The Phoenicians flourished at about the same time as the Greeks and Romans that are more familior to us but they were never a kingdom, just a series of city-states along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Tyre may be their best-known city and port. They were merchants whose influence extended throughout the Mediterranean, from the Levant, to Egypt, Italy, Greece, Spain, Sicily, and northern Africa. And they absorbed cultural traits and artifacts from the places where they traded. We owe our alphabet to them. They ripped off the Egyptian syllabary and instead of syllables, assigned individual speech sounds to each glyph. The Egyptian glyph of an open hand, for instance, was adapted and assigned the speech sound of "d". (The drawing of the hand later turned into Greek "delta" and then our own "D".
The Phoenicians were terrific traveling salesmen. They harvested the Cedars of Lebanon and sold them to kings.
The program doesn't use reenactors but it does focus on the genetic background of the Phoenicians. You can trace it through DNA but that requires drawing blood samples. Historian Spencer and others have surprisingly little trouble because the fishermen of Tyre are anxious to find out about their own history.
Nice, well-organized program about a neglected culture of the Ancient Middle East.
The Phoenicians were terrific traveling salesmen. They harvested the Cedars of Lebanon and sold them to kings.
The program doesn't use reenactors but it does focus on the genetic background of the Phoenicians. You can trace it through DNA but that requires drawing blood samples. Historian Spencer and others have surprisingly little trouble because the fishermen of Tyre are anxious to find out about their own history.
Nice, well-organized program about a neglected culture of the Ancient Middle East.
