They ran a trade network stretching three thousand kilometres without an empire, an army, or a capital. They standardised the alphabet that most of the world still writes with. And almost nothing they wrote about themselves survives — we know them through the Greeks who competed with them, the Romans who destroyed their greatest city, and the archaeology of what they threw away.
This episode covers the cedar trade with Bronze Age Egypt, the rise of Tyre, the invention of Tyrian purple, the expansion to Carthage and the Atlantic, the unresolved argument over the tophet, and the seven-month siege that ended it.
Where the evidence is contested, this video says so rather than pretend otherwise.
Key sources for this episode:
Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians
Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West
Glenn Markoe, Phoenicians
Herodotus, Histories
Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander
Josephus, Against Apion
Vanished Empires produces long-form documentaries on the civilizations that disappeared. New documentary every few days.
0:00 Introduction
3:14 Origins and the Cedar Coast
11:08 The Rise of Tyre
19:38 Purple, Letters and Ships
28:06 Life Inside the Walls
36:26 West to the Atlantic
44:19 The Gods and the Tophet
52:06 Assyria and Babylon
59:35 Alexander
1:06:26 What Remains
