fish-sauce, garum, which the Romans so loved. But the Phoenicians did not seek to conquer their neighbours. Their settlements were centres of trade and industry; they made no attempt to establish political dominion over western Sicily.
Phoenician territorial ambitions did, however, extend beyond Sicily. In southern Sardinia a cluster of colonies emerged from 750 onwards, which aimed not just to provide safe harbours but to dominate the countryside, probably so as to guarantee basic supplies. Most of these settlements were classic Phoenician bases, built on isthmuses jutting into the sea, as at Tharros and Nora; at Sulcis the lowest excavated levels, just like those of Carthage, contained Greek pottery from Euboia.44 Heading inland, the Phoenicians occupied some of the ancient forts, or nuraghi, while to all appearances maintaining peaceful relations with the indigenous Sardinians, who welcomed the opportunity to trade their metals and cereals with wealthy merchants based at Sulcis. The hold of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians on Sardinia was confirmed in about 1540 when the Carthaginians and Etruscans chased away the Greeks of Phokaia in a great naval battle off Alalia in Corsica; this ensured that Corsica and Sardinia remained outside the Greek sphere, and, in view of the value of Sardinia as a source of all sorts of metals and agricultural goods, the victory greatly strengthened Phoenician power in the western Mediterranean. Although the Phokaian Greeks established a base at Marseilles, the far west of the Mediterranean was closed to intensive Greek penetration so long as Carthage remained a major power; it was left to the Phoenicians to exploit the potential of southern Spain and Morocco. The existence of these settlements tells us where the Phoenicians went to live but not how far they actually travelled. Evidence for the impact of the Tyrians comes from tombs in Italy, Spain and elsewhere, some containing the chased silver vessels decorated with animal designs which were greatly prized in central Italy during the sixth century. But it is unclear whether the Phoenician and Carthaginian merchants were free agents or agents of the state. Sometimes they were sent on missions by rulers and received commission for their work, as when they operated in the service of the Assyrian monarch. Out in the west, they were able to operate as their own masters. At first they were able to supply princely courts in Etruria and Carthage itself. By 500 BC they had carved out trading networks that depended on their own investment and provided them with direct profit; working for others lost its attraction.
The far west became increasingly attractive. Greek writers such as Strabo (writing early in the first century AD) insisted on the importance of southern Spain as a source of silver. There was a cluster of Phoenician bases in the Mediterranean approaches to the Straits of Gibraltar: at Montilla, Málaga, Almuñécar and other spots now buried beneath the concrete of the Costa del Sol. Some of these settlements were within a few hours’ or even a few minutes’ walking distance of one another; most were tied into the local economy and society, though finds of finely burnished early sixth-century Etruscan pottery at a site near Málaga indicate that wider connections also existed.45 An early Phoenician settlement existed on Ibiza, within distant sight of the Iberian mainland; the usual exchanges of metals for oil and wine took place, though another asset of Ibiza throughout its history has been its gleaming saltpans. On the Iberian mainland, the case of the little town of Toscanos, founded around 730 BC, is instructive. Toscanos was a community of as many as 1,500 people in the mid to late seventh century, whose artisans produced iron and copper goods, though it had been abandoned by about 550, for whatever reason. The impression is of a modest Phoenician trading station, attuned to the needs of the local Iberian population, not particularly significant in the wider Phoenician trading networks, but quite important if one wants to understand how the Iberians were transformed through their contact with peoples from the east.
In fact, the major Phoenician base in this region lay beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, at Gadir or Cádiz; but because it fed its profits into the Mediterranean networks of the Phoenicians early Cádiz is also part of the history of the Mediterranean. Like so many Phoenician settlements, Gadir was founded on an offshore island, although the traditional date of 1104 BC is over 300 years too early. A temple of Melqart was established, and Cicero later recorded that human sacrifice was carried on here – probably a spring sacrifice in honour of the annual resurrection of Melqart recorded in Canaanite myth. This was a wealthy temple which functioned as a storehouse for precious objects as well as a cult centre, something which was seen as normal in the early Mediterranean trading world. And there was plenty to store in Melqart’s shrine, for Gadir was the prime gateway to the wealth of the land known from the time of Herodotos as Tartessos. This is a place that has been argued over by scholars almost since antiquity. Some have seen Tartessos as a city, even as a river; now the name is taken to refer to a kingdom or region in southern Spain, inhabited by the native Iberian population. Its great attraction, or rather that of the lands bordering the river Guadalquivir, was its silver deposits: ‘silver is synonymous with Tartessos’.46 If Herodotos is to be believed, the Greek trader Kolaios of Samos was blown off course, arrived in southern Spain in the mid-seventh century and brought sixty talents of silver (maybe 2,000 kilograms) back from Tartessos. The name dubiously ascribed to the local king whom Kolaios met was Arganthonios, the first letters of which mean ‘silver’.
It was the Phoenicians, not the Iberians, who transported the silver eastwards, both to Greece and Asia, according to the late testimony of Diodoros the Sicilian (first century BC). In exchange the Phoenicians brought olive oil and examples of their own craftsmanship such as jewellery, ivory objects, small perfume flasks and textiles; they taught the Tartessians how to extract, refine and process metals, beginning as far back as the eighth century. The methods used were sophisticated. This was not an exploitative ‘colonial’ relationship of ‘unfair exchange’, as one Spanish scholar has fashionably claimed.47 It was the Tartessians who enthusiastically set to work, extracting and smelting not just silver but gold and copper at mining centres across southern Spain and Portugal, and, as even those addicted to a ‘colonialist’ interpretation admit, it was the local Iberians who controlled ‘every facet of production’ and were ‘firmly in control of their own resources’, from mining to smelting; the Iberian elites profited from the trade alongside the Phoenicians. Local artists began to adopt Phoenician styles, and the wealth that the Iberian princes acquired enabled them to live in a grand style. Here, contact with the East transformed a traditional society in the West, as was happening on an even greater scale in Etruria. The Phoenicians did not simply have a long reach; their activities also had the power to lift the political and economic life of a far-off land to a new level. They were beginning to transform the entire Mediterranean.
Tartessos has often been equated with the metal-rich land of Tarshish mentioned again and again in the Hebrew Bible. Jonah, fleeing from God, set out from Jaffa for Tarshish, which the author of this story clearly understood to be somewhere extremely remote, the furthest one could go across the seas. And Isaiah delivered a fearful prophecy concerning Tyre in which ships coming from Tarshish by way of Kittim (Kition in Cyprus) learn of the destruction of their home city: ‘howl, ye ships of Tarshish, for it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in’.48
To make this system of trade work, the Phoenicians did not, as has been seen, have much use for coins. Far more important to them was their ability to record what they were doing. The merchants were literate and employed a simple, linear script that was easy to learn and rapid to write, the ancestor of most modern alphabets (in the strict sense of the term: a script with approximately one letter for each sound).49 The art of reading and writing had mainly been a priestly craft, for the complex sound combinations in the three Egyptian scripts could be read only by the well-trained; even the syllabic scripts such as Linear B were clumsy, all the more so when imposed on a language like Greek which was not easily divided into simple consonant plus vowel syllables. In Phoenician script, a sign for a house represents ‘b’ because the word for house, bet, begins with a ‘b’. Many, though not all, of the twenty-two Phoenician letters, beginning with ’aleph, the ‘ox’, originated in the same way. The secret of success lay in the total exclusion of vowels, which were introduced only by the Greeks. Mlk could thus represent the word for ‘he rules’ or ‘he ruled’, depending on the vowels, which the attentive reader would have to supply from context. The first known example of this script survives on the coffin of King Ahiram of Byblos, from the tenth century. The important point is not whether the Phoenicians invented the alphabet from scratch (an earlier script used in Sinai may have provided some letters), but the fact that they diffused the alphabet across the Mediterranean, not merely to their settlements in the west, as the Nora stele proves, but to neighbours, the Greeks of Ionia, who converted letters they considered superfluous, such as the guttural stops absent from Greek, into vowel sounds, and subtly redesigned most of the signs.50
What the Phoenicians possessed in the way of literature is a mystery. The Canaanites of Ugarit produced impressive religious poetry not dissimilar to the psalms, and the Carthaginians wrote tracts on agronomy. There is a dismissive tendency to see much that the Phoenicians produced as derivative, and in the fine arts their dependence on Egyptian and Assyrian models is plain, as, for example, in their ivory carvings. This, of course, was what consumers across the Near East and the Mediterranean wanted: wares which carried the stamp not of the profit-hungry Canaanite towns, but of the great imperial civilizations of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates; and the Phoenicians knew how to satisfy that demand for clients as far west as Tartessos and Tuscany. The spread of Phoenician culture across the Mediterranean, as far as southern Spain, effected both through settlements and through trade with indigenous peoples, is important not just because it brought eastern styles so far to the West; this was also the first time that mariners from the East had reached so very far across the sea, ranging a long way beyond the Mycenaean navigators who had crept round from western Greece to southern Italy and Sicily.
Though the Phoenicians intermarried with native peoples, they did not lose their distinctive eastern Mediterranean culture, their identity and identification as ‘Tyrians’ or ‘Canaanites’; nothing demonstrated this more forcibly than the practice of human sacrifice, which they carried with them from the land of Canaan. It was a practice that gave rise to deep abhorrence among biblical and classical authors: the story of the failed sacrifice of Isaac is one among many biblical invectives against child sacrifice. If anything this practice increased in intensity in the new settlements, especially Carthage, Sulcis and Motya. In the tophet at Carthage, which lay to the south of the city and can be visited today, children were offered to Baal for 600 years; in the last 200 years of the city, 20,000 urns were filled with the bones of children (and, occasionally, small animals), making an average of 100 urns a year, bearing in mind that one urn might contain the bones of several children. The tophets were special places of reverence. Very many urns contained the remains of what seem to have been stillborn, premature and naturally aborted infants, and in a society where infant mortality must have been high, many other remains must be those of children who died naturally. The tophets were thus graveyards for children who died prematurely; once adulthood was achieved, burial replaced cremation.51 So, while human sacrifice did occur, as biblical and classical sources insist, it was less common than the vast number of jars containing infants’ charred bones at first sight suggests, increasing in scale when great emergencies threatened, as the supreme way of appeasing the gods. Two Greek historians report that when Carthage was besieged by the tyrant of Syracuse in 310, the city fathers decided that they needed to appease Baal, whose displeasure noble families had incurred by sacrificing child slaves in place of their own firstborn; 500 noble children were then offered to their angry god. A fourth-century stele from the tophet at Carthage portrays a priest in a flat, fez-like headdress and a transparent robe, carrying a child to the place of sacrifice. The practice, described by classical and biblical texts, was to place the living child on the extended arms of the statue of Baal; sacrificial victims then would drop, alive, from the arms down into the burning fiery furnace that raged beneath.52 Child sacrifice was a way of affirming their identity as servants of Baal, Melqart and the Phoenician pantheon and as Tyrians hundreds of years after their forefathers had migrated from Lebanon to North Africa, Sicily and Sardinia. So, while the artistic output of the Phoenicians – and particularly of the Carthaginians – may appear lacking in originality, these were people with an overpowering sense of their identity.