dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

The sudden collapse of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC took with it virtually every civilized society throughout the Peloponnesus, the Aegean world, and Asia Minor, Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, Homeric Troy, the Hittite Empite and numerous kingdoms across Anatolia and the Near East were toppled, and Pharaonic Egypt slid into a decline subsequent dynasties would be unable to check.

Thus freed from the domination of these suddenly defunct superpowers, other peoples waiting in the shadows filled the commercial vacuum by exploiting trade routes pioneered and guarded by their deposed predecessors. History remembers them as Phoenicians, a Semitic folk residing in Canaan, a region roughly corresponding to the present-day Levant of modern Israel, Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and the western parts of Jordan and Syria.

The Phoenicians were the Canaanites, and the ancestors of todays Lebanese, concluded geneticist Spencer Wells in 2004, after an extensive DNA study of Phoenicians origins sponsored by National Geographic Magazine. Their name is Greek-Phoinike-for people of the purple (which has already been explained), and imported from the Levantine city of Tyre. Phoinike derived from the earlier Mycenaean po-ni-ki-jo, itself a derivation of the still older Egyptian fenkhu, denoting Asiatic Semites.

This lineage of nomenclature demonstrates how the Phoenicians were already well known to the outside world for exportation of costly items, only at their cities of Tyre on the shores of Lebanon, and Mogador, in far-off Morocco long before their rise to prominence in the12th century BC.

They never called themselves Phoenicians but identified instead with any one of their numerous cities. Hence they were Tyrians, Sidonians, Carthaginians, and so forth. They nevertheless comprised, in the aggregate, an identifiable entity. According to the 2011 census, only 12 percent of today's population in Lebanon are Arab. DNA studies reveal overwhelming genetic similarities between Phoenicians and most modern Lebanese.

The ancient Phoenicians built a loose confederation of casually affiliated, ethnically and culturally related, if independent urban centers. These were collectively known as Khna (the ancient equivalent of "Corporate Empire") or, to outsiders as "Phoenicia", that spread from the Levant to the Atlantic coasts of Iberia and North Africa. It was organized into politically self-contained, metropolitan states, collaborating in leagues or alliances, dominated by whatever was the most economically influential city at the time.

Phoenicians were less warlike than mercantile, chiefly interested in amassing riches not territories, and conquest by foreign trade, not military invasion.

Frank Joseph "The Lost Colonies of Ancient America"