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Phoenicia

Middle East & Central AsiaHeartland today: Lebanon

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Independent port cities on the coast of today's Lebanon, led by Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. Phoenician sailors traded across the Mediterranean, settled colonies including Carthage, and wrote with a 22-letter alphabet from which the Greek alphabet developed.

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Key events

  1. Phoenician scribes use a 22-letter alphabet that Greeks later adapt into their ownDisputed

    The date c. 1050 BCE is conventional. No Phoenician inscription is securely dated to the 11th century; the oldest firmly dated ones are from the 10th century, and the dating of the Ahiram sarcophagus from Byblos is controversial.

  2. Settlers from Tyre found Carthage in North Africa, by tradition in 814 BCEDisputed

    The date comes from the Greek historian Timaeus (814 or 813 BCE). The oldest finds at Carthage date to the last quarter of the 9th century BCE; the story of the Tyrian princess Elissa (Dido) as founder is legend.

  3. – Tyre and other Phoenician cities pay tribute to Assyria under Tiglath-Pileser III

    The Assyrian annals fragment that lists Hiram of Tyre and Sibitti-bi'li of Byblos among tribute-payers belongs to an unknown year between 745 and 737 BCE, so the range is that window.

  4. – Phoenician crews sent by Pharaoh Necho II reportedly sail round Africa in about three yearsDisputed

    Only Herodotus, writing about 170 years later, reports the voyage, and he doubted one detail (the sun on their right hand), which later readers take as a sign it was real. Modern scholars disagree on whether it happened.

  5. Alexander the Great besieges Tyre for about seven months and takes the island city