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The Phoenicians Research Paper

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The Phoenicians: The Master Traders of the Mediterranean World The Mediterranean Sea is home to many great civilizations in our early history. The Ancient Greeks and Romans established their empires in this region and their cultural contributions have greatly influenced the development of modern Western culture. Unlike the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, there is one Mediterranean civilization that did not have a land centric empire. The Phoenicians are the first civilization to create a long distance sea trading network in the ancient Mediterranean world. This trading network is significant in ancient Mediterranean history because archaeological remains discovered in different areas of the Mediterranean. These archeological remains …show more content…

The Phoenicians were the first civilization to use a syllabic alphabet (Peckman 2014:3). Their alphabet originated from the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system of the Canaanite writing system (Peckman 2014:3). The Phoenicians created their alphabet by borrowing consonants, vowels, syllables, and other characters/symbols from other Mediterranean civilizations (Peckman 2014:3). This alphabet was invented to be easily learned to anyone living in the Mediterranean (Peckman 2014:3). Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenicians created their own writing system because they wanted to communicate with other traders in their city-states as simple as possible. By assembling the letters in a specific order, the reader did not need to interpret a concept represented by a hieroglyphic (Peckman 2014:3). This alphabet allowed the Phoenicians to create a message with a specific code that always stayed the same and had the same meaning to other people who read the message (Peckman 2014:3). An example of the use of the Phoenician alphabet is found in Phillip C. Schmitz’s article Reconsidering a Phoenician Inscribed Amulet from the Vicinity of Tyre. This article features an archaeological analysis of a bronze pendant discovered in the capital of the Phoenician civilization Tyre (Schmitz 2002:816). The bronze pendant features Egyptian hieroglyphics on the front …show more content…

According to the Phoenician Maritime Religion: Sailors, Goddess Worship, and the Grotta Regina article, the Phoenicians constructed their ships or galleys differently from each other because, a trader will want his ship to have certain attributes necessary for his trading voyage. These attributes include the overall size of the ship, the amount of cargo and the durability of the ship while using different trade routes during its voyage (Christian 2013:181). One example, which features an archaeological analysis of an ancient Phoenician galley is in the Iron Age Shipwrecks in Deep Water off Ashkelon, Israel article. This article features a discovery of a sunken Phoenician galley called the Tanit located near modern day Israel in 1997. Archaeologists working on this project dated the Tanit around 750 BCE which was around the time the Phoenician trading network expanded throughout the different regions of the Mediterranean. The archaeologists have also discovered several artifacts within the galley and these artifacts are well persevered because they were left undisturbed for thousands of years at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. These artifacts include bronze bowls, incense stands, cooking pots and pottery in a shape of a large U-shaped container called an

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