A sea people, but not “the Sea Peoples”
The phrase “people of the sea” is a fair description of the coastal Phoenician towns, which lived by shipping, fishing and trade. It should not be confused with the “Sea Peoples”, a separate name given by modern scholars to groups mentioned in Egyptian records of the late 13th and early 12th centuries BCE. Those groups are a different and much-debated topic.
What follows is about the beliefs and daily life of the Phoenician cities, such as Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad. One caution applies throughout. The Phoenicians left very few religious texts of their own, and most of what survives comes from short inscriptions, archaeology, and the writings of outsiders such as Greeks, Romans and the authors of the Hebrew Bible. The picture is therefore uneven.
Gods and goddesses
Phoenician religion belonged to the wider Canaanite and Semitic world. The word baal simply means “lord”, and it was used as a title for many gods rather than as the name of one. Each city tended to honour a patron deity or divine pair.
- Melqart, whose name means “king of the city”, was the chief god of Tyre. Greek writers identified him with Herakles, and his cult followed Tyrian settlers overseas, including to Gadir in Spain.
- Eshmun, a god associated with healing, was important at Sidon, where a large temple complex lay outside the city by a river.
- Baalat Gebal, “the Lady of Byblos”, was the city’s main goddess and was linked by outsiders to Egyptian goddesses such as Hathor and Isis.
- Astarte (Ashtart) was a goddess widely honoured on the coast and overseas, connected with fertility, love and, in some places, war. Her name is related to that of Ishtar, and the Ishtar cult of Mesopotamia is a close relative.
- Baal Hammon and Tanit were prominent at Carthage, though how they relate to the gods of the homeland is debated.
Gods could take on features of neighbours’ deities. Egyptian imagery appears often in Phoenician art, and Greek names were attached to local gods in later centuries. Greek tradition also tells of Adonis, whose cult at Byblos is described by later authors.
Temples and sacred places
Phoenician sanctuaries were not always grand roofed buildings. Many were open courts with altars, standing stones, and sacred enclosures that could include trees or springs. Upright stones, sometimes called betyls, stood for the presence of a deity. Some cities also had large temples. Herodotus, who says he visited the temple of Melqart at Tyre, describes two pillars there, one of gold and one of emerald-like stone, although his description can only be checked in part.
Priests and priestesses served the cults, and royal families appear to have had a close religious role. Inscriptions record kings as builders and restorers of temples, and some rulers bear priestly titles. Offerings included food, incense, and votive objects such as small figurines.
Burial customs
Phoenician burials were varied. At Tyre the cemetery at al-Bass has produced many cremations in pottery urns from the early first millennium BCE, while other places favoured burial in the ground or in rock-cut tombs. Grave goods often included jewellery, pottery, amulets and, for those who could afford them, imported items.
The best-known tombs are royal. At Sidon, kings of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE were buried in sarcophagi made in Egypt or in an Egyptian style. A famous example is the sarcophagus of King Eshmunazar II, which carries a long Phoenician inscription cursing anyone who disturbs the grave. The Egyptian influence in stone sarcophagus design should be read as a sign of fashion and prestige, not necessarily as a shared adoption of Egyptian afterlife beliefs. We know little about what Phoenicians themselves expected after death, and the inscriptions mainly show concern for an undisturbed resting place.
Daily life in the coastal towns
The towns were crowded and built close to the water. The Greek geographer Strabo, writing around the turn of the era, says that houses at Tyre were unusually tall, which fits a city on a small island with little room to spread. Workshops were a part of city life: dyers, potters, metalworkers, glassmakers and ivory carvers all worked in the cities, and the smell of the dye works was apparently notorious.
Food drew on the Mediterranean staples of grain, olives, wine and fish, though specifics vary by place. Linen and wool were worn, and the textile trade, in which ancient weaving and dyeing was central, was a major activity. Women appear in the record as queens, priestesses and in some inscriptions as donors, but ordinary women’s lives are hard to see.
Phoenician was a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, and literacy appears to have been fairly common among merchants and officials, helped by the short alphabet. Little Phoenician literature survives, so much of the cities’ voice is lost.
The sacrifice debate
The most disputed subject in Phoenician religion is the claim, made by Greek and Roman writers, that children were sacrificed. The evidence is from the western colony of Carthage, where cemeteries of burned remains and inscribed stones, known as the Carthaginian tophet, have been excavated. Scholars disagree on whether these are children’s burials, some of which may have been sacrificed, or cemeteries for infants who died naturally. For the homeland cities, the evidence for such practices is much weaker.
Cultural world
The Phoenician cities shared a culture, but they were not uniform. A merchant of Sidon, a priest of Byblos and a sailor of Arwad each lived within their own city’s traditions. What bound them was language, trade, shared gods, and a habit of borrowing, which helps explain why Phoenician art and religion look partly Egyptian, partly Mesopotamian and partly Aegean.