PART TWO
The Second Mediterranean,
1000 BC–AD 600
1
The Purple Traders,
1000 BC–700 BC
I
Recovery from the disasters of the twelfth century was slow. It is unclear how deep the recession in the Aegean lands was, but much was lost: the art of writing disappeared, except among the Greek refugees in Cyprus; the distinctive swirling styles of Minoan and Mycenaean pottery vanished, except, again, in Cyprus; trade withered; the palaces decayed. The Dark Age was not simply an Aegean phenomenon. There are signs of disorder as far west as the Lipari islands, for in Sicily the old order came to an end in the thirteenth century amid a wave of destruction, and the inhabitants of Lipari were able to preserve some measure of prosperity only by building strong defences.1 The power of the Pharaohs weakened; what saved the land of the Nile from further destruction was the falling away of raids from outside, as the raiders settled in new lands, rather than any internal strength.
By the eighth century new networks of trade emerged, bringing the culture of the East to lands as far west as Etruria and southern Spain. What is astonishing about these new networks is that they were created not by a grand process of imperial expansion (as was happening in western Asia, under the formidable leadership of the Assyrians), but by communities of merchants: Greeks heading towards Sicily and Italy, consciously or unconsciously following in the wake of their Mycenaean predecessors; Etruscan pirates and traders, emerging from a land where cities were only now appearing for the first time; and, most precociously, the Canaanite merchants of Lebanon, known to the Greeks as Phoinikes, ‘Phoenicians’, and resented by Homer for their love of business and profit.2 So begins the long history of contempt for those engaged in ‘trade’. They took their name from the purple dye extracted from the murex shellfish, which was the most prized product of the Canaanite shores. Yet the Greeks also recognized the Phoenicians as the source of the alphabet which became the basis of their new writing system; and Phoenicia was the source of artistic models which transformed the art of archaic Greece and Italy in an age of great creative ferment.
Although the towns of the Lebanese coastline shared a culture and traded side by side, any sense of unity was limited: ‘maritime trade, not territory, defined their sphere’.3 However, the practice of archaeologists is to call the inhabitants of the Levantine littoral Canaanites up to about 1000, thereafter calling them Phoenicians.4 This convention masks an important but difficult problem: when and how the Phoenician cities became great centres of Mediterranean trade, and, more particularly, whether they were able to build on the success of the earlier trading centres of the Levantine coast such as Byblos and Ugarit.5 Ugarit had, as has been seen, been destroyed around 1190 BC; the coast had been settled by people such as the Tjekker of Dor. Disruption undoubtedly occurred; old markets in the west were lost as Crete and the Aegean disappeared from the commercial map. Pirates mauled the traders. But important features of the old Canaanite world survived, sometimes with extraordinary strength.6 The language of the Canaanites became the standard speech of the peoples who inhabited the Levantine lands: Aegean Philistines, Hebrew farmers, town-dwellers in Tyre and Sidon. The religion of the Canaanites was also adopted – with variations – by all but one of the peoples of the region, and even those who opted out – the Hebrews – were not quite so exceptional, for their prophets berated them for following Canaanite practices. The Israelites also knew the Phoenician practice of sometimes immolating their first-born children in sacrificial rituals that incurred the wrath and horror of the biblical prophets and subsequently of Roman writers: ‘you shall not give any of your seed to set them apart for Molech’.7
There was, then, a greater degree of continuity in this corner of the Mediterranean than in Greece or Sicily. Prosperity declined but did not disappear in the eleventh century. But to say that the Phoenicians were a significant commercial presence in the tenth century BC is not to say that they already dominated the trade of the sea. They had other avenues to explore, and selling their purple dyes to the wealthy, militarily irresistible Assyrians in northern Iraq made more commercial sense than hawking it to impoverished peoples across the sea.8 This was not, however, how the Greeks saw the early Phoenicians. Classical writers were convinced that Tyre was founded a few years before the fall of Troy, in 1191 BC; but Tyre itself is a far older site, and its king, Abi-milki, was a significant figure in the fourteenth century, to judge from the correspondence of the Egyptian Pharaohs. The Romans insisted that the Phoenicians were already founding settlements far to the west within a century of the supposed foundation of Tyre: Cádiz in 1104 BC, and Utica and Lixus in North Africa around the same time. This seemed to demonstrate that the early Phoenicians defied the onset of the Dark Age and carved out a network of trade routes, commemorated in the biblical references to a land far to the west, Tarshish, which sounds much like the Tartessos known to classical writers. Though several Roman writers mentioned the very early foundation of Cádiz, they were in fact parroting the opinions of the historian Velleius Paterculus, a contemporary of the Emperor Augustus, who lived 1100 years after the supposed event. Such early dates are not corroborated by archaeology. Even in Phoenicia the archaeological record from the eleventh and tenth centuries is surprisingly poor – this is partly because it is difficult to dig underneath the densely populated cities of modern Lebanon, but partly because the Levantine cities suffered so severely from raids by the Sea Peoples.
The Bible insists on the wealth and power of the kings of Tyre as far back as the tenth century BC. According to the Book of Kings, the alliances between Hiram, king of Tyre and Solomon, king of Israel (who acceded around 960) culminated in a treaty which assured the Tyrians of grain and oil supplies; in exchange they provided timber and craftsmen who built the Temple in the new Israelite capital of Jerusalem.9 The biblical description of the Temple offers an unrivalled account of the appearance of an early Phoenician cult centre, and matches the foundations exposed at Hazor and elsewhere: an external altar, a shrine entrance flanked by two pillars, and then a progression through a larger outer chamber towards an inner Holy of Holies. Israelite amphorae found at Tyre, with a capacity of up to twenty-four litres, prove that the trade in foodstuffs from the lands settled by the early Hebrews continued throughout the ninth and eighth centuries.10 In return for help with the Temple, Solomon is said to have given the king of Tyre a group of settlements in the north of Israel; the Bible calls them cities, but remarks that King Hiram did not like them when he saw them, so evidently Solomon’s estate agents had shown a gift for exaggeration.11 The Israelites had emerged as a force in their own right after centuries herding sheep and growing barley in the hill country east of the Philistine settlements. They knew that Tyre lacked a proper agricultural hinterland; this city, which may have contained 30,000 inhabitants a century or two later, could survive and grow only if it had regular access to grain supplies. The forests full of high-quality timber, rising to great heights behind the city, had to be exploited in trade and exchange if the city were to feed itself.12 The Hebrews were also attracted by the murex shells; though forbidden to eat the shellfish within, they were commanded to colour the fringes of their garments with the dye extracted from these molluscs. This purple dye in fact varied in colour from a vivid blue to a rusty red, depending on how it was treated. Tyre and its neighbours therefore had two great advantages: a luxury product highly prized in the textile trade of western Asia; and a staple product without which house-building, ship construction and the production of countless small household objects was impossible. Thus Tyre and its neighbours did not flourish simply as intermediaries between Asia and Europe. They had something of their own to offer.
The great advantage the Phoenician cities possessed in the eleventh to early ninth centuries was independence from a higher power, and often from one another. The sharp decline in Egyptian influence over the Canaanite lands provided a marvellous opportunity for the Phoenician
s to press ahead with their own schemes free from outside interference. The arrival of Assyrian armies from the east in the ninth century acted as a brake: the ‘wolf from the fold’ swept up the coastal cities, just as it eventually absorbed the kingdom of Israel in the hinterland; but the Assyrians were wise enough to see that Phoenicia could remain a source of wealth, and extracted tribute from the continuing trade of Tyre and its neighbours. Until then, Tyre was only one of a series of independent cities along the Phoenician coast, but it became the best known to outsiders such as the Greeks and Hebrews, and it was the mother-city of the leading Phoenician settlement in the west, Carthage, supposedly founded in 814 BC. The rulers of Tyre sometimes exercised dominion over Sidon, and both in Homer and in the Bible they are actually called ‘king of the Sidonians’ (Homer never uses the term ‘Phoenicians’, always ‘Sidonians’).13 This may appear to make Tyre exceptional, but Tyre was typical of Phoenician trading centres in several remarkable respects. Like several later Phoenician colonies, and like Arvad to the north, it stood on an island. Its well-defended position earned the site the name Tzur, for ‘Tyre’ means ‘rock’ or ‘fortress’; only after Alexander the Great built a causeway to link Tyre to the mainland in the late fourth century BC did the city become permanently attached to the coast. These small islands possessed natural defences, but water supply was a constant worry, and late classical accounts describe a water pipe that supplied Arvad from the mainland, though water was also conveyed to the cities in tenders and rainfall was stored in cisterns.14 By the time of Alexander, the island of Tyre had two harbours of its own, one facing Sidon to the north and the other facing Egypt; a canal linked them.15 In the sixth century, the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel imagined Tyre as a fine ship made from the cypresses of Mount Hermon and the cedars of Lebanon; silver, iron, tin and lead arrived from Greece and the west, while the kingdom of Judah sent grain, wax, honey, tallow and balm.16 He gloomily predicted that the magnificent vessel of Tyre was now heading for shipwreck. And yet he provided a periplus, or route map, of the Mediterranean and western Asia, seeing Tyre as the focal point in which all the goods of the world were concentrated – the wealth of Tarshish in the west, of Javan or Ionia in the north, of Tubal and other mysterious lands and islands.
Tyre only gradually became this glorious city. Short trips to Cyprus, Egypt and southern Anatolia continued even during the bleak period after the fall of Ugarit, though economic difficulties in eleventh-century Egypt weakened Tyre, which had relatively intimate ties with the Nile Delta, while Sidon, looking more towards the Asiatic hinterland, was more successful.17 It is not surprising that the artistic influences felt in Phoenicia came from the long-established cultures of western Asia and Pharaonic Egypt. What emerged was an eclectic amalgam of Assyrian and Egyptian styles.18 Some eighth-century ivory fittings from King Omri’s palace at Samaria, the capital of the kingdom of Israel, betray heavy Egyptian influence: two heavenly figures face one another, their wings facing forward; their faces are exposed, and they wear striped headdresses of typically Egyptian design. Though ivory mostly came up the Red Sea or by way of Egypt, it was sent westwards, and Phoenician silver and ivory objects appear in a noble tomb from Praeneste (Palestrina), south of Rome, dating from the seventh century. Gradually, then, the Phoenicians began to open up a new set of routes, into the central and western Mediterranean.
Some of the finest Phoenician products had to be presented to powerful rulers as tribute payments. The bronze gates of Balawat in northern Iraq, now in the British Museum, were built for Shalmanasar III of Assyria in the ninth century; they show Ithobaal, king of Tyre, loading a cargo of tribute on to ships standing in one of the harbours of Tyre, and an inscription solemnly announces: ‘I received the tribute from the boats of the people of Tyre and Sidon’. Yet the tribute cannot have been sent from Tyre to northern Iraq on sea-going ships. The bronze panel portrays the fact that the Canaanites of the seaboard acquired their wealth from sailing the Mediterranean.19 This is confirmed by the annals of Assurnasirpal, an Assyrian king, who died in 859 BC, and who claimed to have acquired from Tyre, Sidon, Arvad and other coastal cities ‘silver, gold, lead, copper, vessels of bronze, garments made of brightly coloured wool, linen garments, a great monkey, a small monkey, maple-wood, boxwood and ivory, and a nahiru, a creature of the sea’. Here we can see a mixture of the exotic and the day-to-day, commodities carried across the Mediterranean and others produced in Phoenicia itself, as well as rare items such as the monkeys, which probably arrived via the Red Sea.20 The Red Sea trade that fed into the Mediterranean was remembered in the biblical account of the ships of Ophir, sent out from Eilat by Solomon and Hiram.21
The Phoenicians traded without minting money, though they did not simply rely on barter.22 For large payments they made use of ingots of silver and copper; sometimes too they paid or were paid in cups made of precious metals, presumably of standard weight (a memory of this is preserved in the biblical story of the cup that Joseph hid in the grain sack of his younger brother Benjamin, and in the story of Wenamun).23 The employment of standardized weights such as the shekel provides clear evidence that, even without coinage, the Phoenicians were able to operate what might be called a market economy; or, put differently, they were familiar with a money economy, but money takes many forms other than coinage. Only much later, the Carthaginians began to mint coins; but their aim was to facilitate trade with the Greeks in Sicily and southern Italy, who were enthusiastic users of coin.24 Metals, though, were the foundation of Phoenician trade in the Mediterranean: the first identifiable base of the Phoenicians was quite close to home, in copper-rich Cyprus, near Larnaka, and was established in the ninth century. Known to the Greeks as Kition and to the Hebrews as Kittim, among the Phoenicians the town generally went by the simple name ‘New City’, Qart Hadasht, the same name that would later be applied to Carthage in North Africa and Cartagena in Spain.25 What was important at Kition was the attempt to create a colony and to gain dominion over the land that surrounded it; an inscription of the mid-eighth century indicates that the governor of the ‘New City’ was an agent of the king of Tyre, and he worshipped the Baal Libnan, the ‘Lord of Lebanon’, though Kition also contained a massive temple dedicated to the female deity Astarte.26 The granaries of Cyprus were as great an attraction as its copper. Without regular supplies of food not just from the grain lands of Israel but from Cyprus they could not cope with the boom in their own city, whose increasing wealth was reflected by growth in population and greater pressure on resources. Unfortunately for the Tyrians, their success in Cyprus attracted the attention of the Assyrian king; Sargon II (d. 705 BC) acquired dominion over Cyprus, an event that marked the brief but significant arrival of the Assyrians in Mediterranean waters. An inscription recording Sargon’s dominion was set up in Kition; he continued to receive tribute from the island over several years, without interfering in its internal affairs, because his aim was to exploit the island’s wealth.27 Its attractions as a source of copper were not, of course, lost on this warrior king. Later, the Assyrian hold on Cyprus weakened, for King Luli of Sidon and Tyre fled from Tyre to safety in Cyprus; the event was commemorated in a relief that portrayed the humiliated king scurrying away on a Phoenician boat.28 But Cyprus was only the most important place in a network of contacts that brought Phoenician merchants regularly to Rhodes and Crete.
By the end of the ninth century, then, Phoenician commerce across the Mediterranean had taken off. There is room for argument whether this take-off preceded that of the Greek merchants and of other mysterious groups such as the ‘Tyrsenians’ who are mentioned in the Aegean and Tyrrhenian Seas at this time. Whoever reached Italy first, the Phoenicians must be given credit for the elongated routes they created, stretching all the way along the coasts of North Africa.
II
The best way to trace the trading empire of the early Phoenicians is to take a tour of the Mediterranean some time around 800 BC.29 This tour will also pass through the Straits of Gibraltar, to reach Cádiz a
nd beyond, for one of the distinctive features of Phoenician trade in the Mediterranean was that these merchants from the extreme east of the Mediterranean also exploited the point of exit at the extreme west, giving access to the Atlantic Ocean. Taking into account the prevailing winds and currents in the Mediterranean, and the certainty that they travelled in a relatively short open season between late spring and early autumn, they must have taken a northerly route past Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete, then across the open expanse of the Ionian Sea to southern Sicily, southern Sardinia, Ibiza and southern Spain. Their jump across the Ionian Sea took them out of sight of land, as did their trajectory from Sardinia to the Balearics; the Mycenaeans had tended to crawl round the edges of the Ionian Sea past Ithaka to the heel of Italy, leaving pottery behind as clues, but the lack of Levantine pottery in southern Italy provides silent evidence of the confidence of Phoenician navigators. Once in the waters around Málaga, westward-bound Phoenician ships often stalled. Weather conditions in the Straits of Gibraltar can be treacherous; there is a strong inflow from the Atlantic, and fogs alternate with contrary winds. This could mean a lengthy wait before tentatively taking passage through the Straits towards Cádiz and other commercial outposts. Fortunately, it was easier to enter the Mediterranean from the Atlantic than to leave it, this time taking advantage of the winds and currents that blocked their exit. On the return journey to Tyre the Phoenicians coasted along the great long flank of North Africa, but even then enormous care was needed: there were treacherous shoals and banks; nor, for long stretches, was there as much to buy as could be found in the metal-rich islands of Cyprus, Sicily and Sardinia.30 On the other hand, Carthage, with its sizeable harbours, offered a refuge and helped to ensure the safety of waters very far from home in which Greek and Etruscan pirates abounded.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 10
