What we know about Phoenician ships
No Phoenician shipwright left a manual, and no complete Phoenician ship survives. What we know comes from four kinds of evidence: shipwrecks, pictures on Assyrian reliefs and on coins, short descriptions by Greek and Roman authors, and a poetic passage in the Hebrew Bible that describes Tyre as a ship. Each has limits, so reconstructions of Phoenician vessels involve some educated guessing.
The best preserved remains are wrecks. Hulls from Mazarrón in southeastern Spain, dated to the 7th century BCE, give details of construction, and the deep-water wrecks found off Ashkelon show how cargoes were loaded. A Punic warship found off western Sicily, from the 3rd century BCE, is later but belongs to the same tradition. Earlier still, the Uluburun shipwreck shows how well Late Bronze Age Levantine and eastern Mediterranean builders already worked with timber.
Ship types
Two broad kinds of ship mattered, a division that applies to the whole ancient Mediterranean.
Merchant ships were broad, deep-bellied sailing vessels with a single square sail, meant to carry as much cargo as possible. Greek writers used the term gaulos, apparently meaning “round” or “tub-like”, for such vessels, which were the workhorses of the trade. They used oars for harbour manoeuvres and steered with large side-mounted steering oars.
Warships and fast galleys were long and narrow and driven by rows of oars, with a ram at the bow. Assyrian reliefs from the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, made around 700 BCE, show Phoenician galleys with rowers on two levels, pointed prows and shields along the rail. The Phoenician cities were later known for triremes, the three-banked galleys that became standard in the 5th century BCE, and the Greek trireme belongs to the same family of designs, although whether the type began with Phoenician or Greek builders is debated. Herodotus says that a Sidonian ship won a sailing contest held for the Persian king Xerxes’ fleet.
A third kind of ship was the small trader that Greek writers called a hippos, “horse”, because of the horse’s head carved on the prow. Some images of these show them on Assyrian reliefs.
Timber and construction
Timber supplied the hull. The mountains behind the coast provided cedar, fir and cypress, and the passage in Ezekiel 27 lists the materials for a famous image of a ship of Tyre. It names fir for planks, cedar for the mast, oak for oars, cypress inlaid with ivory for the benches, and linen for the sail. It is poetry, not an engineering report, but it shows what contemporaries associated with the finest ships and where the materials came from.
Mediterranean ships of this period were typically built “shell first”. The shipwrights assembled the hull’s planks edge to edge, joined by mortise-and-tenon joints (small wooden tongues fitted into slots), and added internal frames afterward. Seams were sealed with resin or pitch. Wrecks such as those at Mazarrón follow these methods, although construction details varied from place to place.
Navigation
The Phoenicians had no compass or chart in the modern sense. Navigators relied on knowledge passed down from experienced sailors. This knowledge included coastal landmarks, the colour and depth of water, the direction of prevailing winds, and sounding with a weighted line to check depth.
Many voyages followed coasts and islands, sailing from one known stopping point to the next. But the Ashkelon wrecks and long crossings to the west show that crews could sail out of sight of land. For this they used the Sun and stars. Later Greek writers said that the Phoenicians steered by the Little Bear (Ursa Minor), which lies closer to the celestial pole than the Great Bear used by Greeks, and this tradition is usually accepted as plausible, although the sources are indirect. Other peoples faced the same problems, and ancient navigation methods around the Mediterranean were broadly similar, so the Phoenicians’ reputation owes more to how often they sailed than to secret techniques. Ancient seafaring in general depended on experience handed down from one crew to the next.
Sailing was seasonal. Winter storms and poor visibility made long voyages risky, and most crossings took place from spring to autumn. Sailors depended heavily on wind direction, so a round trip could take longer than the distance suggests.
Harbours
Phoenician cities were built around their harbours. Tyre was on an island just offshore and had two harbours, one on the north side and one on the south, according to later authors. Sidon likewise sat on a promontory with sheltered anchorages. Arwad was on a small island. Such island and promontory sites protected a city from attack and gave ships shelter.
In the colonies, a similar logic applied: islands, headlands and river mouths were favoured. At Motya in Sicily, a small island in a lagoon, an artificial basin known as a cothon has been identified, and Carthage later had a famous pair of artificial harbours. Their exact dates and uses are discussed by archaeologists, and the Carthaginian complex is usually dated later than the early colonial period. In general, ancient harbours of this region were small by modern standards, and ships were often drawn up on a beach.
Ships and power
Phoenician ships were an asset that others wanted. The Assyrians employed Phoenician shipwrights and crews, and the Persian kings relied on their fleets. In the Greco-Persian wars the Phoenician contingent formed a main part of the Persian navy, and the Greek response, built on the Themistocles naval strategy of fighting in the narrow waters off Salamis, had to deal with that fleet.
The skills were practical and learned from generations of experience. The Phoenicians were not the only skilled seafarers of their time, but their combination of good timber, ready markets and long experience put them among the leading maritime peoples of the early first millennium BCE.