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https://medium.com/@kurtcagle/jesus-christ-phoenician-fdc26cb2fac4
Jesus Christ, Phoenician?
And Other Speculations about the World’s First Sea Trading Empire
Chances are, if you have heard about the Phoenicians at all, it was probably in the context of the origin of the alphabet. However, in the last decade or so, a picture has begun to emerge about this mysterious culture that should actually be fascinating to futurists and those interested in the history of science and ideas. This mysterious group of seafarers created the first true naval empire, served to accelerate both the bronze and the iron age, may have have brought red hair to the Irish, and may actually be the real reason that Christianity spread so quickly two millennia ago.
Please note that much of this is speculation. While we are getting a better idea about history through genetic drift in populations, most of this essay takes place at the very rise of civilization, some of it going back 10,000 years or more, and much of it involves a culture that, despite having invented the alphabet, left almost nothing in their wake about what kind of culture and society they had.
Cedar and Bronze
If you look at most ancient settlements, the one defining character of most of them was the use of fired bricks of mud. It would take the combination of bronze nails and access to trees for lumber-based construction to take place, and even there, it was far more likely that the lumber was used not for houses but for boats.
These exact origins of these inhabitants is still unknown, though Qatar or Bahrain, on the Eastern Arabian peninsula, has been proposed. Bahrain in particular is notable for being an island, and as such reachable only by boats. This suggests that it might have been an ideal place for a sea faring culture to originate, one capable of going beyond the immediate visible horizon. Boats are interesting because they require so many skills to make — an understanding of keels and sails, the manufacture of metallic tools capable of chiseling and shaping wood, harnessing the power of fire.
In time, the temperatures began to warm, and as they did so, the benefits of lighter shades began to decline in comparison to the health costs — light hair and skin meant a higher incidence of cancer and higher levels of melanin provided greater levels of protection. In some parts of this population, the gene for expressing red hair itself disappeared, especially towards the east. Small isolated villages learned (or possibly relearned) the art of agriculture, and over time the population increased. The ancient city of Ur (which would eventually become Bagdad, Iraq) sprang up as stone working using ziggurats (an early kind of pyramid) became commonplace, eventually followed by Babylon, Ninevah and others.
The Babylonians the first historical Mesopotamian culture, spoke of the god Ea, the god of the sea, who came ashore in a mail of scales like a fish, bringing with him the gifts of law and writing and fire, in essence the rudiments of civilization. These seem strange gifts for a sea god, especially given that Ur was still several hundred miles from the nearest major body of water beyond the Tigris and the Euphrates. Yet perhaps this strange tale was a mythic retelling of traders coming on shallow water boats from distant Bahrain, bringing with them a technology that was almost alien in nature — early Bronze swords and plowshares, smelting furnaces and an accounting system, and the first codification of sea laws upon cuneiform tablets. Ea would in time become known as Oannes, and later Noah, he who saved the animals from the flood in Biblical legend. In the Phoenician pantheon he was Yum, god of underwaves and wisdom, and even millennia later, Yum had a place apart above the trading ships of the Phoenicians, the Canaanites, the Carthaginians.
It is not hard to imagine colonies springing up in Ur (which was on the Persian Gulf at the time) then up both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, on flat-bottomed boats manned by these proto-Phoenicians. They spread westward with the Babylonians through Sumer and Assyria, part of the migration but distinct from the peoples around them, until they eventually made their way to the Levant, eventually encountering (and influencing) the Hittite cultures in Southern Turkey even as they found one of the most important resources a sea-faring culture could have … wood.