Phoenitians and arameans

An account of Southwest Asia during the first millennium ВС would not be complete without a mention of the Phoenicians and Arameans; both peoples were members of the Canaanite nation. The name the Phoenicians gave themselves was Kena'ani, Canaanites.

The great gift of the Phoenicians to world history was their dissemination of the alphabet. The first of their alphabetic inscriptions used 22 letters, all of them consonants, dating from the eleventh century. The inscription is found on the sarcophagus of a king of Byblos. Later this Phoenician alphabet became known to the Greeks, allowing it to become the forerunner of all European scripts.

Their contemporaries knew the Phoenicians best for their extensive trading in the Mediterranean. As soon as spring came and the threat of storms passed, the Mediterranean became a lake criss-crossed with Phoenician ships headed for Egypt, Cyprus, North Africa, Greece, and even Spain. About 600 ВС one Phoenician expedition is reputed to have gone around Africa, a feat not accomplished again until AD 1498.

Phoenician trade was in glass, metals, jewelry, lumber from the famous cedars of Mount Lebanon, wine, and cloth. Especially treasured was the purple dye (actually closer to scarlet than purple in modern terms) that the Phoenicians obtained from the murex mollusk. To make a pound of the dye, 60,000 snails gave their lives. Wealthy people all over the Mediterranean wanted to wear cloth of this color to set them apart as men and women of importance.

The most well known of the Phoenicians was Queen Jezebel, who was married to King Ahab of Israel. The Bible recounts how she pursued an aggressive policy to convert her husband's subjects to her religion. This brought down on her the wrath of Yahweh's prophet, Elijah; she was trampled by horses in a bloody death.

The Phoenicians were very active in colonizing other parts of the Mediterranean, establishing settlements all along the Syrian coast and on Cyprus and Malta. The two Phoenician colonies that grew into major cities were Carthage, now in modern Tunisia, and Cadiz, a port of Spain. The Phoenician cities became very wealthy from their dominance of Mediterranean trade allowing the kings of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos to beautify their cities with temples to the Phoenician deity El, his wife Asherah, and Baal, a fertility god.

Because each Phoenician city was independent of the other, little resistance could be offered Assyrians or Persians when they threatened. Sending the monarchs of these nations tribute allowed the Phoenicians the latitude they needed to pursue their economic interests. Like the rest of Southwest Asia, Phoenicia's history extends to the coming of Alexander the Great, when it was merged into the Hellenistic world.

The Arameans, the Canaanites of the interior, were also great traders of the first millennium ВС. Rather than ships, their merchants used caravans of jackasses and camels to carry goods from all over the region, from Phoenicia to the Euphrates. Damascus was at the hub of the Aramean trading network, but other cities such as Aleppo shared in the prosperity that its merchants generated.

So many Aramean merchants traveled throughout Southwest Asia that their language often displaced native tongues. In the seventh century Aramean replaced Akkadian and a century later Hebrew. The Aramean alphabetic script was the forerunner of the modern Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.