Phoenicians

 

Phoenician Music

This records did not always survive with details information for us to form clear understanding of the tonal and timber quality of music from those days, that the father of musical theory of the ancients was Pythagoras who was trained in the temples of Phoenicia and exposed to the mysteries of festivals and ceremonies of these temples.

Phoenicians Colonies

Around 1100 B.C. the Phoenicians began creating colonies all across the Mediterranean even on the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa. The first colonies were:

• Cadiz
• Lixis
• Utica
• Kition
•  More followed on Sicily and Sardinia.

 When combined with the Phoenician's earlier cities along the east coast of the Mediterranean, that was an impressive span of settlement.

They created a large and rich colony at Cartago, near the older settlement of Utica, and began a new stage of rapid growth. Spurred on by competition from the Greeks who began to settle in southern Italy and eastern Sicily, the Phoenicians planted more colonies all around the Mediterranean.

Phoenician Culture  

The Phoenicians had a language and culture like those of other Semitic peoples in the general area and may be said to have been identical with the Canaanites of North Palestine except for the development of their culture. The Phoenicians made a variety of metal articles, they also colored cloth the famous Tyrian purple with stain obtained from shellfish. They worshiped fertility gods and goddesses generally designated by the names Baal and Baalat, Astarte and Adonis; sacrifice of the first-born, both of humans and of animals, was practiced.

Phoenician artisans, who were skilled architects, were imported by the Egyptians, and Hiram (King of Tyre) lent assistance to Solomon in building. Their greatest contribution to Western civilization, was the development of a standardized phonetic alphabet, which was a great improvement over the more ambiguous cuneiform and hieroglyphic. The Phoenician alphabet served as a basis for the Greek alphabet and was a key factor in the development of Greek literature.

 

Language and literature

  

The Phoenician alphabet was one of the first alphabets with a strict and consistent form, it is assumed that it adopted its simplified linear characters from early pictorial Semitic alphabet developed some centuries earlier in the southern.The precursor to the Phoenician alphabet was likely of Egyptian origin as Middle Bronze age alphabet from the southern Levant resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs, or more specifically an early alphabetic writing system found in central Egypt. In addition to being preceded by Canaanite, the Phoenician alphabet was also preceded by an alphabetic script of Mesopotamian origin called Ugaritic. The development of the alphabet from the Canaanite coincided with the rise of the Iron Age in the 11th century BC.
This alphabet has been termed an abjad or a script that contains no vowels. The first two letters aleph and beth gave the name to the alphabet.

The oldest known representation of the Phoenician alphabet is inscribed on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblos, dating to the 11th century BC at the latest. Phoenician inscriptions are found in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus and other places. 
 Phoenician traders disseminated this writing system along Aegean trade routes, to Creta and Greece. The Greeks adopted the majority of these letters but changed some of them to vowels which were significable in their language, giving rise to the first true alphabet.
In Phoenician colonies around the western Mediterranean, beginning in the 9th century BC, Phoenician evolved into Punic. Punic Phoenician was still spoken in the 5th century AD: St. Agustin.

Art

Phoenician art lacks original characteristics that might distinguish it from its contemporaries. This is due to its being highly influenced by foreign artistic cultures:

•  Egypt
•  Greece
•  Assyria

 

 Phoenicians who were taught on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates river gained a wide artistic experience and finally came to create their own art, which was an amalgam of foreign models and perspectives.

Phoenician History

Between the period of 1200 B.C. and 900 B.C. there was no major military power in Mesopotamia. There for smaller states like Phoenicia and the Hebrew kingdom were able to prosper. These kingdoms started to trade throughout the Mediterranean region.  

It is believed that economic opportunity and population pressures forced them out into the Mediterranean sea.  The Phoenicians colonized many areas
along the Sea, areas where their colonies have been found like Sardinia Cyprus, and Cartago; the most important and lasting colony by far they were superior to all peoples of that time in seamanship.