Facts about Phoenicians
The Phoenicians are credited with spreading the Phoenician alphabet throughout the Mediterranean world.
According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began to quarrel.
Phoenicians seem to have first discovered the technique of producing transparent glass.
Professional archaeologists have pursued the origin of the Phoenicians for generations, basing their analyzes on excavated sites, the remains of material culture, contemporary texts set into contemporary contexts, as well as linguistics.
Some have speculated that the Phoenicians may even have colonized the Americas.
Ironically, the Phoenicians themselves are mostly silent on their own history, possibly because they wrote on perishable materials, papyrus or skins.
To many archaeologists therefore, the Phoenicians are simply indistinguishable from the descendants of coastal-dwelling Canaanites, who over the centuries developed a particular seagoing culture and skills.
Ultimately, the origins of the Phoenicians are still unclear: where they came from and just when (or if) they arrived, and under what circumstances, are all still energetically disputed.
Trade routes from Asia converged on the Phoenician coast as well, enabling the Phoenicians to govern trade between Mesopotamia on the one side, and Egypt and Arabia on the other.
Hecataeus writes that Phoenicia was formerly called ???, a name Philo of Byblos later adopted into his mythology as his eponym for the Phoenicians: "Khna who was afterwards called Phoinix."
The Phoenicians often traded by means of a galley, a man-powered sailing vessel.
Phoenicians also shipped tall Lebanon cedars to Egypt, a civilization that consumed more wood than it could produce.
Some lesser commercial sugar crops include the date palm, sorghum, and sugar maple.
Wreckage of Phoenician ships and an inscription on a rock in Brazil suggests Phoenicians had visited there.
The Melungeons are also sometimes claimed to be descendants of the Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians exerted considerable influence on the other groups around the Mediterranean, notably the Greeks, who later became their main commercial rivals.
The Phoenicians were not an agricultural people, because most of the land was not arable; therefore, they focused on commerce and trading instead.
The Phoenicians also traded cedar for making ships and other things.