The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) Read Online Free PDF

crowning city, whose merchants are princes and whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth.” 8
    Phoenician contributions extended well beyond their role as traders in goods. In a way later seen in such cities as Venice, Amsterdam, and Osaka, they also developed skills as artisans and craftsmen. Phoenicians fashioned glass, jewelry, garments, and other adornments worn from the wilds of Spain to the already ancient cities of Sumeria. Homer, in The Iliad, speaks of Paris clothing Helen in “the bright robes woven by the women of Sidon.” 9 One particularly important industry grew from their mastery of the complex formula for extracting purple dye from the glands of a sea snail found on their beaches. It was from this dye, phonikes (“red” or “purple” in Greek) that the region derived its name. 10
    Phoenician cities also exported their expertise. They were the designers of beautiful urban places, palaces, and temples around the ancient world, including Solomon’s Temple at Jerusalem. 11
    The Phoenicians’ greatest cultural contribution—the alphabet—also derived from the demands of commerce. Phoenician merchants and artisans learned from the Mesopotamians and Egyptians the value of writing as a way to keep accounts and lay down laws. Starting around 1100 B.C., these practical urbanites devised a system that was both simpler and more accessible than the old hieroglyphs. This system of writing became the basis for the Greek and then the Latin alphabets. 12
    As befitted talented entrepreneurs, the Phoenicians appreciated their own value. They were quick to remind their customers that they would do their bidding for profit, not out of compulsion. When the pharaoh sent a mission to procure wood for a sacred vessel for the god Amon, the king of Bylbos rudely reminded the Egyptian representative: “Nor am I the servant of him that sent thee.” 13

     

THE ROOTS OF PHOENICIAN DECLINE
     
    Like the Greek city-states that would inherit their commercial empire, or the Italian cities of the Renaissance two millennia later, each Phoenician city was covetous of its own independence. Cities were run, for the most part, by mercantile interests whose primary concern was expanding trade.
    The civic parochialism of the mercantile elite served to limit the Phoenicians as empire builders. When their traders founded permanent outposts far from their native land, their tendency was to build a new, independent city.
    Carthage in North Africa was the greatest of these colonies. Tradition has it that Carthage was founded in 814 B.C. by natives of Tyre. Known as Qart Hadasht, or “New Town,” it served as a base for the expanding Phoenician trade with the lands rimming the western Mediterranean. Gradually, the burgeoning trade center’s influence was felt from the Atlantic coast of Spain all the way north to Cornwall and, by some accounts, the coast of Guinea. 14
    By the fifth century B.C., Carthage’s population surpassed that of Tyre and Sidon combined. It was now among the powerful states in the Mediterranean, with an impressive fleet and a series of alliances with various regional powers, including the Etruscans in Italy. Other Phoenician outposts in the west looked to Carthage for leadership and protection against opposing city-states, largely those established by the Greeks. 15
    This shift in allegiances away from the home cities undermined Phoenicia itself. Without the help of their progeny, the old cities could no longer stave off assaults from the increasingly aggressive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Eventually, the cities lost both their independence and their place as the primary trading hubs of the ancient Mediterranean. The Phoenician “golden age” was coming to an end. 16
    In time Carthage, too, would succumb to the limitations inherent in a purely commercial city in ancient times. Proud bearers of Phoenician cultural and political values, the Carthaginians—whose number reached a peak of between