Phoenicians: Murex Purple, 500-Ton Ships and the 22-Letter Alphabet

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The people we call Phoenicians never used the name. It was a Greek exonym from phoenix, a word for a palm tree and for the purple dye they sold, and the people themselves identified as Tyrians, Sidonians or men of Byblos, or more broadly as Canaanites. Ancient writers from Herodotus to Strabo claimed they came from the Persian Gulf, but a 2017 study in the American Journal of Human Genetics found present-day Lebanese share about 93 percent of their ancestry with Canaanites who lived nearly 4,000 years ago. Squeezed between the sea and the mountains after the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC, they turned to the Mediterranean.

Pegged mortise-and-tenon joinery let them build hulls of up to 500 tons with no iron nails to rust, and navigating by the North Star let them cross open water. They sold Lebanese cedar, mass-produced glass styled for each market, and carried Spanish silver, Cypriot copper and possibly British tin, founding colonies such as Carthage around 814 BC. They survived the Assyrians and Babylonians by paying tribute, held out on island Tyre through a 13-year siege by Nebuchadnezzar II, and served Persia as its navy. Alexander the Great ended that independence in 332 BC with a causeway to the island. Their lasting export was a 22-letter consonantal alphabet formalized around 1050 BC, adapted by the Greeks into the ancestor of Latin and Cyrillic.

• Producing a single gram of Tyrian purple took upwards of 10,000 murex snails, and the dye only turns purple in sunlight.
• The Greeks called the North Star the Phoenician Star.
• Phoenician engineers built the pontoon bridges that carried Xerxes' army across the Hellespont.
• Tyre refused to let Alexander sacrifice at the temple of Melqart and threw his envoys from the walls.
• After the city fell, 2,000 of its leading men were crucified along the beach and tens of thousands were sold into slavery.