Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Phoenician alphabet [b] is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) [2] used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region.
Herodotus believed that the Phoenicians originated from Bahrain, [16] [17] a view shared centuries later by the historian Strabo. [18] This theory was accepted by the 19th-century German classicist Arnold Heeren, who noted that Greek geographers described "two islands, named Tyrus or Tylos, and Aradus, which boasted that they were the mother country of the Phoenicians, and exhibited relics of ...
The Ship Sarcophagus: a Phoenician ship carved on a sarcophagus, 2nd century AD. The theory of Phoenician discovery of the Americas suggests that the earliest Old World contact with the Americas was not with Columbus or Norse settlers, but with the Phoenicians (or, alternatively, other Semitic peoples) in the first millennium BC. [1]
The majority of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet were adopted into Greek with much the same sounds as they had had in Phoenician. However, Phoenician, like other Semitic scripts, has a range of consonants, commonly called gutturals, that did not exist in Greek: ʼāleph [ʔ], hē [h, e, a], ḥēth [ħ], and ʽayin [ʕ].
The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE, to become the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
Phoenician (/ f ə ˈ n iː ʃ ən / fə-NEE-shən; Phoenician: śpt knʿn lit. ' language of Canaan ' [ 2 ] ) is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon .
The name Phoenicia is an ancient Greek exonym that did not correspond precisely to a cohesive culture or society as it would have been understood natively. [8] [9] Therefore, the division between Canaanites and Phoenicians around 1200 BC is regarded as a modern and artificial construct. [7] [10]
The name Phoenicia is an ancient Greek exonym that did not correspond precisely to a cohesive culture or society as it would have been understood natively. [7] [8] Therefore, the division between Canaanites and Phoenicians around 1200 BC is regarded as a modern and artificial division. [6] [9]