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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 name Phoenician is by convention given to inscriptions beginning around 1050 BC, because Phoenician, Hebrew, and other Canaanite dialects were largely indistinguishable before that time. [27] [47] The so-called Ahiram epitaph, engraved on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram from about 1000 BC, shows a fully developed Phoenician script. [48] [49 ...
Recent studies by Miriam Balmuth has also shown that a large part of Phoenicians' history has been influenced by political ideologies that started with the Greeks and the Romans and that the Phoenicians did not have a shared Phoenician identity which they identified with, choosing to identify with their city of origins such as Tyre and Sidon ...
Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic group of people who lived in the Phoenician city-states along a coastal strip in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily modern Lebanon. [5] They developed a maritime civilization which expanded and contracted throughout history, with the core of their culture stretching from Arwad in modern ...
In 1996, Mark McMenamin proposed that Phoenician sailors discovered the New World c. 350 BC. [105] The Phoenician state of Carthage minted gold staters in 350 BC bearing a pattern in the reverse exergue of the coins, which McMenamin initially interpreted as a map of the Mediterranean with the Americas shown to the west across the Atlantic.
The Phoenician city-states frequently rebelled against their Babylonian overlords, which resulted in almost yearly campaigns to repress the revolts. In 586 BC, fresh from the destruction of Jerusalem , Nebuchadnezzar and his army laid siege to Tyre , which had revolted.
The regions that were known to be "Phoenician" were given new names that were pseudo-ethnonyms, this did not cut the geographical regions off completely from Phoenicia, but gave it loose ties to the former region. The grave held grave goods that showed Phoenician habits, but also held exotic objects that are from abroad regions.
The Phoenician colonial system was motivated by economic opportunity, not expansionist ideology, and as such, the Phoenicians lacked the numbers or even the desire to establish an "empire" overseas. The colonies were therefore independent city-states, though most were relatively small, probably having a population of less than 1,000.