The Phoenicians

in prehistoric island, or what made Alexander truly great.

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leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. It's 3000 years ago and a fleet of sturdy ships sailed west past a towering promenade

of thelooking a wide straight of water. In later centuries, the Greeks would label this greater limestone mountain a pillar of their hero Heracles, the rock of Jupiter. The sailors come from far away from a city on the eastern most coast of the great sea they have just left, the island stronghold of Tire.

Their expertly crafted ships originate from the great sea to wood forests close to their coastal home.

Together they have traversed hundreds of kilometers of coastline, and now they have finally

reached the exit of the Mediterranean. They come with cargo from their homeland, stacks and stacks of finally crafted pottery, wine carried in tall clay jars, and also more infamously, slaves. All would be offloaded at their final destination now not far away, sold to the highest bitters.

These sailors were traders first and foremost, just as their fathers and grandfathers had been before them. Their people would become known as some of the greatest sea fairers of ancient history, a mysterious yet fascinating view, the Phoenicians. From their rise and prominence on the ancient Mediterranean stage, to their lasting legacy

down to the present day with the alphabet, and their legendary sea fairing. In this episode, we're going to introduce you to who these so-called Phoenicians were, and why they are some of the most fascinating peoples from antiquity. I'm Tristan Hughes your host, and this is the story of the Phoenicians. Our guest is Dr. Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at St. John's College University

of Cambridge. Josephine, I can't believe we haven't had you on the show before.

It is a pleasure to welcome you finally to the ancients.

It's great to be here, thank you. You're more than welcome, and I think we need to get into one of the big questions first off. Josephine, who were the Phoenicians? Well, the people we call Phoenician now were the people who lived in the ports of the Eastern

Mediterranean, so what we now call the Lefand, so modern Lebanon, bits of Syria, bits of Israel and so on, but it's a string of ports that run down that coast, and the people who lived there were extraordinary sailors, navigators, inventors, and they're really what they have earliest explorers of the Mediterranean.

“Is that why we primarily remember the word Phoenician today?”

Is it very much linked to that idea of exploration and sea travel? Yeah, I think so. I mean, the reason that we call these people Phoenicians, so they, they themselves would probably have thought of themselves in terms of the cities they came from, tire, side and, bit lost, later, calf-fish and so on, but we call them Phoenician because that's what the ancient

Greeks call them. It seems to have been a term for people you meet on the sea who speak a really different language to you, that's really how they use that, so I think right from the beginning, it's a name for sort of sailing foreigners somehow. So almost kind of describes certain attributes of someone like, I think in other words, the

Tarantine gets called later on for people who like, who could throw javelins from their horses and move around, it's almost like the attributes of a person and then they can be labelled a Phoenician, is that the idea?

“Yeah, I think above all, it's going to be the language they speak, because Phoenicians”

is the language very like Hebrew or even Arabic or in the ancient world, Aramaia, Acadian even a bit further away again, these are all somitic languages and they're extremely different from the Indo-European language or languages dialects that people living in what we now call

people seem so foreign to them, that's why they can give them a kind of collective label,

“because they sort of recognise the type of person, sailors like themselves, city dwellers,”

people living city states, in fact, so on, but they speak a really different language, I mean, the actual name Phoenician, nobody's quite sure what it originally meant, it can be, because of course it's a Greek name, so one thing that certainly was associative with it in antiquity is the palm tree, the phenics in Greek, but you know, the coast of the Levant is by no means the only place in the Mediterranean to get palm trees, so it seems like that's more of

a kind of later association from the name, not just an explain the name, and other ideas that another meaning of phenics in Greek is a kind of red or sort of reddy brown, purpley color,

and one thing that these cities were very adept at, very early on, was producing a kind

of purple dye from a sea stale, the remains of a sea stale, a kind of squeeze them for the dough, it's really horrible, but they had kind of factoos for this sort of thing, and that really does seem to have been a speciality of this particular group of cities and

“language speakers, so I mean, I think that's the best guess for where the name originally came”

from, it was something to do with this sort of profession, a speciality of them, but yeah, I think it becomes a very generic term, the Eastern foreign trade a person. So interesting, and a bit more on that topography of where they came from Josephine, so these coastal cities should be also imagined that there was like great planes outside of the cities, or were they very much kind of crammed up next to the coast, what we should

be thinking? No, it's a good question, they're really crammed up, is the answer, because if you think about the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, the coast of the Levant, these are cities like Beirut, would be another example, an ancient Venetian city that has carried on into the modern period, you've actually got very little coastal plane before your right up against

mountains, along most of this coast, not the whole way down, but for most of it, and so actually these are not great agricultural cities, I mean, every ancient city has to grow enough food to feed itself beyond what you can get by imports and so on, so it's not that these people didn't do any farming or agricultural at all, but it wasn't the basis of their economy, economic practices and so on.

And so what types of sources you mentioned that Phoenicia, that the word is a Greek name,

“so I think that gives a bit of a hint of to one of our sources, but what types of sources”

do we have surviving to learn more about these people? So a variety of things, there's no, unfortunately nobody wrote a guide to the Phoenicians in antiquity in any language, so sort of sort of sort of references here and there in various authors. So a lot of ancient Greek interests, the historian Herodotus, and fascinated by these

people, and they're very big part of his stories of early Greece and so on, very lots of interaction, settlement, and sort of so on, co-conspiracy in a way, Roman authors, take over this interest from the Greek, selling by the time many of the Roman authors that we have preserved, that's a Latin author, that's we have preserved today of writing.

These people are no longer really powerful, so those cities of the Eastern Mediterranean

time, and so on, have kind of faded over the course, the first millennium BCE, and then their great Western colony of Carthage is destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE. So after that, you can say different, it's a kind of heritage references to them, and it's still plenty of Phoenicians because living in the Mediterranean, particularly southern Mediterranean, North African, so on, but they, after 146, there's no longer a kind of political

focus for them, so it becomes more of a kind of nostalgic literature. You also get a lot of references in the Hebrew Bible, so these are neighbors, but I direct neighbors, very close, speaking a language that, or dialects that were in many cases, probably mutually comprehensible with the big cities of the Hebrew Bible, so narrative of the Hebrew Bible, Jerusalem, and so on, so, and there's quite a lot of references to them,

including really sort of fascinating insights into aspects of their life on the sea that to slave trading was clearly a big aspect, certain of Tyrion merchants, they were moving

archaeology, they're one of the problems with archaeology, and the Phoenicians is that

“these cities that they inhabited are so located in such excellent strategic locations that”

many of them are still occupied today, so it's actually quite tricky, but in places like Tyre, my goodness, we'd love to have more of ancient Tyre than we do, but a great deal of it is still the city of the modern, large city of Tyre. There are some places like Carthage, in particular that have become, they're kind of getting rebuilt now, the Carthage now is a sort of seaside suburb of Tunis, and it is actually, there's quite a lot of development to a kind of

worrying degree for the archaeology over the last decade or two, but in general it's one place where it's easier to see more. And do we get a sense from this surviving archaeology? Do we get lots of inscriptions or do we get writing from these people themselves? Well, this is one of the frustrations and the mysteries of these people, so the frustration is that there are huge number of inscriptions.

“I mean, more than 10,000 inscriptions in Phoenicians, I think that's great, we must”

know so much from all that stuff, and of course, the great thing about inscriptions is that in many cases, and this is one of them, you get the sort of witness of the whole social order, and things like gravestones, those are inscriptions, right? You go to a cemetery for now, or a graveyard, and you'll see a huge social range of people and you'll facts about them and so on, and it's really interesting, much more so often than the kind of people who are writing the great literature of the day.

For the problem with this 10,000 plus inscriptions, is that 9,900 and probably

50 of them say exactly the same thing. They're basically from sanctuaries, their dedications to

the gods, but worded in exactly the same way, the vast majority of them are from carpet itself,

“and they don't actually say very much about the people who are dedicated, don't say very much,”

about the gods. So that's really frustrating, and it's made even more frustrating by the fact that there is no Venetian language literature. There are some books written in Greek, much later on, when really we're talking about sort of heritage society, where people are claiming to be Venetian, or claiming to write about ancient Venetian myths and so on, and that may well be true, but it's all kind of would be like people now writing about the time of Shakespeare and so on,

and it's just not quite the same thing, but without having Shakespeare himself. And there's like the mystery here is that no one is quite sure why there's no Venetian literature. There's nothing, you know, as I said, these are the immediate neighbors of the people who are writing the books of the Hebrew Bible, in exactly the same period. They're the pretty close neighbors of the Greek city states, where people are writing, particularly in Athens, of course, but in other places as well,

and on the coast of Turkey, Greek speakers writing various things that just up the coast to regrets, on the coast of Syria and the Bronze Age, the huge amounts of writing in a very similar language definition, so there's kind of gap in the Phoenician city states, and I mean, there's sort of two ways to approach this. One is to say, this is the kind of very pragmatic answer to it, which is very kind of likely to be right, which is that it rains a lot in this part of the world.

I mean, not as much as it does in this part of the world. It rains quite a lot in the Levant as well, and so if things are being written on Papyrus, they don't really survive. I mean, in each it they survive, it's so dry, but further north they don't survive. And on what we have from the Bronze Age, the Disable of Ant, is a thing's written in Quneiform script on clay tablets, and then fired, so they survive, not necessarily that was the intention of buying them, but it's the effect.

And so when people stop doing that around a thousand BCE and they start writing on Papyrus instead, do you often might think of that as a kind of step forward, as opposed to what we do, who is a right on paper, but actually it means that it's much less likely to survive. So that's one thing,

there may have been an incredible literature in Phoenician, and so many factual accounts and histories

which are equally impossible to prove or disprove, which is that in some cases people simply choose

“not to write things down. And the Phoenicians, these Phoenicians' cities are the very interesting”

potentially problematic relationship to the people around them, in that they are just west of some pretty major powers, whether we're talking about the great Mesopotamian Bronze Age kingdoms,

or later the Persians, the Syrians, I mean, very big, powerful agricultural empires who always

want to need to work with the people in these Phoenician cities in order to gain access to the Mediterranean and their trading knowledge and so on, but the less they know about them, the more they have to work with them rather than over them. So I kind of quite like the idea that in fact, it's in the interest of people in these cities not to write too much down. That's such a very interesting argument. I'm sure we might revisit that as our chat goes on

“the later interactions with those Mesopotamian empires. You've mentioned them in past in Josephine,”

but just to kind of summarize, so the main cities we should be thinking about, you're so tyre-sidedan.

Biblos is another very big one on that coast, on the coast spots now, Lebanon. We can also think of Bay Route itself was a fairly major Phoenician speaking city in that time big port. And then in the west, these, I mean, they're often called colonies, so that perhaps makes it sound a bit too formal, settlements of people, originally, or found it by people originally from the Eastern Mediterranean in places like Carthage, Catters. It's another big one, even earlier,

probably, well, but also on the Atlantic coast of Spain. And then a whole lot of sites and settlements round the island of Sardinia in western Sicily, along the coast of North Africa, sort of Utica, isn't it? I did a lot of digging myself. That's another one in North Africa, very near Carthage, on the coast of southern coast of Spain now. And indeed, on the Portuguese coast, there are, so the whole Mediterranean is speckles the sites that come from this tradition, if you like.

“I mean, I would say I'd be a bit careful, I'd talk about this. I mean, I think if we'd been”

talking a year ago, I'd just hear this said, or this is a settlement, straightforward settlement from the Eastern Mediterranean. But in the kind of crazy way, the ancient histories getting

updated, there's an amazing new study of ancient DNA was published in nature last year that showed

these ports all around the central western Mediterranean that are associated in Greek and Latin literature with Phoenicians that associate themselves with Phoenicians. We know that often have stories about their founder from one city or another that certainly used the Phoenician language, so on and so on. They actually looked at the kind of heritage, if you like, of the people who are living there in the Arnage, living in these cities. And essentially to ask, you know,

would they more left in time or more local? Like is this a small colonial settlement or a big colonial settlement, this like, you know, William the Conqueror or something that actually involves an awful lot of settlement from abroad? And what they found was that they fascinating, completely unexpected, it was at the answer as well, neither really. These cities are actually full of people from all over the Mediterranean. Desilience, people from the Aegean, people, you know, and actually,

of course, some local people as well, particularly North Africa, but not necessarily majority, and almost no genetic signal from that would reflect people coming from the Levantic Self at all. It's very kind of interesting and, you know, it really sets a challenge to historians like myself to think about what that might actually mean in terms of the mechanics of settlement, interaction, and so on that lead to that kind of population make-up in the air.

Well, yes, a major spanner in the works of this idea, just lots of people from those cities just going west at all the time. So one idea has often been that this was about agricultural settlement because there was so little good agricultural land back in the Levant. This was about people finding, you know, the wild west to open her eyes and sort of certain, and that is certainly true to some extent, and particularly in Spain, there's been wonderful work done on all the new

at least from the Levant or some people coming, but this really suggests that that's not how

“even if that was originally perhaps one idea or motivation that's not how it worked out in the air.”

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brought to you by history hits. There are new episodes every week. Before we delve more into that expansion and those settlements further west and that's seafaring, that key identity of these people. I'd like to focus on those original cities in the Levant a bit more because earlier Josephine you mentioned the Bronze Age and you mentioned places like New Garrett. So can we link the rise that the rise to prominence of these cities with

the ever popular words, set of words the Bronze Age collapse?

“Yes, yes, no suspicious of the Bronze Age collapse. That's what it looked like if you”

were the King whose palace was collapsing around you. If you were the sort of local person holding the fire brand to the palace, it perhaps didn't look so so collapsing, but anyway you're absolutely right. So these cities go back well into the Bronze Age, places like Tyre and Sidon and we have letters from them to Pharaoh in the 14th century. So they are places that were existing as a city-state, really, but as very small ones and very much under the power

of bigger empires of the Bronze Age. So each it's sometimes the hittites and Anatolia and so on. They're really kind of caught between this sort of much bigger power gains around them and they

“have to, you can see in these letters they have to tread extremely carefully, you know,”

sucking up to Pharaoh reporting on each other and we're just really behaving quite badly in a lot of cases, the kings of these cities, in order to preserve some local independence and power for themselves. But then when those great big empires collapse, you know, generation or two either side of say 1200 BCE. Suddenly, it kind of horizon's open for these cities on the coast of the Mediterranean. They've no longer got these overlords, that of course

that means also, they've, you know, they've no longer got the enormous demands for metals and other kinds of resources moving around. But they're still a fair amount going on in the Mediterranean and they are kind of free all of a sudden to make their own way in terms of trading in particular

and what they start to do for the first time is actually sell all the way across the Mediterranean

by all the way from tire to the streets of Gibraltar and they seem to do that kind of straight away. I mean, there were connections across that space and have been for, well, hundreds, certainly probably thousands of years, but it would be down the line. If somebody had be sailors based in Sardinia who deal with their part of the Mediterranean sailor's based in Cyprus who deal with their part and stuff will move from one side to the other, but not on the same ships. And for the first

time, these ships seem to set out from these the Mediterranean ports and go really quite suddenly all the way across the sea. There's very little evidence in the archaeological, in the the sorts of objects that turn up in the furthest away places are the earliest. Wow. So yeah, pottery, so here are the earliest terrain pottery is found at Welfare and it's only after that very long distance link has been established. I'd all the way through the Mediterranean

pottery, the same kind of pottery in places like Sardinia, the North African coast and so on. It doesn't take very long. This is kind of the work of a generation, probably altogether,

but it is this incredible thing that's there's long been the assumption that the way that

Phoenicians and elders learn to do long distance sailing is by doing short distance sailing, but you kind of creep across, you stop every night and eventually get to where you're going and then maybe you start to miss some of the stops out. But it's the other way around. It seems that you go all the way out of sight of land probably at half the time and you can be on the weather and then it's only when you've established that link and presumably establish that it's worth

going backwards and forwards that you start to set up stops along the way and, you know, maintenance yards are in our places for so long. And Josephine, I mean, to say like a ship maybe for half a day or so will go beyond sight of land. I mean, it doesn't sound that impressive today, but you need to be back then, that was boozy. Okay, that was pretty big deal. Yeah, I mean, there are no compasses where a good couple of thousand years before the compass here and at nice, of course,

it is easy, because you can steer by the stars and so on. But during the day, I mean, again, depending on the weather, it really can be very difficult. But people do do the Vikings, of course, to another example of seafaring societies who manage perfectly extraordinary navigational feats in actually much worse weather a lot of time. So it's not that it's beyond the wit of humans. But it is really tough and it is quite unexpected, but now seems certain to my mind that

this is something that was developed that they did the very bold things first and then sorted

out the practicalities later. And what types of resources did they have available? What would

“they have brought with them to these distant shores to show their local populations there?”

You know, we are people you want to trade with. We've got these great things that we can we can exchange with you. So it's interesting. They, the things that we know they bring and of course, it depends a bit on what remains in the archaeology. There's an awful lot of pottery, which is very nice. You know, lovely cups and bowls and so on, but you can't imagine that people are going to go all that way to sell some pots or give away some pots. And you know, that's just, it's what

tends to remain. You just can't kill a pot, as you can break into pieces, but they just have to put it back together again, 2000 years later, it's really tiresome. So you've got to think why would they do this? And there are other clues in terms not what's left directly behind, but what changes, so why making? So we have the pots that would have had wine in them, of course, in most cases, it doesn't survive anymore. But we also have in the Western Mediterranean vines,

how vines that actually make drinkable wine for the first time, and vineyard set out in a way that

would actually work. So they're bringing not just things and goods. They're bringing ideas and technologies as well. And to be honest, all of this, the pottery, the wine or that kind of stuff, it's probably just the sort of social matter that smooths the way to the trade in metals,

“because that's what it's not what the Phoenicians are bringing to these places. It's what they're”

taking away. And what you get in the Atlantic is metals. Those mountains are just absolutely stuff with minerals and metals. And in particular, silver is a big draw in that part of the world. And this is not news, the people who are living there, very active networks up and down the Atlantic coast. Again, centuries, if not millennia, at this point, but that certainly is unwise millennia. But the kind of silver mine that's going on before people from the eastern Mediterranean

turn up. So let's take the year of thousand BCE. We're really talking about here when that's when sort of ship start to arrive. Before that, there is silver mining, but it's on quite a small scale. It's not technologically extremely advanced. But when we start to see Phoenician pottery, we also start to see a huge changes in the mind. Much bigger, much better technology for actually turning, you know, what comes out of the minds themselves into something that you can

“use more salt. And so forth, I think what they're bringing is a kind of a market for the people,”

local people who want to sell their wares. They're bringing new technologies that can help the local populations improve their production. Now, what we don't know, of course, is whether they

I mentioned that one of the things that we found out from the Hebrew Bible is the Tyrion's at a slave traders, quite a big scale. And they seem to be acquiring humans for sale in the eastern Mediterranean, a general sense in Western Asia. And it would actually make a lot of sense for them then to bring them across the Mediterranean to actually work in places like Spain, because I mean, one of the kind of awful realities of the kind of slave trading economies is that you want to

move people as far away from home as possible. You want to put them in places where they don't know the language, don't understand the systems and so on, where it's going to be hard for them to get away. If you can kind of confine them on the coast, that's great because they don't have

“access to ships that there's nowhere for them to go. So I think it makes an awful lot of sense.”

So again, not something that can be proved to think that they're also bringing human labor, but can then be put to work particularly in these silver mines and other metal mines, so on. I know it's probably not a resource that they would export because they needed themself. But can we also talk about the importance of timber for these cities, because I mean, if they're doing all the seafaring, it was like wood must be right at the center of their whole system.

Right, and this is, you know, the seeders of Lebanon are still, you know, at the kind of symbol of modern Lebanon. And how this is hugely important in the Phoenician story, these cities, particularly perhaps bib losses is maybe most of all associated with this that an early stage.

So bib loss was the first sort of really big power of big city stay on this coast.

And that was because they had very early trading relationships with each it, where there isn't a lot of wood. And they were building ships and buildings and any of the Egyptians needed wood. And the seeders of bib loss now of Lebanon are really with their best bet.

“And so I think it is one of the things that really establishes these cities as kind of small trading”

powers is the transportation of wood. It's interesting, quite a bit. It has probably not what's going on in the longer voyage is across the Mediterranean, because of course there's quite a lot of wood in the idea in this period as well. So that's more something I think that kind of explains the early story of these cities. And later they have to branch out more to find new resources to exploit. And these cities like becoming trading powers, are they almost the equivalent of

like kind of the merchant, the merchant republics of later centuries? I mean, how should we, how are they socially structured? Well, it's a really interesting question. And one thing to say is

that it varies. There are always set up fundamentally a city state, which is a very broad category

that counts for almost every ancient power in the Mediterranean and medieval and so on. It's the norm rather than the exception. Within that, you can have a great deal of variety. You can have oligarchies, aristocracies, democracies, monarchies, and probably all of the above are found in Phoenician-speaking cities. We know that the Eastern Mediterranean cities, places like Tire, size and bib loss, have kings. Certainly, for the period of their history, where they are most

powerful when they are setting out, their sailors are setting out across the Mediterranean, the first half of the First Millennium BCE. In the west, the cities that are seem to be founded by these Phoenician speakers, they tend to be republics. And of course, that's often true of colonies anywhere in the world, anytime of history. So it's rare for settlers to go out and set themselves up under a king, but it's not a natural method of community formation,

“from scratch, I think. They tend to be republics. And can we imagine that there was a lot of,”

especially in those original cities, Tire, Sidon, bib loss, and so on. I guess there must have been a lot of competition between them. A lot of interactions, diplomacy, but also competitiveness.

Absolutely. I mean, there's never a sort of political hole. They do cooperate sometimes,

particular revolts against the Persians, for instance, you sometimes find cities working together. Tire and Sidon do seem to have a particularly close relationship at various points in history

that they are basically operating as a single entity, most obviously under the real power of

“tyre, which is always the biggest city. There we don't, we honestly don't know the, the glory details”

there. And in the West as well, they often seem to operate quite separately from each other, sometimes in competition. Over time, Carthage comes to acquire some form of hegemony over much of the Phoenician-speaking Western Mediterranean. But as a basic principle, no, they are absolutely acting in competition more than together. And Josephine, I apologize because this is almost, well, this is kind of two big questions in one. With these various cities, they say the one's

original ones, and then of course the colonies as well. But do we think they also shared the same,

I'm thinking very much from an identity angle here, the same religious beliefs and the same language. So it's a really interesting question, the language. I mean, some scholars differentiate between Phoenician in the East and Punic in the West. You can also differentiate further between the dialects, the different cities, but possible to kind of cut and cut up. You could do that with many languages in the world today that we think of as languages. At the other end, you know,

it's the difference between what people are speaking and tired and side and what people are

speaking just down the coast in the cities of, of kind of a heap of Hebrew speaking cities.

It's probably, you know, it's a spectrum. It's not, it's not too quite different languages. So I would say that rather than trying to cut that spectrum up anywhere, rather a very high level, say, well, these are all kind of very similar North-Westmetic languages. Everything would have been fairly comprehensible to each other, perhaps with some goodwill and effort. Or saying, now, each individual city who speak North-Westmetic languages should be treated as having their own

“individual of anger and perhaps therefore identity and so on. I think we can see it while”

them worrying too much about how it looks in at each point in space. We can see it in terms of that relationship between the languages. These people made sense to each other. That doesn't mean they identified, you know, absolutely and completely with each other, but I think they made sense to each other. And that also goes for the gods, the different cities and this is the same for Greeks as well and the same in ancient Italy that different cities will have a particular god or god sometimes,

couples or not who are their own civic gods. So Tire has the god Melcart, who's literally the milk cart, the king of the city. Also, it becomes quite an important god than in other Phoenicians speaking cities. He's very important in ancient cadres of Gadier in Phoenicians, but he's a sort of lesser god in places like Carfetch or even Bibloss and so on. Bibloss, the main godess is called the Lady of Bibloss, the Bibloss, the Bibloss and she's looked off like Ishtar actually

and also sometimes it's a bit like ISIS from Egypt. So do you get these, there's a sort of shared pantheon where different gods are a top of the pops in different cities, but it's also shared with neighbouring communities. When later Greek authors write about what they call Phoenician religion, they include gods like Athena and Solomon, the great godess of Athens. She comes into the story. She's given her city by the king of the Phoenician gods else on. And so there's just ancient

“religions, a very porous set of ideas, essentially. But again, I think there is a kind of”

a greater density of shared gods and ideas of gods in these Phoenicians speaking cities. I mean, that porous nature of the gods is fascinating. We did an interview at a few months ago now on Inanna from Symerian times and then of course Ishtar, Aphrodite, ISIS and then this goddess in Bibloss as well, once again you can see those links together. Absolutely. It's absolutely fascinating and when you were saying that like Phoenicians and these various cities, the people could probably

understand each other but recognize differences. Should we then more be thinking of it like different dialects? Is that more than I do of it? Yeah, yeah, I think it's a bit tricky to understand this from an English speaker's point of view because perhaps this is true of many languages

a lot more so it's much, you do get of course local accents and so on, some local vocabulary,

local, I mean there are people who have understand that there are many kind of quite distinctive ways

“of speaking English. But I think the notion of the dialect is something that I found it easier to”

understand when I was digging as a student in Italy where you really would have villages, neighboring villages but on top of different hills where people really found it quite hard. They certainly weren't speaking Italian in any of these places and people found it quite hard to have lengthy conversations with each other if they were just speaking the language of their own city. So I've

always been a little bit suspicious of the idea of two easy mutual comprehensibility and having

seen how places in the relative 20th century world really very close to each other can actually be communication is not necessarily straightforward. But they would have been recognized

“simply the same language type essentially.”

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history and great stories listen to echoes of history a Ubisoft podcast bought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week. What about customs then? Could it be more recognizable you see the similarities between let's say what people are doing in Carthage compared to what they're doing in time maybe by the language

“but by the customs and the traditions that they were doing can you see more clear similarities there?”

Yes in some guests are there are some very distinctive things that people in time and Carthage do like or if there's the classic one there's child sacrifice a kind of awful aspect now as it seems now the presumably didn't seem so to them which is something that is practiced on a fairly broad scale at Carthage in particular but they see as something that is inherited from practices probably I would say on a smaller scale at Tire and other places and it's also

the sanctities where this went on recorded inscriptions are found in Sardinia and Sicily as well but not in Spain probably not on Cyprus there's a bit of a question mark about that they're not found in other kinds of parts of North Africa further to the west so so I say bit there are a cult and you could say the seven that's the most dramatic example but you could say the same about how architecture for instance or certain fashions in sculpture that you can see so

one of those would be the incredible sarcophagi stone sarcophagi kind of stone coffins essentially

very dramatic very heavy made of marble extremely high-class sculptures that you get in the eastern Mediterranean you get in some western cities but not others so so all of these things you can see kind of networks of culture and taste and so on that are not certainly widely shared outside Venetian speaking context though again there's some porosity cottage union furniture very popular Rome apparently they really like that so here that from Roman sources but you also it's not universal

it's not like a kind of sea of art or cultural influence or something there's a quite a lot of picking and choosing from those traditions going on and quite a lot of reinvention anyone who's lived in America will know that the American idea of what it is to be Irish is very different from or is actually like to be Irish in Ireland or most of the rest of the world so there's a certain

a lot of localizes them in some ways to emphasise the connection. So you could remember that so it's not too

“far-restretched to perhaps imagine yourself if you're in let's say caddies or carthage back in”

ancient times and they would both have different stories about their you know the origins for the rest and the connections that they're most proud of you know with these original cities you know or the other end of the Mediterranean do we think yeah exactly so you know you get there's a good example so caddies has this huge connection with this god melcart who is at laterons it's another example that porosity not that much later becomes identified by Greeks with Heracles Hercules

and it's fun because it's not a direct mapping on because melcart is clearly a god whereas Heracles

is a kind of demigod hero type figure but that's a really doesn't seem to matter if I detail um so you have this god who has a huge temple at caddies sadly now lost um but there are still some in the sea from time to time make they find kind of sculptures on this temple and it's a great tourist attraction in antiquity so Julius Caesar goes to visit this temple on on his travels as a young man so so that's sort of one example whereas at calf that

where did you notice it and I did's right in it if you're like kind of formal connections between

“padders and tyre um we don't actually know if it was in fact terians who bandit caddies and honestly”

they probably didn't either but but that's a kind of really big religious connection whereas in calf bitch the story is a different one it is also a story about tyre which is the biggest and most famous uh at Venetian city in the east so most likely to be sending out settlers or having settlers leave from it also the almost obvious place to attach a story to but the story there is a you know princess dido who uh is a refugee and uh escapes

and from her evil brother the king who's murdered her husband and she takes some of the and senators with her and they go off to you know find this new world what they can be free and apparently sacrifice their children and it's a very different sort of story it doesn't seem to come with the god that they do say later that they send back kind of gifts to the god of tyre as well but he isn't he doesn't really become a big deal at Carthage itself for about 500 years

after the city's founded so you get this of again different ways of relating to to what people understand as their origins we're talking is an interesting for the question of identity as well there's often an assumption identity has to be based in either some original identity and ancestry say or in some sort of uh natural biological um fact about people but actually what we see throughout history this is by no means the only example it's people creating constantly creating

and recreating identities based as much on relationships as on sort of the tyranny of origins it's very interesting how you can also see parallels with what the Greeks will later do alright so in southern Italy and the founding of cities there once again not this idea of colonies

“because it's very much they're independent they remember their mother city and the roots they have”

but it's very much them creating mainly for trade but then establishing connections with the local

peoples and this amazing mixture of cultures you get as a result it's I mean the Phoenicians get

their first with their expansion and then the Greeks almost see what they've done and do something very similar yeah kind of fill in the gap in between there's a sort of as both the point where those two kind of movements come come into contact so the nations are settling all around the Mediterranean so 10th and 9th century Greek sailors start through the same the 8th century starting probably again with traders entrepreneurs and then kind of settlers coming a bit later but the kind of real

boundary if you like is it the furthest the Greek the major Greek city that is furthest West is Masalia Marseille modern Marseille and the rivalry between Marseille and Carthet as these two great western cities sort of facing each other from the north and south Mediterranean is out a kind of wonderful theme in ancient history gosh before Roman this is well before the rise of Roman as well which is what it's also so fascinating about this Josephine I must ask about the alphabet

alphabet is really strange almost all of human history people have chosen when they chosen to

“write things down at all they chosen to write down syllables rather than south they alphabet is sound right”

they should be able to choose to write down syllables and even if you I would say if you just sound the alphabet out they say ABCD these are syllables this answer we can't even say the alphabet in alphabet concept so it's really weird and almost all alphabet in used today go back to the alphabet that is used in these Venetian cities which kind of extraordinary really it's it's invented really is invented this is the kind of thing that doesn't just emerge slowly among thousands or tens of

thousands of people because for something like a writing system you all need to use it the same way so you know you basically do need a person or a small committee of people to sort it out in the first place and then of course it changes in the balance and so on in different directions

“but but this this alphabet emerges in the Levants in these the Mediterranean it's first used to write”

down Levantine languages so the precursors of the Phoenician language and the Hebrew language and Aramaic and so on probably around 2000 BCE as a little bit of a suggestion that there might be stuff even earlier than that but it's it's quite disputed as to whether we're looking at alphabetic letters or just scratches because they don't look that different especially early on but by around 2000 or 2019-1800 BCE you're beginning to get death in it's alphabetic signs

with that you know are writing down the precursor of the Phoenician language but you don't get the many in in in Phoenicia this is what's absolutely fascinating to me you get them in Egypt and it is it is people from the Levants workers of some kind in Egypt there's a lot of them at the Royal Turquoise mines in Sinai whether these are mine workers or managers or alphabet people being brought south from the Levants to Sinai in order to work in these mines

you also get a bit further south in some areas that are used by the army quite a lot so clearly travelers are workers and so on who actually write things down for the first time when they're abroad and they don't need to do it at home they can just tell someone what they

want but abroad they really need to write things down especially for the gods and it's amazing

that some of the earliest examples are little dedications on tiny sculptures to 11 time gods we're going to precursors of these Phoenician gods we've taught precursors to the god of the Hebrew Bible and they write these little alphabetic dedications on the very simple things and I think the idea

“must be that you need to write to gods in your own language and their own language to establish”

that relationship and perhaps the idea is that just in an Egyptian sanctuary you know there's a too much background noise you need to actually write it down so that they'll really your own god will notice and see well like how how glist is that how glist being like the sacred writing that you

only get in temples and that in these same temples and what so what's amazing is that when they're

using this language I don't think it's just coincidence that we've get the first examples in Egypt that actually these are the second or third examples or something because every letter of the Phoenician alphabet that Levantine alphabet which means pretty much every letter of the alphabet that you and I use day comes originally from the Egyptian Hieroglyph. It has no relation to what these hieroglyphs actually mean how they're said they're sometimes used back to front or

upside down but it's they're clearly writing and so they're an appropriate tool to adopt to do your own very different kind of writing that's going to mean the Egyptian hieroglyphs are largely syllabbed where they're not describing whole words and and so the to adapt them to the alphabet to a

phonetic system is it's it's such a leap of the imagination. It really is what an amazing story

and what a sound by there as well I must admit and also it's it's fascinating because we did kuneir from recently and hearing about the origins of kuneir from a well-bealing to like writing stuff down for trade and administration it's fascinating to think that actually maybe the origins of our the alphabet today in the time of the Phoenicians was actually maybe primarily

of that. Yeah I think it's social I mean it is interesting because of course the

“weather they get passed on to Greeks so Greek city states do have writing some of them at least in”

the Bronze Age linear B that writing down a kind of early form of Greek but then there is no writing in the region for 400 years maybe something like that and then you start to get it again and it's in a completely different system it's this alphabetic system that is is the Venetian alphabet they are recycled some of the sort of letters that seem a bit strange to them that sound that they don't make in their language they be cycled them for vowels which aren't really needed

in what the mythical languages in general but otherwise it's the same alphabet but that is definitely

in a trading context that the first places that you get these Greek inscriptions in the Mediterranean

are the big trading ports but again you get them in sanctuaries or this is a Greek thing you get them in the kinds of pottery you use for parties which again they have something to do with trade but sort of you writing down little drinking songs it's really it's really strange way because it's great it's very hard to distinguish if the spread of the modern alphabet is but the spread of the alphabet is linked to booze ups and without the terrain there's also some really kind of

dirty graffiti about drinking and associated amusements in early alphabetic inscriptions in Greece very very carefully worded there Josephine I could ask so any more questions I'm afraid we don't know too much our boy Alexander the Great and the wonderfully named Abdelonimus of Sidon the guy

“who became king I think we have to wait for another time yes I will ask for a couple of”

quick questions on the extent of Phoenician exploration my first one Josephine did Phoenicians reach Britain you know that there was a great story in early 20th century Cornwall that said did the rounds of the antiquies journals that that they must have done because how else were plotted cream of which Britain here's designed for these long ship journeys of the cream is bulletproof really

so the answer is there's no proof of it there's no reason they have to there were certainly

connections all the way up and down the Atlantic coast if the need to be because our operational even if it's just in what's now you know Morocco and Spain and Portugal they would have their their stuff they would have had contacts knowledge and so on going up the coast to Britain and

“Ireland on the other hand there's no reason why they shouldn't have done particularly it's not”

it's not by any means impossible navigationally in fact you know other people were doing something similar whether they did it in sailing ships would be another question to visit there's no proof of it but it's not it's not on the desert idea that's enough and my other question is going the other way did Phoenician sailors circumnavigate not just get to subsaharan Africa did they actually circumnavigate Africa well get they probably did actually

because there are these stories stories it's not quite the right one historical reports of pharaohs sending ships out it says in one particular pharaohs then to ship out that it's supposed to circumnavigate it's Africa this is tiny detail about it recorded by Herodotus that he thinks this is a reason it can't be true but he says that um the sun is rising on the other side when they go around you know the capable good hope and

I mean just that detail suggests that it probably is true there are also quite a number of stories of people trying to do this and either failing or disappearing so it's not a regular thing but I don't think it's at all unlikely that at least one kind of very well resource funded prepared expedition managed it back in the say the 6th century BCE what a TV show what a film that would be but I guess you know you've done a lot of work on the kind of the identity of

the nations and how that's developed as time goes on so if it was at all though those cities

the Biblos tyre Carthage and they're like when ultimately decline I mean their legacy

has endured to the present day with the word Phoenician well it's been just such a fertile ground for identity since I say I don't I don't think the ancient Phoenicians have much of a common identity of any but but it's been a really useful idea for identities kind of

where the idea of being Phoenician is some sense is it's right gave the Maranite Catholics

“away to argue that they should be a separate nation from the Syrians gave them a kind of”

identity that made them less Arab and more Mediterranean and that was in a period of the early 20th century that was happening there were similar movements in Egypt and that it was a fascinating moment and kind of stealth invention in in this period when the nation state is a relatively recent idea they're being made up by the old colonial powers all over the place some people sometimes kind of taking the opportunity to make their own kind of interventions in that

and in Lebanon it worked but you also get going back a little bit further there's a great idea in the 17th century of Britain itself was a Phoenician power sea going empire and so on and the

“the trip there was that France was always identified with Rome great territorial power and so”

to to to be Phoenician was not only a kind of heroic in a way but it also made it clear that you were absolutely not like those awful French and this is made extremely clear some of the writings of the time but then in Ireland in the 18th century it works completely the other way around there's

a real intellectual fashion first saying that the Irish definition when that's literally as a

kind of Phoenician colony in some cases of just you know it's inspired by Phoenicia and the idea there is that like cathitch you know this is a great cultural nation that has been abused by their neighbors so not Rome but Britain making Britain Rome so the Ireland can be Phoenician wow yeah it's a lot a lot of fun interpretation of archaeological features of Ireland along those lines 18th century we're Josephine I know we've just scratched the surface I know we could talk so much more but

what a fascinating chat this has been giving a great overview and introduction to who the Phoenicians who they actually were and how important they were in antiquity and their their enduring legacy down to the present day it's been absolutely brilliant last but certainly not least you have of course you've written a few works related to Phoenicians if I'm correct

“oh that's why I wrote book published book in 2018 called In Search of the Phoenicians which was”

all about this kind of mystery of whether they knew they were Phoenicians or not whether they helped how that actually played out in terms of identity and both in the ancient and modern world it's on and then I wrote a book came out a couple of years ago called how the world made the west which is debunking the myth of the modern west as a self-made miracle and of course one of the very big actors in that story of what we now call western civilization coming out

of you know millennia of connections and journeys and relationships other parts of the world are those Phoenicians who brought an awful lot besides wine and slaves to the west much more than wine and slaves we'll leave it on that no Josephine this has been absolutely wonderful

it just goes me to say thank you so much finally we finally got you on the podcast thank you so much

for coming on the ancients thank you very much for having me well there you go that was the brilliant doctor Josephine Quinn are talking all the things the Phoenicians the Tyrion's the people of big loss of cid on of aridus and so on and the great legacy they left the seafaring legacy the alphabet and so much more thank you so much for listening to this episode I really do hope you enjoyed it if you are enjoying the ancients please make sure that you're following the show on Spotify

or wherever you get to your podcast that really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor if you be kind enough to leave us a rating as well well which really appreciate that don't forget you can also sign up to history hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week sign up at history hit dot com slash subscribe that is all from me I will see you in the next episode you