The Phoenicians: The Purple People Who Gave the World the Alphabet — Sleep Podcast

On the far south of the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, where the light comes down off the mountains and the sea turns the colour of old bronze, there was a city at the edge of the known world. From it went out cedar and purple, tin and silver, ships with the tall prows, and the slow, patient work of the dyer’s snail. And from it, carried in merchants’ hands and sailors’ memories, went out the marks that became letters — the alphabet you are reading now. A long bedtime history of the purple people who gave the world the alphabet.

About an hour and a half, in the voice of the show. We stand on the purple coast; we sit in the city at the edge of the world, and under the cedar forest; we go down into the vats with the snail and the dye; we watch the ship and the star and the coast, and the slow growth of the network; we land at the colony at the edge of the map, where the god stands in the harbour; we make the long voyage; and we come, at the end, to the marks, to the stone, to the decline, to the letter you are reading, and to the quiet.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About ninety minutes. Where the historians disagree, the rival view is named; no reference in the endnotes is invented.

Sources (a selection): History Skills, “The purple dye that made Tyre rich”; Wikipedia, “Phoenicia” and “Tyre”; Quinn, The Phoenicians (2018); the Byblos inscriptions and the Ahiram sarcophagus (Baalbek and Beirut, National Museums); the Phoenician inscriptions of Carthage (Tophet stelae); the Levante oikoi evidence from the Greek colonies; the Ugaritic alphabet tablets; the Phoenician script corpora (Corpus of Phoenician/ Punic inscriptions); the Herodotus passages on Phoenician sea trade (Histories 1.1–3, 4.85, 4.192–198); World History Encyclopedia, “Phoenicians” and “Tyrian Purple” entries.