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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 Phoenicians, known for their prowess in trade, seafaring and navigation, dominated commerce across classical antiquity and developed an expansive maritime trade network lasting over a millennium. This network facilitated cultural exchanges among major cradles of civilization , such as Mesopotamia , Greece and Egypt .
Phoenician trade also helped facilitate the exchange of cultures, ideas, and knowledge between major cradles of civilization such as Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. After its zenith in the 9th century BC, Phoenician civilization in the eastern Mediterranean slowly declined in the face of foreign influence and conquest, though its presence would ...
From Spain and Morocco, the Phoenicians controlled access to the Atlantic Ocean and the trade routes to Britain and Senegal. The most famous and successful of Phoenician colonies was founded by settlers from Tyre in 814–813 BC and called Kart-Hadasht (Qart-ḥadašt, [13] literally "New Town" [14]), known in English as Carthage.
It has been argued that Roman Britain's continental trade peaked in the late 1st century AD and thereafter declined as a result of an increasing reliance on local products by the population of Britain, caused by economic development on the island and by the Roman state's desire to save money by shifting away from expensive long-distance imports.
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.
Unlike the existential conflict of the later Punic Wars with Rome, the conflict between Carthage and the Greeks centered on economic concerns, as each side sought to advance their own commercial interests and influence by controlling key trade routes. For centuries, the Phoenician and Greek city-states had embarked on maritime trade and ...
The Phoenicians, known for their prowess in trade, seafaring and navigation, dominated commerce across classical antiquity and developed an expansive maritime trade network lasting over a millennium. This network facilitated cultural exchanges among major cradles of civilization , such as Mesopotamia , Greece and Egypt .