The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (18 page)

Twenty years later, Solomon and Hiram collaborated on a project to send a fleet to
Ophir and Sheba for frankincense and myrrh, essentials in the religious rites of the day. Like the Egyptians’
Punt, neither Ophir nor Sheba has
been positively located, and scholarly guesses range from
Sudan and Yemen to the Indus Valley. The Phoenicians supplied the ships, which were carried overland in pieces to the
Gulf of Aqaba, and the fleet ret
urned from Ophir with gold, spices, ivory, and precious stones—which recall the cargoes of the ships of
Dilmun,
Magan, and
Meluhha—and sandalwood, which is native to southern India. In later centuries, the Yemeni
ports of
Aden and
Mocha would be celebrated entrepôts of east–west trade, and the identification of Ophir and Sheba with Yemen is credible. These expeditions probably stopped after Solomon’s death and the division of the monarchy between
Israel and
Judah.
Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, attempted to revive the Ophir trade in the mid-800s
BCE
, but, according to the
Hebrew
Bible, God condemned his collaboration with Israel and destroyed the fleet at Aqaba. Little is heard about shipping on the Red Sea for centuries thereafter, but the Egyptians doubtless benefited from, if they did not control, such trade as there was. Although Phoenician seafarers were always in demand in foreign fleets,
Levantine city-states were too small and far removed from the Red Sea to capture its trade directly.

Tyrian prosperity owed much to the rise of the Neo-
Assyrian Empire (935–612
BCE
). Centered on the upper Tigris city of Assur, a major crossroads of north–south and east–west traffic, Assyria was for a time the only major Near Eastern state without direct access to saltwater and maritime trade. This they remedied by conquering Babylon and opening the way to the Persian Gulf and, in the 870s
BCE
, by forcing the Phoenician cities of Tyre,
Sidon,
Byblos, and Arvad to pay tribute. Toward the end of the eighth century
BCE
, the Assyrians moved to control Syria and the Levant directly and they appear to have encircled but not annexed Sidon and Tyre. The price of independence was high—in 732
BCE
the Tyrians paid 4,500 kilograms of gold in tribute. In exchange, however, they retained a virtual monopoly of Assyria’s western trade and maintained commercial agents in Ur, Uruk, and Babylon. At the end of the century, the Levantine city-states became pawns in the struggle between Egypt and Assyria. The pharaoh encouraged an uprising by
Luli of Tyre, which ended with the city’s fall and Luli’s flight to Cyprus in 707
BCE
. Although Tyre remained nominally independent for another two hundred years, the Phoenicians continued to chafe under Assyrian domination.

The threat of conquest and demands of traders both shaped Tyre’s destiny. In his oracle concerning Tyre, the prophet
Isaiah refers to the “
exultant city … whose feet carried her to settle far away.” Archaeological and written evidence bears out that the Phoenicians were the first
Iron Age traders to cast their commercial net across the Mediterranean. In large part this was a continuation of a Levantine seafaring tradition dating from the third millennium. The coming of the
Sea People had disrupted Mediterranean trade,
and long-distance routes were broken into shorter segments plied by seafarers sailing within networks of diminished scope, between
Phoenicia and Cyprus, and from Cyprus to the Aegean islands, for example. However, legend holds that around 1000
BCE
Phoenician voyagers established colonies at
Utica in Tunisia, Gadir (
Cádiz, Spain), and
Lixus, on the Atlantic coast of
Morocco about ninety kilometers south of
Tangier. While no hard evidence of such
early settlement has come to light, the speed of Tyrian westward expansion in the late ninth and eighth centuries
BCE
suggests a more than passing familiarity with the sea routes and marts of the central and western Mediterranean as well as Atlantic Africa and Europe, where a Phoenician presence can be firmly dated to at least the 700s
BCE
.

A bas-relief believed to show the flight of Luli from Tyre to Cyprus in the eighth century
BCE
. All the galleys are biremes (with two banks of oars) with side steering oars. Those fitted with rams and masts are warships. The presence of warriors and women (who appear larger) supports the theory that this represents a mass exodus from Tyre before the armies of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (reigned 705–681
BCE
), from whose palace at Nineveh, Iraq, this comes. From Austen Henry Layard, The Monuments of Nineveh: From Drawings Made on the Spot … During a Second Expedition to Assyria (London: Murray, 1849), plate 81.

Much of Tyre’s westward enterprise can be attributed to trade and commercial interests, but the first colonies of which we have any firm knowledge were founded in the wake of a struggle between sibling heirs to the throne,
Elissa and
Pygmalion. Following the death of her husband, Elissa (or
Dido, as the
Romans knew her) fled to
Kition, on Cyprus, in about 820
BCE
. Six or seven years later, she
established
Carthage—Qart-hardesht, or “new city”—on the
Gulf of Tunis. Unlike other Phoenician settlements, Carthage seems to have been a colony formally modeled on the home city and, apart from Kition, the only overseas settlement in which members of the ruling family and priesthood had a direct hand. The port is strategically located on the southern shore of the seventy-mile-wide
Strait of Sicily through which most east–west shipping must pass. As a result, some historians believe that from its inception Carthage was intended as a bulwark against threats to Phoenician aspirations in the central and western Mediterranean. It is difficult to ascribe the fugitive Elissa’s choice of such a strategic location to simple luck, and the city’s founding reinforces the idea that an older Phoenician settlement existed at nearby Utica. The story of Elissa’s flight may be apocryphal, but whether Carthage was founded in response to domestic tensions in Tyre or to oversee her western trade, the colony’s bonds with the home country remained strong through the middle of the sixth century
BCE
.

The Phoenicians’ drive to the west was doubtless fueled by a search for metals, particularly Sardinian iron and Spanish tin and silver. Tyrian traders established themselves on a group of islands on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain by the 760s
BCE
. The archaeology of the area is complicated by the fact that the site has been occupied continuously since before the Phoenicians arrived, and silt deposits long ago joined the islands to the mainland. Called simply
Gadir—the Phoenician word for fortress or citadel—it was known to the Romans as Gades, and eventually Cádiz. Gadir’s primary attraction was its proximity to the
Guadalquivir River and the Río Tinto, which offered access to the silver mines of the Sierra Morena and
Huelva. Silver, gold, and tin had been mined in the region since the Bronze Age, but smelting operations in Huelva intensified around the seventh century
BCE
, probably in response to Phoenician demand for silver. As one historian has put it, “
only high economic returns can explain the eccentric location of Gadir”—that is, more than two thousand miles from Tyre, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar on the shores of the
Atlantic, and without another major trading partner in the region. Certainly it is a long way to ship
olive oil, perfumes and
scented oils, textiles, jewelry, and the other Phoenician and Greek ex
ports for which evidence survives, and it was not until the later eighth and early seventh centuries
BCE
that Phoenicians began settling along the Andalusian coast of southeast Spain, the Balearic island of Ibiza, and
Malta. Phoenician shipping also reached the Portuguese coast, while Gaditeans sailed south to the rich fishing banks between
Mauritania and the
Canary Islands, about four days from Gadir. The most substantial of the settlements on the African coast was at
Lixus, at the mouth of the Loukkos River in northern
Morocco, which flowed from the western Atlas Mountains with their wealth of gold, ivory, salt, copper, and lead. Farther south, the Phoenicians reached the island of
Mogador (near
Essaouira, Morocco) about 380 miles from Gibraltar, where the primary activities seem to have been fishing and
whaling.

Even after the bitter fighting that accompanied the fall of the Neo-
As
syrians and the rise of the Neo-
Babylonian Empire at the end of the seventh century, the Tyrians remained important players in the far-flung network of Near Eastern trade. Writing during his captivity in Babylon, the prophet
Ezekiel described Tyre’s imports at considerable length. As it had in the days of
Hiram four centuries before,
Israel supplied “
wheat, millet, honey, oil, and balm,” but virtually all the other goods he mentions are high-value or luxury items: silver, iron, tin, and lead from
Tarshish (perhaps one of Tyre’s overseas colonies); slaves and bronze statues from
Ionia and central
Anatolia; horses from
Armenia; ivory and ebony brought by merchants of
Rhodes; turquoise, linen, embroidered cloths, coral, and rubies from the Negev Desert; wine and wool from Syria; cassia, iron, saddlecloths, lambs, and goats from Arabia; spices, gold, and precious stones from Yemen and Africa; and so on. Ezekiel also describes the diverse sources on which the Tyrians drew to build and man their fleets, gathering
cedar,
fir, and
oak from the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Mountains, Cyprus
pine, and linen sailcloth from Egypt, while her crews and shipwrights came from
Sidon, Arvad, and
Byblos. In short, the web of Tyrian enterprise embraced nearly the entire Near East and Mediterranean.

For all their enterprise, Phoenicians did not have a monopoly of Mediterranean trade. The most important evidence of other merchants, including
Greeks and possibly Cypriots, comes from
Al-Mina, a neutral trading center at the mouth of the Orontes River just north of the modern Syro-Turkish border. The port, which may have been little more than a landing beach, had been overrun in the twelfth century
BCE
but was revived later by Phoenicians. Many believe that Al-Mina was the first Levantine port frequented by Greeks and thus the point from which a range of
oriental influences such as metalworking
techniques, religious ideas, literature, and writing infiltrated the Greek world. By 800
BCE
, the date of the earliest Greek pottery found there, it seems to have been a rendezvous for Greek merchants, many of them from the island of
Euboea, “
famed for its ships” and the launching pad of the first wave of overseas expansion from
Iron Age Greece.

The oldest image of a ship from post-Mycenaean Greece is on a late-ninth-century
BCE
jar found on Euboea. While the Phoenicians were the preeminent seafarers of the time, such evidence suggests the involvement of sailors from Euboea in Mediterranean trade. Perhaps more convincing is the sudden diffusion of a Greek alphabet modeled on a Phoenician original. Just as some of the earliest Phoenician writings outside the Levant have been found along their trade routes—in Cyprus and
Crete from the tenth century, and
Sicily and Sardinia from the ninth—two of the oldest known specimens of Greek writing come not from the Greek mainland or islands but from areas visited by Euboean merchants in southern Italy. Thus the distribution of the alphabet—the last word in low-volume, high-value cargo and the most transformative agent of change in the ancient Greek world—must be credited to ninth-century Euboean merchants frequenting ports across the eastern Mediterranean.

The inscription on a drinking cup found at a Euboean entrepôt on the island of
Pithecoussae (Ischia) in the
Bay of Naples and dated to about 775
BCE
has been translated: “
Nestor had a fine drinking cup, but anyone who drinks from this cup will soon be seized with desire for fair-crowned
Aphrodite.” This is of interest not only because of its antiquity, but because it parallels or alludes to Homer’s description of Nestor’s drinking cup in the
Iliad.
Several Greek cities claimed Homer for their own, most of them in Ionia in Asia Minor, yet textual and linguistic analysis of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
suggests that he was from Euboea and that he lived in the early 700s
BCE
. The background to his epics is the
Trojan War fought at
Troy (Ilium) in modern Turkey in the mid-twelfth century
BCE
during the period of widespread upheaval that convulsed the palace economies of the
Mycenaeans, the
Hittites, and the Levant. As a result, the poems combine anachronistic survivals from the more prosperous Mycenaean age with details of daily life that reflect the reality of Homer’s eighth-century audience, one just emerging from several centuries of declining population, technological regression, and relative insularity.

Homer’s depiction of Phoenicians, whom the Greeks view with a mixture
of envy and mistrust, is especially relevant for understanding the maritime dynamic of the age. While the Euboeans may have been striking out on their own at this point, the Phoenicians had been responsible for maintaining and renewing the post-Mycenaean trade between the Levant and Greece, and for introducing Greek traders to lands farther west. Homer’s portrayals of Phoenicians could reflect resentment of their success or a nascent struggle to wrest control of local trade from non-Greeks. The prophet
Isaiah, Homer’s near contemporary, may have written of
Tyre, “
whose merchants were princes, whose traders were the honoured ones of the earth,” but on the Aegean frontier the Phoenicians could be pretty tough customers not above raiding for slaves. When
Odysseus returns to
Ithaca and swaps stories with his old retainer
Eumaeus, he tells how he spent seven years in Egypt, “
amassing a fortune” before a Phoenician—“a scoundrel, swindler, an old hand at lies / who’d already done the world a lot of damage”—enlisted his help to “ship a cargo there for sale / but in fact he’d sell
me
there and make a killing!” Eumaeus counters with a story of how as a child he was kidnapped by Phoenicians and escaped from them while anchored off Ithaca. Such piratical raiding for slaves was not limited to the Phoenicians, and even Eumaeus, poor swineherd that he is, owns a slave whom he “
purchased for himself … bought him from
Taphians, bartered his own goods.” Indeed, according to Thucydides, piracy, “
so far from being regarded as disgraceful, was considered quite honorable” in archaic Greece.