The Phoenicians occupy an unusual position in ancient history: a civilization with enormous historical impact — the alphabet, maritime exploration of the entire Mediterranean, the founding of Carthage — that left almost no literature of its own. Everything we know about them comes from outsiders.

Phoenicia refers loosely to the coastal city-states of the eastern Mediterranean (modern Lebanon and Syria): Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Berytus. These cities were never politically unified; they shared language, culture, and religion but maintained independent governance. Their economic base was maritime trade and the production of luxury goods: the famous Tyrian purple dye, cedar wood, glass, metalwork.

The Phoenician alphabet — the ancestor of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and all alphabetic scripts — is perhaps the single most consequential cultural invention of the ancient world. By reducing the writing system to 22 consonant signs, it made literacy accessible on a scale that syllabic and logographic systems never could. The Greeks adapted it around 800 BC, adding vowel signs to create the first true alphabet.

The Carthaginian state, founded by Tyrian colonists in 814 BC according to tradition, became the dominant western Mediterranean power and Rome's most dangerous rival. The Punic Wars that ended with Carthage's destruction in 146 BC are central to Roman history. But Carthaginian literature — which certainly existed — did not survive the destruction, and we read Carthage entirely through Roman and Greek sources with obvious biases.