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The western Phoenicians were arranged into a multitude of self-governing city-states. Carthage had grown to be the largest and most powerful of these city-states by the 5th century BC and gained increasingly close control over Punic Sicily and Sardinia in the 4th century BC, but communities in Iberia remained outside their control until the ...
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 ...
Phoenician art was largely centered on ornamental objects, particularly jewelry, pottery, glassware, and reliefs. Large sculptures were rare; figurines were more common. Phoenician goods have been found from Spain and Morocco to Russia and Iraq; much of what is known about Phoenician art is based on excavations outside Phoenicia proper.
The specific sort of open aired sanctuary described as a Tophet in modern scholarship is unique to the Punic communities of the Western Mediterranean. [85] Over 100 tophets have been found throughout the Western Mediterranean, [86] but they are absent in Spain. [87] The largest tophet discovered was the Tophet of Salammbô at Carthage. [81]
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]
Cippi and stelae of limestone are characteristic monuments of Punic art and religion, found throughout the western Phoenician world in unbroken continuity, both historically and geographically. [269] Most of them were set up over urns containing cremated human remains, placed within open-air sanctuaries.
Phoenicia was an ancient Semitic civilization originating in the coastal strip of the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily located in modern Lebanon. [6] [7] The Phoenicians were organized in city-states along the northern Levantine coast, including Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. [8]
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, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region.