What the Phoenicians were known for selling
The Phoenician cities sat on a narrow coastal strip with mountains behind them, and not much farmland. They lived by selling what they could make or obtain, and by moving other peoples’ goods around the Mediterranean. Their best-known products were purple cloth, glass, timber and fine craft goods, supported by a trade in metals that stretched across the sea.
Evidence comes from several kinds of source. Archaeology gives us cargoes, workshops and shipwrecks. Written sources include Assyrian tribute lists, Egyptian texts, and, in the Bible, a long poetic list in the book of Ezekiel that describes the trading partners of Tyre. These sources are not always easy to compare, and they sometimes exaggerate, so the details below are cautious.
Tyrian purple dye
The most famous Phoenician product was purple dye made from sea snails of the murex group. The dye came from a gland in the snail. When it was extracted, it was a pale liquid that turned through shades of yellow and green toward purple when exposed to air and light. Different species and treatments produced shades from reddish purple to a deep blue-violet.
The process took large numbers of snails, and ancient authors such as Pliny the Elder, writing in the 1st century CE, describe it as laborious and costly. Piles of crushed murex shells have been found at Tyre, Sidon and other Levantine sites, which support the idea of a dye industry on a large scale. This is one reason that the dye was so expensive, and in later periods it became linked with rank and royalty. The Greek word phoinix, connected with red or purple, may be the source of the name “Phoenician”, although this is an old idea that is not fully certain. Tyrian purple dye was used on wool and linen, and it was the end product of a chain of fishing, dyeing and ancient weaving.
Glass and other crafts
Glassmaking was not invented by the Phoenicians; the earliest glass objects come from Mesopotamia and Egypt in the second millennium BCE. But the Levantine coast became a centre of glass production, and Sidon had a long reputation for it. Small coloured vessels for oils and perfumes, made around a clay core, and glass beads were exported widely. Beads shaped like human faces, often called Phoenician head pendants, turn up in sites from Carthage to Spain and Sardinia. A later story told by Pliny, in which sailors on a beach discovered glass by accident, is a legend. Techniques of ancient glassmaking were improved in the Levant in the 1st century BCE, when glassblowing appeared in the region, though it is not clear in which city.
Phoenician workshops also produced carved ivory, decorated metal bowls and jewellery. Ivory plaques in a Phoenician style have been found at Assyrian palaces such as Nimrud, probably as tribute, loot or imported luxury goods. The craftsmen borrowed Egyptian and Near Eastern motifs and mixed them in their own way.
Cedar and timber
Mount Lebanon had forests of cedar, fir and cypress, a rarity in the largely treeless landscapes of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Byblos exported timber to Egypt from the Bronze Age onward. The Egyptian story of Wenamun, written down around the early first millennium BCE, shows a ruler of Byblos bargaining over a cedar order. In the Hebrew Bible, Hiram of Tyre supplies cedar and craftsmen for the building of Solomon’s temple. Assyrian kings also boasted about taking cedar beams from Lebanon.
Timber had a second use for the Phoenicians themselves: it built the ships on which the whole system depended.
Metals and the western trade
Metal was central to the long-distance trade. Copper from Cyprus and tin, needed for bronze alloying, had been moved around the eastern Mediterranean since the Bronze Age, as the Uluburun shipwreck cargo illustrates. In the first millennium BCE, Phoenician traders turned increasingly to the west, especially southern Spain, which had silver, as well as copper, lead and other metals. The biblical name Tarshish is often linked to this region, though the identification is debated. Later Greek writers claimed that the silver in Spain was so plentiful that Phoenician ships took it in great quantity; this is a good example of a story that is probably exaggerated but reflects a real trade.
In Sardinia and elsewhere, the Phoenicians also exchanged goods for iron and other ores. Their return cargoes to the east included silver, which was important for the tribute that the Assyrian Empire demanded from the coastal cities.
Other goods and the list in Ezekiel
Phoenician traders also dealt in wine, olive oil, salted fish, pottery and textiles, along with more unsettling cargoes. The list in Ezekiel 27 mentions trading partners supplying silver, iron, tin and lead, horses, ivory, wine, wool and linen, and enslaved people. Slavery was widespread in the ancient world and the Phoenicians took part in it; the sources do not give us numbers.
How the networks worked
The commercial system had no single manager. Some trade was carried out by royal households, some by temples, and some by private merchants, and these overlapped. A treaty from the 7th century BCE between the Assyrian king Esarhaddon and the ruler of Tyre includes rules about ships and trade, which shows that kings were involved.
The colonies were nodes in the network, giving traders safe harbours, local contacts and warehouses. Tyre’s commercial reach is one reason that it grew rich, and the colonies, from Cyprus to the Atlantic, extended it.
Coinage came late to the Phoenician cities. Silver coins were struck in several of them from about the 5th century BCE, well after the Lydian gold coinage had begun in Anatolia. Earlier trade relied on weighed silver and barter.
The limits of the evidence
It is tempting to treat the Phoenicians as the great merchants of antiquity, but that is partly a result of who wrote about them. Greek and Hebrew writers were often impressed or hostile, and no Phoenician merchant’s archive survives. Recent work on wrecks and trade pottery has made the picture sharper, and the surviving evidence suggests they were skilled traders in a world where many other peoples, such as the Greeks and Etruscans, were trading too.