Cities, not an empire
There was never a Phoenician empire in the sense that there was an Assyrian or a Persian one. No king ruled all of Phoenicia, no common capital collected taxes from the whole coast, and no single army marched under a Phoenician banner. What existed was a group of independent coastal cities on the Levant, in roughly what is now Lebanon and the neighbouring coasts of Syria and northern Israel. Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Arwad and Beirut were among the best known, and each had its own king, its own gods and its own interests.
The name itself is Greek. The Greeks called these people Phoinikes, a word often linked to the colour purple or red, and it is not certain that the people used a collective name for themselves. Sources suggest that they identified first with their home city (“a man of Tyre”, “a man of Sidon”) and, more broadly, as Canaanites. Historians therefore usually speak of the Phoenician city-states in the plural. The idea of a “Phoenician empire” mostly comes from the reach of their trade and colonies, which were real, but which were run by cities rather than by a central state.
Roots in the Late Bronze Age
The coastal cities did not appear from nowhere. Byblos had been trading with Egypt for centuries before 1200 BCE, and the letters found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, from the 14th century BCE, show local rulers of coastal towns writing to the pharaoh as vassals while quarrelling with each other. Further north, Ugarit was a rich port with its own archive, although it is usually treated as a neighbour rather than as a Phoenician city.
Around 1200 BCE the eastern Mediterranean went through a period of upheaval, with the collapse of the Hittite kingdom, the destruction of many Aegean centres such as the old Mycenaean palaces, and the end of Ugarit. Scholars still debate the causes, which probably combined several pressures. The Levantine coast was shaken, but cities such as Tyre, Sidon and Byblos continued to be occupied. Their survival is one of the main reasons that the period after 1200 BCE is treated as the Phoenician age.
Independence and the age of Tyre
With Egypt and the Hittites weakened, the coastal cities had room to act on their own. A well-known Egyptian text, the story of Wenamun (usually dated to around the late 11th century BCE), describes an Egyptian envoy sent to buy cedar at Byblos. The local ruler treats him as a customer, not as a representative of an overlord, and expects payment.
From about the 10th century BCE, Tyre came to the fore. The biblical tradition, which is our main source and should be handled carefully, names King Hiram of Tyre as a partner of the Israelite kings in building projects and trade. Later rulers of Tyre are better attested, including Ithobaal I in the 9th century BCE. At times Tyre appears to have been the most powerful city on the coast, and sources occasionally call its kings “kings of the Sidonians”, which shows how flexible the labels were. Even so, Tyre led by wealth and prestige and not by command, and other cities kept their own rulers.
In this period the cities built up the maritime commerce and colonies that made them famous. The chief centres of that expansion were Tyre and Sidon, and the later Carthage founding legend, which credits a Tyrian princess with starting a new city in North Africa, reflects how closely Tyre was associated with it.
Under Assyria and Babylon
The cities’ independence was always conditional on the strength of their neighbours. From the 9th century BCE the Assyrian Empire pushed to the Mediterranean. Assyrian kings recorded receiving tribute from Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad, and the arrangement suited both sides: the Phoenician cities paid and kept their trade, while Assyria gained access to timber, metals and luxury goods.
The relationship was not always peaceful. Cities that revolted risked sieges, deportations or the installation of a loyal ruler. Sidon was destroyed and rebuilt under Assyrian orders in the 7th century BCE, according to Assyrian records. When Assyria fell in the late 7th century BCE, Babylon took over its western claims. Nebuchadnezzar II is traditionally said to have besieged Tyre for around thirteen years in the early 6th century BCE, with the outcome uncertain; the city seems to have come to terms and survived. Throughout, the pattern held: a Phoenician city lost freedom of action but not its identity.
Persian rule
After the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great and his successors took over the region, and the Phoenician cities became part of the Persian system. The coast was grouped in a larger province under the satrapy system, and local kings generally kept their positions in return for loyalty and ships.
Those ships mattered. The Phoenician fleets were the backbone of Persian naval power. Herodotus reports that the Phoenicians supplied the largest and best-regarded contingent during the Greco-Persian conflict, and they were in action on the Persian side at Salamis in 480 BCE. The same writer says that Cambyses wanted to attack Carthage but that the Phoenician sailors refused to fight their own colony, so the plan was dropped. We should treat the details with caution, but the story fits what we otherwise know about the cities’ ties across the sea.
Persian rule was a prosperous period for many Phoenician cities, and Sidon in particular flourished. Resentment grew all the same, and in the mid-4th century BCE Sidon joined a revolt that ended with the city’s destruction by the Persian king Artaxerxes III, according to later Greek sources.
Alexander and the Hellenistic world
In 332 BCE Alexander the Great marched down the coast. Most Phoenician cities submitted, but Tyre, on its island, resisted. Alexander besieged it for about seven months and built a causeway from the mainland, after which the city fell with heavy losses. The sand that gathered around the causeway over the centuries eventually turned the island into a peninsula, which is why Tyre is joined to the land today.
After Alexander the cities passed to his successors, first the Ptolemies and then the Seleucids, and they kept their commerce and local institutions for a long time. Greek culture spread, and local inscriptions gradually shifted to Greek. By the later 1st century BCE the region was under Roman control, as part of the province of Syria.
What fell, and what continued
It is hard to point to a single moment when “Phoenicia” ended. The cities were absorbed one after another into larger states, but they did not vanish. Tyre, Sidon and Byblos remained important towns well into the Roman and Byzantine periods, and their dye, glass and shipping trades continued.
The western colonies followed their own course. Carthage grew into a major power and fought Rome in the Punic Wars, before the Carthage destruction of 146 BCE. The Punic language, a descendant of Phoenician, was still spoken in North Africa centuries later. Meanwhile the greatest legacy of the coastal cities was not political at all: it was an alphabet, a maritime tradition and a set of trading habits that shaped the Mediterranean world long after the kings of Tyre and Sidon had lost their thrones.