The Emergence of Phoenicia

The man's feet dragged as he passed through the city's narrow streets. He was tired, his wool and tunic stained with sweat and grime. His gray hair and beard peppered with tiny shavings of wood. His hands ached after hours of gripping his tools, and spikes of pain stabbed into his lower back from hours spent bent over. His thumb, which he had accidentally struck with a wooden mallet earlier in the day, throbbed with every step. The smell of the sea hung in the air with a tang of salt carried inland from the docks by evening gusts of warm Mediterranean wind. He caught the occasional whiff of something rancid as well, spoiling fish he thought from the fish mongers down by the water. The walk was a short one, but it felt like it took forever. The weight of the day's labor is hanging heavily on his wiry, slightly stooped for. One lay just ahead on the other side of a potter's workshop. Smoke rose from the kilns. The man cringed when he heard pottery breaking, clay shirts tinkling on flagstones, followed by a series of purses so vile that he knew he couldn't repeat them to his wife when he reached his house. Still, he had to give the potter credit for creativity. It would never have occurred to him to think that God's bail and ushtart would do that to someone just for breaking pottery. The man breathed the sigh of relief when it last he walked into the courtyard. Three large rooms faced onto the open space with its paved floor. He could smell stew and fresh bread, even the sweet notes of wine flavored with pine rice, his favorite. That might just have been his imagination, though. Nostomic rumble with hunger had been a long time since he ate that morning just before sunrise. Sounds washed over him in the moments before he entered the room in which he and his wife slept. One laughing, his grandchildren, his pride and joy, and their mother, his daughter, singing a tune in her fine soulful voice. He smiled, grasping the wooden boat he'd carved from a chunk of discarded cedar, spending weeks on the toy before finally finishing it today. The children would love it, a reminder of their sailor father's occupation during the weeks or months he spent away at sea, plying the waves between their city of tire and the ports of Cyprus, Egypt, or even further afield. The old man didn't mind the absences, and meant he got to spend more time with his daughter and his grandchildren. Life was good here, he thought, even for a humble boatbuilder who came home every day, wreaking of wood shavings, far better than his parents could have imagined when they fled their old home after its destruction. Tire had been good to them. Phoenicia and its inhabitants, the Phoenicians, were one of the great success stories of the Iron Age. From humble beginnings, they built a Mediterranean-wide network of trade and colonies, eventually uniting the whole sea into a single unit. All of that started in the chaos that followed the Bronze Age collapse, a time of both destruction and opportunities. Hi everybody, from Wanderrie, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Weiman, thanks so much for being here with me. To the extent that the average person, even the average history enthusiast, has any preconceptions or pre-existing ideas about the Iron Age Mediterranean, they probably know the names of two groups of people. First, the Greeks, the ubiquitous traders and colonizers who laid down the roots of the classical era to come. And second, the Phoenicians, the seafaring merchants who built trade networks and new settlements spanning the whole of the Mediterranean, from the Levant in the east to Iberia in the west. Those two groups, in both cooperation and competition with one another, built the Iron Age Mediterranean and set the stage for the era that followed. Yet in comparison with the Greeks, with their foundational role in what we often call "western civilization," the Phoenicians are far less known, even a bit mysterious. We don't learn Phoenician epic poetry in school as we do with the works of Homer. Phoenician deities such as Bale and Ashtard don't come naturally to mind in the same way as Zeus, Athena and Aries. The names of Phoenicians great cities like Siden and Tyre don't roll off the tongue quite like Athens and Sparta. If the Greeks are the stars of this particular show, the Phoenicians are more like character actors. Identifiable to the real enthusiasts out there, respected for their achievements, but neither celebrated nor immediately recognizable. This is a shame on a whole bunch of different levels. First, the Phoenicians were no less important to building the networks, both the roots and the key settlements that defined the Mediterranean world in this period than the Greeks. They were perhaps even more so since their activities covered so much more territory. If we want to understand how and why the Mediterranean came into being as a fully connected unit with all of the cultural, economic and political changes that entails, then we have to understand the Phoenicians. Carthage, Rome's great rival and an imperial power in the classical era in its own right had been a Phoenician colony, and that's just one tiny piece of Phoenician's legacy to the world to come. Second, the Phoenicians themselves are absolutely fascinating. Despite their superficial similarities with the Greeks, including an emphasis on trade, long-distance projects of overseas settlement, and city states as the dominant political form, the Phoenicians differed in fundamental ways. They went to different places than the Greeks, they traded in different goods, they built their overseas settlements in different ways, and for different reasons. They organized themselves along different lines, and most importantly, they thought of themselves in much different terms. As time went on, Greeks from various city states came to think of themselves as Greeks, with particular practices and ideas that defined them as Greeks. By contrast, it's an ongoing, contentious and confusing question as to whether the people we call Phoenicians ever understood themselves to be a collective group in any meaningful way. Phoenician was originally a term the Greeks used for these people, not one that they employed themselves. That's just one of the truly compelling things about the Phoenicians. For all that they impacted the world to come and profound and long-lasting ways, our conception of the Phoenicians themselves is very much in flux. New archaeological work in both the Phoenician homeland and in the places the Phoenicians visited and built overseas has transformed our understanding of their activities. New approaches to understanding how people conceive of themselves, their identities, and how they interact with different groups, have likewise shed an enormous amount of light on these seafaring adventurers. The realization that what it meant to be Phoenician changed dramatically over time and space fundamentally alters our perspective as well. The upshot is that we are in a much better position to understand the Phoenicians and their world today than we were even a few decades ago. In today's episode, we're going to start trying to get a handle on the Phoenicians. Specifically, we'll focus on how this tiny strip of land in the eastern Mediterranean became a launching pad for bringing the whole sea together over the course of the Iron Age. Let's start by getting a sense for the geographic setting. The eastern edge of the Mediterranean forms a north-south strip of coast running from Syria and Turkey in the north through Lebanon in the middle and down to Israel and the Sinai in the south. This is the Levant. What we call Phoenicia makes up one chunk of this coastline, corresponding to part of its north and all of its central sections. The northern border of Phoenicia encompassed the city of Arwad and the Okar Plain, which are now the southwesternmost part of Syria. The southern border was the city of Ako and its associated plain, now the northernmost tip of Israel's coastline, just beyond Mount Carmel. This is heartland, however, lay within what's now Lebanon. Throughout the entire period of Phoenicia's history, four cities, listed here from north to south, dominated the region and its overseas enterprises. Arwad, Biblos, Sidon, and Tyre. Three of those four, Biblos, Sidon, and Tyre lay within the territory of Lebanon, and more than anywhere else, Lebanon has claimed the legacy of the Phoenicians. This territory is incredibly fragmented. The interior is mountainous, with the Mount Lebanon range in the north and the Galilee in the south. And nowhere in Phoenicia is the flat coastal strip wider than about 10 km or 6 miles. Each viable segment of flat coastal land is further subdivided by mountain spurs and rivers that extend from the interior to the sea. The Phoenician cities were located either on promontories overlooking the sea or on islands just offshore. All of them controlled varying extensive viable agricultural land, but never enough to produce a huge agricultural surplus, or even necessarily to feed a large urban population without imports room for the refueled. Now, this isn't to say that the interior offered nothing. The mountains of Lebanon were famous for the quality of their timber, particularly their cedar. That would happen to be perfect for shipbuilding. The lowland plains are quite fertile, and the hilly terrain in between can be used for olives, vines, and pasturing animals. But given this physical environment, it's not particularly surprising that the Phoenician city states base their existence around trade, and particularly seaborn trade. By the time the Phoenicians began to spread out across the Mediterranean in the 9th and 8th centuries BC, their cities and their way of life were already old. Significant maritime activity along the coast of the Levant likely goes back well before 3,000 BC, when we can first start to track the distribution of fine pottery manufactured in your Biblos and transported all over the region, as far as Abidos in Egypt. Trade on a substantial scale was certainly established by about 2600 BC, when large shipments of that fine cedar for shipbuilding were already being sent from Biblos to Egypt. Biblos, located in present-day Lebanon, had been continuously inhabited since at least 5,000 BC. The city first appeared in Egyptian records using an identifiable forerunner of its later name, all the way back in the old kingdom. Vigrants for Biblos later played a key role in the emergence of the Hexos rulers in Egypt during the second intermediate period, dating back to the 18th century BC. Tire and Sidon had likewise been occupied for well over a thousand years by the time of that period of expansion and the Iron Age probably much, much longer. During the late Bronze Age, the region that later became Phoenician, along with the more southerly stretches of the Levant in what's now Israel, was known as Canaan. The maritime city-states of Canaan and Syria to the north were all dependent on Egypt's new kingdom, the dominant power in the region. This is often characterized as imperial control, with the Ciro Canaanite city-states as part of an Egyptian empire, but it was a pretty loose form of control. Rather than direct rule, the Egyptians provided a military and administrative infrastructure while local bigwigs continued to do the day-to-day business of ruling. Ciro Canaanite merchants were the key connectors of that late Bronze Age world we've discussed so many times here on tides. Their ships built from the fine cedar covering the mountains of Lebanon, plied the busy routes stretching from Egypt to the Levant to Cyprus to the Aegean and everywhere in between. The Ulebonune shipwreck found off the coast of southern Turkey and dating to around 1300 BC is one of our key sources of evidence about the late Bronze Age trading world. It was almost certainly a Canaanite ship made from Lebanese cedar, hailing from the one of the ports of what later became Phoenician, loaded down with clay storage jars made by Canaanite potters. The ubiquity of those Canaanite storage jars across the late Bronze Age world and they've been found everywhere from Greece to Egypt to Mesopotamia speaks to the far-flung and intense connections that defined this part of the world in the late Bronze Age. We might assume that the Bronze Age collapse would have devastated a region so dependent on maritime trade and production for foreign markets. In one sense, this was indeed the case. Much of the evidence for genuine destruction at this time, the burned cities and pulled down walls, followed by the strikingly different material culture of the subsequent layers that must have been brought by new migrants, comes from the Levant. Ugarit, just to the north of Phoenicia and presumably raised by the sea peoples, is one famous example? There are many others further to the south, both on the coast and further inland. At the southern end of what became Phoenicia, the aqua plain, just north of Mount Carmel and Israel, the whole settlement system changed at the end of the Bronze Age. The coastal plain was dotted with abandoned villages and new settlements were built inland in the foothills of the mountains. This was obviously a turbulent time. The residents of the region must have lived in fear of maritime raiding. Merchants could never have been sure that their ships would return at all, much less with enough to make a profit. But on the other hand, it was also a time of possibilities. Egypt's new kingdom abandoned its loose empire in the Levant and retreated back to the south. The hit heights, the other ambitious great power that had tried to exert control over the region had ceased to exist. Despite their brief resurgence at the end of the 12th century BC, the Assyrians were in no position to continuously dominate a region so far from their core power base around Osher. Tiglath Pillister I received tribute from the cities of Phoenicia, but he never controlled them. Freed from the machinations of distant imperial powers, these city-states of the Levant were better able than they had been in centuries to chart their own course. If the Egyptians wanted cedar from Biblos, they could pay for it, rather than demanding a tribute. There's a quasi-fictional historical text from the reign of Ramazese XI, around 1100 BC, called the Report of Wendemloo, that details an Egyptian official's journey to Biblos to obtain cedar. The city's ruler, Zakar Bail, humiliates Wendemoon by refusing to give him the cedar for free. If the Egyptians wouldn't pay for it, somebody else would. The late Bronze Age world was indeed densely connected, connections built in large part by the activities of Canaanite merchants, but those connections didn't disappear after the fall of the Hittites in the end of the Mycenaean palaces in Greece. Enterprising merchants, ambitious city-state rulers, and innovative craftspeople could all find new opportunities amid a rapidly changing world. Of all the constituent parts of the dynamic world of the late Bronze Age, nowhere weathered the collapse better than these parts of the Levant. With Egyptian imperial ambitions receding back to the south, after the 12th century BC, and no other great power left to make an attempted domination, the city-states of the Levant were in position to explore the possibilities of the new world. Notice the phrase I used, "city-states." This part of the world was organized along fundamentally urban lines. Each significant city was a political entity unto itself, with its own king and clique of powerful families. That had been the way of things before the Egyptians, Metani, and Hittites spent centuries fighting each other and the locals for control of the Levant and Syria. It was how things had worked when they were exercising imperial overlordship, just with another layer of extra authority on top. And when those imperial overlords left and that extra layer of authority receded, the region simply kept going with that same political format. Usually when we think of city-states, we think of Greece, but they existed in Phoenicia long before they became the norm in archaic Greece. When the format became common across the Mediterranean, Phoenician models were just as popular for emulation as those of the Greeks. City-states were important to Phoenicia not just because of how the local political system function, but also because cities were the major point of reference for how the people we call Phoenicians understood themselves. If you asked someone from this region where they came from, no matter how far away they were from home, they wouldn't have said Phoenicia, they would have said tire or siden or what have you because their city of origin was what mattered most to them. At the time of the Bronze Age collapse and for a while afterward, there wasn't much distinctive about the region that later became Phoenicia in comparison to its nearest neighbors. The whole region was Canaan and all of the people living there fell under the broad umbrella designation of Canaanites. There were probably some new arrivals around the end of the Bronze Age, particularly in the southern parts of the Levant, the Greek known as the Philistines. We'll talk more about them in a few months in an upcoming episode on Israel, Judah and the beginnings of Judaism. Other new arrivals did come further north, individuals and groups often associated with the Aegean. But for the most part, the people of this region shared a language, a common material culture, a suite of deities, and a way of life that stretched back into the indigenous traditions of the Bronze Age. Over time, thanks to the arrival of the Philistines further south and the influence of the Assyrians further to the north in Syria, the north central Levant, the region we call Phoenicia, began to diverge from its neighbors. This divergence only really became noticeable after the turn of the millennium during the 10th century BC. The Phoenicia's language, material culture, and most of all its way of life centered on seafaring, trade, and craft production of luxury goods and metals separated it from both the southern Levant and Syria to the north. Now, this culture wasn't static by any means, very much the opposite. In fact, one of its major defining features was its openness to external influences, something will talk about more in upcoming episodes. When the Phoenicians went abroad, which they did with striking regularity, they brought back with them new artistic motifs, styles of pottery, deities, and ideas. They integrated them into their own way of doing things, and then they re-exported them, sometimes back to the place from which they'd gotten the artistic motif for deity in the first place, with their new added twist. This was the core of what being Phoenician meant, going out into the world on ships, exchanging goods and ideas with others, and then returning home, doing this over and over and over again, and in the process, changing both the homeland and everywhere they touched. One of the ironies of the Phoenicians is that it's often much easier to talk about what they were doing outside their homeland than inside it. This is especially true from the end of the Bronze Age until the 10th century BC. The primary period when the Phoenicians became the Phoenicians, who so shaped the Mediterranean in the centuries to come. In that time, we have practically no written records related to Phoenician. Their neighbors weren't writing about them. The Egyptians, then, in the midst of the third intermediate period, were even more concerned about internal goings-on than usual. After the resurgence under Tiglaspilis are the first, at the end of the 12th century BC, the Assyrians had likewise withdrawn to their core area along the upper Tigris. The Assyrians weren't even doing much writing about their own activities, much less those of some faraway and relatively unimportant cities along the Mediterranean coast. We're mostly left with what the Phoenicians had to say about themselves, which amounted to some scattered inscriptions, not enough to do more than note the existence of writing. That's not nothing, though. This period, specifically from about 1200 to 1100 BC, showcases the first instances of the Phoenician alphabet, perhaps the greatest of all Phoenicians' many exports, which gave rise to the Greek and Latin alphabets. But aside from the fact that people were using it, and noting that the language it encoded was noticeably Phoenician, we can't even say all that much. The archaeology, frankly, isn't that helpful, either. The major Phoenician cities, Arwad, Biblos, Siden, and Tyre, have all been continuously occupied in the 3,000 years since the time we're talking about. This period, called Iron Age 1 in the parlance of local archaeologists, hasn't given up much in the way of remains. Much of it has been obliterated by later occupation. If you were digging foundations for your new metal workshop around 500 BC and you had to destroy the remains of a 500-year-old house to do it, you did it, and you weren't thinking about archaeologists 2,500 years later. Other parts of these truly ancient city remains are simply still lying there underneath modern remains. Good luck trying to convince people to bulldoze a working port installation so you can go look for an early Iron Age dock or harbor mole. We know literally almost nothing about northern Phoenician in this time, and we have only scattered hints from further south. In general, the Iron Age 1 remains found in Phoenician are almost always from outside the major cities. That's something, and it helps us to understand things like craft production, pottery, house architecture, and the like, but it would be pretty nice to get a sense for what Arwad or Biblos was like around 1000 BC. There have been some more extensive recent excavations, especially from Iron Age 1 levels at Seidon, but they're still in the process of publication. So except in really general terms, occasionally augmented by a rescue excavation or astounding from that layer, it's hard to say much. So what can we actually say? There are some quite intriguing hints. We know that places like Seidon, Tyre, Biblos, and Arwad were continuously inhabited throughout the Bronze Age Iron Age transition. However, located in Israel just to the south of what's traditionally called Phoenician has been much better excavated, but it fits the same pattern and its excavators generally include it in Phoenician at this time. We don't know the full extent of any of these urban sites at the time, but the general estimate is that all of them were pretty small, about 5 hectares, 12 acres, and size. All of them had a suburban and rural hinterland that was quite a bit bigger, 2 to 6 kilometers or 0.75 to 2.3 square miles in size. There really aren't large communities, they had maybe a few thousand total inhabitants at most. The archaeologist Gunner Lehman calls them village states or town states as opposed to city states with populations in the tens of thousands. And as much as we think of these as cities oriented around craft production and trade, we shouldn't neglect agriculture either. Each of those territories was actually small enough that residents could live in the city and then walk out to their fields, vineyards, and orchards to work. There was no strict division between agriculture and those other activities that seemed more characteristically urban to us. In fact, the close interface between those two probably goes a long way toward explaining Phoenician's success in trade. The agricultural produce of the hinterland could easily be gathered, packed in organic or ceramic containers, and then shipped to consumers who would pay more for it than the locals. We tend to think of commerce in terms of luxury goods and craft production, but if the bulk agricultural products are right there, they're easy to ship and people will pay for them, that's a path to serious profits for enterprising merchants. It's easy to focus on the cities and their close hinterlands, but there were also lots of people living outside them as well. Phoenician was full of small hamlets and villages. They were usually tucked up in the foothills of the mountains or in the valleys between bridges and spurs. None was particularly large, couple hundred inhabitants at most, they were usually members of the same extended kin group. The archeologist Gunnar Lehmann points out that these lineages, the product of complex patterns of intermarriage between villages and hamlets, probably correspond to what the Hebrew Bible calls "Mishpahot". Unlike the cities, these smaller settlements were oriented inland, away from the sea. This was probably intentional, a means of avoiding falling under the control of the coastal cities. These two very different kinds of settlements, with their very different social and economic orientations, occasionally raided and fought with one another, but they also cooperated and traded. That fine Lebanese cedar was probably cut and transported by these inland communities. In return for wood and other mountain products, especially animal products, the villages and hamlets probably received iron tools, which have often been found on those sites, but which rarely seem to have been manufactured there. This pattern of coastal inland interaction existed in the Bronze Age, and it continued in Phoenician's early iron age as well. What was life like at this time in Phoenician right around 1000 BC? Where did people live? What did they spend their time doing? So far as we can tell, the urban areas seem to have been divided between domestic and craft activities. Houses often had a courtyard paved the flagstones with three large rooms facing onto it. This was an indigenous style, it was common across the land of Canaan in the Bronze Age, and people would have used the rooms for storage, food processing, and of course the rest of daily life. We can say a bit more about crafts. It's really telling that pretty much every excavation of a Phoenician site from the early iron age has evidence for some kind of craft or even industrial activity. The pottery making, bronze working or recycling, iron working, bead making, purple dye production, fish packing, or large-scale agriculture beyond the level of subsistence. To those activities we can surely add woodworking and especially shipbuilding. Our evidence is exceptionally patchy, far more so than for greastering the same period, but what we have gives us a clear impression of a busy, industrious, little corner of the Mediterranean world. And to all of those activities, we can add one more. Trade. One of the very few written texts, the Egyptian report of Wenemen that I mentioned earlier, tells us just how busy these harbors were. Biblos, it says, had 20 ships engaged in trade, while Sidon had 50. So each of these little cities had hundreds or more likely thousands of residents engaged directly in work as merchants, sailors, stevidores, and other maritime industries. As this new millennium dawned, Phoenicia was on its way to becoming, well, Phoenicia. When I started to plan out how I was going to write these episodes on Phoenicia and the Phoenicians, my initial idea was to spend this first episode writing about Phoenicia itself and developments there. Once we get a handle on the Phoenician homeland, I thought, then we can follow the Phoenicians outward into the Mediterranean in the second episode. But as I started to do my research and think through the key developments that made Phoenicia and the Phoenicians, what they eventually became, it grew clearer and clearer there was no point at which Phoenicia could be separated from the broader Mediterranean context. Bronze Age Canaan was an intensely connected part of that bigger world. The scale dropped with the Bronze Age collapsed in the beginnings of the Iron Age, but those connections never disappeared entirely. Such as explosion onto the Mediterranean scene at the beginning of the night century BC, with voyages as far afield as Iberia, which is our end point today, was a product of continuous activities outside Phoenicia over the preceding 300 years. Separating Phoenicia from that wider context simply doesn't make sense, because there was no Phoenicia without the wider world. This was true in a whole bunch of different ways, ranging from the cultural to the ethnic to the economic. Let's start with the economic aspects because it's the one we associate most heavily with the Phoenicians, and also because it's the easiest to track in the material record. The Bronze Age collapsed undoubtedly caused a major downturn in economic activity across the whole Levant, the region that would become Phoenicia included. The North Syria suffered the most, its most important trading city, Ugarit, was destroyed in the upheavals of the era. So two were other sites along the Syrian coast and inland as well. The Southern Levant likewise suffered waves of destruction, with numerous sites showing signs of burning and devastation throughout the 12th century BC. The demise of the Hittite Empire as a trading partner and the end of the palace economy in the Aegean, then the unrest throughout Babylonia and Assyria, followed by the slow unraveling of Egypt's presence in the Levant, all took their toll as well. The trade networks that had brought goods to the coastal cities of Phoenicia to pass on to distant markets fell apart massively disrupting supply. It would have been a tough time to be a middleman. But even more serious would have been the drop in demand. Aegean palaces, for example, had been centers of concentrated demand for raw materials such as tin and copper and for luxury goods. How could a merchant from Biblish or siden take a cargo of copper from Cyprus and tin carried overland from Central Asia to the Aegean if he couldn't be sure there would be anybody around a trade for it? On top of all that, we can imagine a knock-on effect on local agriculture, which was presumably geared at least in part toward consumers outside the immediate locality. And on potters who had made the storage jars for bulk transport of those agricultural goods. Nor can we discount how much destruction in Syria and the southern Levant would have disrupted the economy and what became Phoenicia either. Surely, much of their trade was local and regional, basically coastal lugging. They would have lost consumers not just in distant places such as the Aegean, but also much closer to home. Now, that's not great. But, despite all that, the economy and what became Phoenicia showcased surprising resilience. Local and regional trade was the first category of trade to bounce back, and it seems to have been driven not by fancy craft products or luxuries, but by simple exchange of bulk agricultural goods. Basically, the hinterlands, the few square kilometers of arable lands surrounding cities like Sidenitire, could produce goods that were more valuable elsewhere than at home. Since it was so easy to move those bulk goods by sea, it was a simple matter to take wine from Sirrepta, a small city between Sidenitire, or fish from Tel-Dor in Israel, up or down the coast. Moving slightly further afield, those people living in the hills and mountains could provide animal products and timber as well. Those would have been slightly harder to transport, but still straightforward. There were so many cities, each with easy access to the ocean and its own population demanding goods that could be provided through trade that the infrastructure of exchange never went away even at the lowest economic ev. Scholarly discussions of the Phoenician economy commonly present its trade system in terms of circuits of exchange. Precisely, which places these circuits encompass depends on the scholar, but the basic concept is sound. We can imagine concentric circles of trade, each one extending further away from Phoenicia than the last. The first was the closest, the agricultural products produced in the hinterland and exchanged with other nearby cities. The second included the hills and mountains, involving exchange with the inland villages and hamlets I mentioned earlier. With the third circuit, we start to get a bit further from home. Given the fact that Phoenicia is so oriented toward the Mediterranean, it's easy to forget that just nearby were the extensive inland plains and hills of what are now Israel and southern Syria, which can be incredibly productive agricultural land. One of the earliest textual references to Phoenician trade found in the Hebrew Bible and dating to the beginning of the 10th century BC involved large-scale exchange between King Hiram of Tyre and King's David and Solomon of the United Kingdom of Israel. It had probably been going on for some time before that as well. Now, at the Transjordan region, the area on the other side of the Jordan River beyond the United Monarchy offered even more products, including copper. Phoenician trade reached all of these regions from an early date, none required particularly long or strenuous journeys away from home. We can also imagine two different, but relatively close-in, circuits of trade that went by sea. It's not that far from the southern edge of early Iron Age Phoenician, located in what's now northern Israel, down the coast to Egypt. This had been a well-traveled route for at least 1500 years, probably more like 2000 years by the beginning of the first millennium BC, and never disappeared even during the turbulent years of the Bronze Age collapse. This trade did, however, change forms. Rather than tribute from the subject cities of the Levant to the powerful New Kingdom pharaohs, Phoenician merchants were trading on equal terms with the Egyptians in the early Iron Age. This more or less continuous trading activity with Egypt was one of the two early pillars of Phoenician's overseas commerce. The archaeologist Iolette Gilboa recently published a paper arguing that the Egyptian trade was, in fact, the earlier and more important of the two. Thanks to her recent excavations in northern Israel, Gilboa has tracked the development of this trade quite closely over time. It expanded from the southernmost reaches of Phoenicia, particularly the site of Tel Dora on the Carmel coast of Israel, further to the north over the course of the early Iron Age. Siden, Tyre, and Biblos followed southernmost Phoenicians lead in broadening their commercial horizons to include this circuit. The second pillar of early Phoenician trade was the island of Cyprus, located in the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. Cyprus had been one of the cornerstones of the late Bronze Age trading world, the hinge between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, and it went through its own upheavals during and after the period of collapse. Canaan had been quite closely tied to Cyprus during the late Bronze Age, and that trade suffered as people moved into and out of the island, and old political and economic structures were disrupted. But the trade with Cyprus never entirely went away, and it intensified after 1000 BC. Pottery made in Cyprus, or bicepriate potters, shows up continuously in Phoenicia throughout the early Iron Age. In turn, Phoenician pottery started to show up from the beginning of the Iron Age. The most intriguing and most numerous of these pieces of Phoenician pottery are small clay flasks, which the archaeologist Iolette Gilboa analyzed in a 2015 paper. Huns of these flasks show up in Cyprus from the 12th through to the 9th century BC, so for several hundred years these things were exported from Phoenicia to Cyprus, along with whatever it was that they contained. The flasks themselves actually aren't that special. They only held about 50 milliliters, 1.7 ounces of fluid, but decorations were pretty simple. What made them special was what they contained, the Cinnamon. The Cinnamon isn't native to Phoenicia or even the Near Eastward generally. Until the early modern period it grew only in South and Southeast Asia. To find traces of it in Phoenician-made containers means that the Phoenicians were importing it from much, much further to the East. But not only were they importing Cinnamon, they were suspending it in some form of liquid, such as wine, putting it in these special decorated flasks, and then exporting it all over the Eastern Mediterranean. Cinnamon was exotic, and these special flasks, with their special contents, were more often found in elite and ritual contexts, such as special drinking rooms in fancy houses or in temples, outside their place of manufacture in Phoenicia. In Phoenicia itself, they were common enough to show up in domestic and industrial contexts, not just in temples and special rooms. Now, Phoenicians need not have gone all the way to South or Southeast Asia to get the Cinnamon. It's far more likely that they were acquiring it via the Red Sea and the South, thanks to a trade route stretching around Arabia, or slightly less likely through Mesopotamia. Still, Phoenicians must have been on the go to complete these last legs, traveling overland through what's now Israel to the Gulf of Acaba, or north to the Euphrates, and then down toward Babylon and the Persian Gulf. Either way, the little flasks and their exotic Cinnamon are signs of just how far Phoenician connections reached long before their ship set out for Sicily, North Africa, Sardinia, and Iberia. What we have to bear in mind here is that it wasn't just goods that were moving, people were too, along with their ideas and their ways of life. Sometimes those movements were short-term, just visits or trade missions, but they often weren't. I mentioned before that the Levant saw a ton of incoming migration at the time around and after the Bronze Age collapse. The Philistines in the Southern Levant are the most famous example, largely because of their presence in the Hebrew Bible, but it happened to the North as well, through Phoenicia and into Syria in the North. New forms of material culture show up, such as pottery with strong associations with the Aegean. The simplest explanation for the presence of this material, no matter how much a certain set of scholars argues against it, is that it was brought to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean by imbiagrants. Nor were these the only movements. Connections between Cyprus and Phoenicia also brought people southeast into the cities along the Phoenician coastline. There's strong evidence for direct migration from Cyprus to the site of Tel-Dor in northern Israel in the earliest Iron Age. And it's hard to imagine that all that pottery and cinnamon went back and forth without people migrating in both directions. On an even more local level, we can track the permanent, southward migration of people down the coast from Syria into Phoenicia. A 2019 paper, led by Alessio Pomosano, tracked the long-term demographic history of the whole Levant based on radio carbon dates. It found that after a short-term downturn associated with the Bronze Age collapse, the population of the Levant shot upward dramatically in the Iron Age. The region that became Phoenicia was no exception. And while much of that population growth probably would have been the result of higher fertility and lower mortality, some of it was obviously the result of migration into the region from elsewhere. Some people simply moved a little ways down the coast, probably fleeing the destruction of coastal centers in Syria such as Ugarit, others traveled a bit further from Cyprus, and still others came from more distant locales, such as the Aegean. In all of these different ways, we can see Phoenicia's connections with the outside world, near and far. Phoenician traders were going outward and new migrants were coming into Phoenicia, especially from Cyprus, Syria, and perhaps the Aegean. None of this is a coincidence. What we understand to be a distinctively Phoenician culture and way of life grew directly out of this dynamic of movement in both directions. The earliest trading connections between Phoenicia and the outside world in the Iron Age were tightly connected to migration from elsewhere. We see old trading connections with Syria leading to Syrian migration into Phoenicia. We see Cypriot migrants in Phoenicia and Phoenician goods in Cyprus. We see the likely presence of people from the Aegean in Phoenicia. When we look back at Greece during its Iron Age, such as the site of Livkondi that we talked about in our last episode, we see goods that certainly traveled through Phoenicia even if they weren't actually made there. There's no way of telling the story of Phoenicia without understanding just how inseparable Phoenicia itself was from the outside world. As we get toward 1000 BC and then into the 10th century, the scale of activities in Phoenicia seems to have picked up quite substantially. The cities were getting bigger, they were showing more evidence of planning. Those concentric rings of trade were reaching further and further afield, and were showing more contact with the Aegean and beyond. Soon Phoenician merchants would begin to explore the central and western Mediterranean, searching for valuable metals and other goods. Yet the outside world was also beginning to impinge on Phoenicia. A new empire that of the Assyrians was rising to the east. Caught between the Assyrians and the sea, Phoenicians looked even further outward than they ever had before. And in the process, they created the Mediterranean as we know it. That's what we'll talk about next time on Tides of History. How the Phoenicians' networks expand to cover the entirety of the Mediterranean, leading to massive trading operations, the foundation of new colonies, and the spread of a whole new set of ideas to every corner of the known world and beyond. I've also written a book called The Verge, Reformation, Renaissance, and 40 years that shook the world. It's available now on hard copy, paperback, e-book, or audiobook from your distributor of choice. There's a link in this episode description that will take you there. Tides of History is written and narrated by me, Patrick Weiman, Sound Designed by Derek Sparons for Airship, Audio Editing by Molleybott for Airship, Sound Engineer Isseer Joe and Reekas. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffy. From Wunderreet, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Luey. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Wunderreet, this has been Tides of History.