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  Archaeologists tracing the history of the early humans believe that it was the desert nomads of Western Asia and the Arab lands who were among the first to occupy Syria, where they founded the great and noble City of Damascus. Among them were a few nomads who believed that Damascus offered little scope for their progress and crossed into the Lebanon Mountains, settling themselves in the narrow strip of land that was North of Palestine. They occupied a strip of land that was about a hundred and twenty miles long and more or less twenty miles wide between the present day Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea. The people who lived around Damascus came to be known as Aramaeans and those who occupied the narrow strip of land near Lebanon were called Phoenicians. They soon found that the new land, on which they settled, was not right for a flourishing agriculture by the methods known at that time, and were forced to take to trade to survive as a civilization – the Aramaeans by land and the Phoenicians by sea.

  The opportunities of establishing trade by land were limited to the Aramaeans. However, the sea offered unlimited opportunities to the Phoenicians. The Aramaeans traveling through land along the trade routes, as carriers of commerce, are credited with popularizing the use of the alphabet to people to the Near East – the Aramaic dialect that later developed as a common language of the countries of the Levant – the language that was spoken also by Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, they made little impact on the life of the people with whom they came into contact, but not as much as the Phoenicians. Ancient historians refer to them as Canaanites. The Greeks called them “Phoinikes,” which means “red people.” The Phoenicians who had taught the alphabet to the Aramaeans had simplified the old hieroglyphics of the Nile Valley Civilization and the Cuneiform writing known to the people of Mesopotamia and developed a language, which they could both read and write and make it popular among the ancient people of the larger part of the Middle East.

  After having discovered early that their new home was not right for agriculture because of its mountainous terrain, the Phoenicians decided to take to the sea. However, the waters around them were not calm and peaceful, and they had to set sail on their crude boats in their early experimental voyages into the open sea. The stormy waters of the sea led them to discover by a trial and error method how to innovate on their existing boats, and over a period of time they became expert sailors of the ancient times. The Cedar wood that grew in plenty on the Mountains of Lebanon provided the ancient Phoenicians with the right type of wood to make sturdy sailing vessels, and its abundance in that region made it an article for export to distant lands across the sea.

  From the early times, the ancient Egyptians prized Cedar wood as a building material for their houses and temples had established trading posts in Phoenicia for hauling the logs of wood to Egypt in their sailing vessels before the nomads occupied and settled down in the region and started monopolizing its trade. Another important factor that contributed to the growth and riches of the Phoenician Civilization was the abundance of shellfish available along the coast of Lebanon, from which they managed to extract a crimson dye - used for dyeing cloths - that was in great demand in the countries of the East. With the availability of the two prized articles of trade in their possession, the Phoenicians set out to trade in a large scale and by 1700 BCE they had become leading commercial traders, sailing to faraway lands and navigating their ships by the North Star. The Phoenician enjoyed that status until the arrival of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE.

  The Phoenicians established strong trading cities along the coast of Lebanon, each with a government on its own that joined hands with other cities during a crisis. They did not believe in forming a Central Government or a Kingdom to watch over the administration of these cities and they were pretty much left to their own devices governing by themselves without a Central Authority. The riches of the Phoenicians led Egypt to conquer their cities by 1500 BCE, and later followed by the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Persians and finally the Romans. However, the foreigners soon found out that it was in their interests to allow the Phoenicians the freedom of trade and they continued to thrive as a trading community in spite of foreign domination of their lands.

  The Phoenicians were energetic and adventurous commercial traders, a quality that could not be matched by the occupying powers of the Phoenician cities. They had established ports in the cities of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos and were sailing to different parts of the world where trade was profitable. They managed to set up trading posts and colonies in those cities - the trading centers of the world - to which came articles of commerce from distant lands, and from here they shipped out raw material and finished goods. They dominated trade in Cyprus, Crete and other islands of the Aegean Sea, as well as the Black Sea ports, Sardinia, Marseilles, Cornwall, and Carthage. They maintained garrisons in Malta, Sicily and Corsica. From Spain they secured silver, lead and zinc, and from Cornwall they acquired the highly valuable alloy tin. From Africa they obtained gold and ostrich feathers. India offered to them ivory, spices and cotton goods. The Land of Arabia supplied them with incense, costly spices and perfumes. Syria sold them the sweetest wines made in the world. Greece presented them with a profitable trade of precious goblets that were made up from metal and decorated glass. In these the Phoenicians acted as middlemen offering to every country something that the other did not have, and profited immensely in their business enterprises.

  Once they had become masters of trade, the Phoenicians set up manufacturing units in their cities from the knowledge acquired from foreign shores and they were soon turning out exquisite carpets and beautiful crimson cloths. Their artisans became experts in decorating bronze, silver and glassware articles that commanded a wide market all over the trading world.  Naturally, the demand for their articles in the world markets made them rich and prosperous and the cities of Phoenicia were busy centers of trade and their ports hummed with activity round the clock. The modern day archeologists who unearthed the Tell-al-Amarna tablets of Egypt tell us that in the fifteenth century BCE, the Port of Tyre was famous for its commerce, and continued to flourish in the days of King Solomon the Wise. Later, political conditions forced the Phoenicians to abandon the ports of Tyre and Sidon, after a 13-year old siege by the Babylonians. The Phoenicians then turned the city of Carthage, near Tunisia, to their main center of activities, and during the sixth century BCE it boasted a population of 750,000 with their own culture known as “Punic” to the Romans.

  The riches of Carthage and the powerful impregnable defenses built-in the city made it a formidable power in the Mediterranean Sea. The Romans who were dreaming of extending their supremacy over the Mediterranean Sea soon arrived at the conclusion that they could only become the masters of the region after crushing the might of the Phoenician empire based in this city. And they could realize their dreams only after a century of hard fighting with the Phoenicians – in the three Punic Wars that lasted between 246 to146 BCE – for the Phoenicians over the years had become tough soldiers, with a strong naval force that was capable of fighting battles on the sea, a tactic that laid the foundations of building strong naval fighting ships in the armory of the modern world. The famous Carthaginian general Hannibal nearly conquered Rome, but in 202 BCE the Romans clashed with his army near the City of Carthage and defeated him. Rome finally captured Carthage in 146 BCE and laid waste to the last of the major Phoenician city burning it to the ground.

  The greatest achievement of the Phoenicians was that they were carriers of culture from distant lands and passed on their knowledge about their habits and their way of life. They also gained knowledge about the new lands and cultures, which in turn they passed into their own world and in this way they served as a connecting link for the intermixing of cultures between the East and West. They were also responsible for the spur of economic activity in other lands along with their own by exchanging articles purchased from different lands that energized people of the world to manufacture these articles on their own.

  Among the many achievements of the Phoenicians, a very important one was the introduction of the alphabet by simplifying the Egyptian hieroglyphics and rearranging the symbols in a form that could easily be learnt and written. They passed on their written alphabets to the Greeks and influenced the use of language in the ancients trading ports of India. Later other European countries learnt the use of alphabets from the Greeks, which borrowed heavily from the Phoenician form of writing. The Phoenicians were also responsible for introducing the use of papyrus, parchments, quills that were used as pens along with the ink to different parts of Europe. For the first time, the world learnt the art of measuring the articles of sale from the Phoenicians who taught them the use of weights and measures, in the course of trading their goods. In fact, the word “Bible” is derived from the ancient Phoenician port of Byblos, which exported the papyrus plants and parchments, which in turn helped the early Jews and Christians to record the Bible. Likewise, the Phoenicians who had mastered the art of building formidable merchant navy ships and warships introduced the art of shipbuilding for the first time into the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. It is the Phoenician Navy that had kept at bay the fearsome Roman army for nearly one hundred years before they could master the art of shipbuilding and gain a mastery over the Mediterranean waters.

  Herodotus in his writings tells us about the genius of the Phoenicians and about “their skill, which the Phoenicians exhibit in all their undertakings”. Their engineers adopted the Assyrian method of siege warfare. Their cities were famed for the stoutness of their fortifications. To avoid a shortage of drinking water during sieges, they tapped the fresh-water springs that issued from the sea-bottom. They invented an inverted funnel over the spring and pumped the water into the city using a leather pipe.

  Phoenician shipbuilders were far more advanced in the art of shipbuilding over their contemporaries of other civilizations. The early Egyptian ships were hardly more than large canoes, whereas the Phoenician shipbuilding engineers learned that their ships moved faster by rowing, with the rowers facing the back of the ship, better than the paddling used by Egyptian ships. The ships made by the Phoenicians were of two types - the warship with its long and narrow galley with many oars and a small sail and the merchant ships that were short and tubby with few oars and a large sail. All ships had one single rectangular sail. The warship needed the services of many oarsmen to run in different directions to avoid the missiles thrown at them by the enemy ships. On the other hand, the merchant ships used the space occupied by the rowers to store their precious cargo. Most rowers of the Phoenicians ships were free workers who were well paid for their services.

  During the century that followed after founding the city of Carthage, the Phoenicians developed a new formidable warship, which had a pointed ram at the waterline and was specially braced to withstand the shock of ramming the enemy ships. These ships had solid decks over the rower’s heads to carry a small army of fighting men. Further, these ships had the rowers arranged in pairs on each side of the ship to give it more speed and power during maneuvers in a sea battle. Phoenicians engineers have also been credited for developing battering rams as siege machinery, suspended from chains from the roofs of wheeled sheds, which they called a “ram tortoise.” This was used during battles that were fought on land to knock down the doors of the strongholds of their enemies.

  The history of the Phoenician empire is available to us only in bits and fragments and mainly from the sources of the opposite camps. They never bothered to keep a recorded history of events neither did they hire men of literature who were capable of documenting their fascinating civilization. It is also possible that most of the records of their history could have perished along with the destruction of their cities. For Sidon was destroyed by the Persians in 345 BCE, Tyre by Alexander in 332 BCE, Carthage by Romans in 146 BCE and Beirut by Tryphoon the Seleucid King of Persia in 140 BCE

  Although the Phoenicians were not known to be warlike people – they were businessmen, not soldiers – they defended their cities with a fanatical courage and stubbornness when faced by dangers from outside their borders. It is said that the Phoenician families of Sidon burned themselves and their families rather than surrendering to the Persians, and naturally, the record of their history and other archives went up in smoke along with its people.