Phoenicians

Phoenicia was an ancient civilization in Canaan which covered most of the western, coastal part of the Fertile Crescent. Several major Phoenician cities were built on the coastline of the Mediterranean. It was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550 BC to 300 BC.

They were famed in Classical Greece and Rome as ‘traders in purple’, Tyrian purple also known as Tyrian red, Phoenician purple, royal purple, imperial purple or imperial dye, referring to their monopoly on the precious purple dye of the Mrex snail, used, among other things, for royal clothing, and for their spread of the alphabet, upon which all major modern alphabets are derived.

The Greek historian Strabo believed that the Phoenicians originated from Bahrain. This theory was accepted by the 19th-century German classicist Arnold Heeren who said that:

"In the Greek geographers, for instance, we read of two islands, named Tyrus or Tylos, and Arad, Bahrain, which boasted that they were the mother country of the Phoenicians, and exhibited relics of Phoenician temples."

The people of Tyre in particular have long maintained Persian Gulf origins, and the similarity in the words "Tylos" and "Tyre" has been commented upon. However, there is little evidence of occupation at all in Bahrain during the time when such migration had supposedly taken place.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus also believed that the homeland of the Phoenicians was Bahrain. His account (written c. 440 BC) refers to the Phoenicians originating from Bahrain:

“According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. These people, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Erythraean Sea (the eastern coast of the Arabia peninsula), having migrated to the Mediterranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the wares of Egypt and Assyria...”

The oldest of these theories was conveyed to us by Herodotus, who suggested the Phoenicians had come from the Red (Erythraean) Sea. By this the Greeks meant the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, with the term later being applied to what we know today as the Red Sea next to Egypt.

Palpable theory stipulates that when the Hittites conquered the Old Babylonian Empire in 1595 BC. Although they invaded, sacking Babylon and other cities, they did not incorporate all of the Babylonian Empire into their dominion, and only exercised political control over Upper Mesopotamia, during which, probable import or migration of skilled shipbuilders and sailors from the gulf region to the Mediterranean shores may have occurred.

History of the Phoenicians has always been at a handicap when it came to these factors. On the one hand, most of what we know about them comes to us from the propaganda of their rivals [the Romans], and on the other hand they left very little behind with which to point to their origins. Or perhaps they did leave something behind, after all: a vital clue that we did not, until very recently, have the technology to understand their DNA.

Up until now, we've been left with a whole host of fanciful theories about their origins, and the inquisitive have been lazily dismissed by paleolinguists who tell us that the Phoenicians were “Semites”. As any educated person knows, “Semitic” is a linguistic designation, not an ethnic one. Nevertheless, we've been encouraged to accept this ad hoc definition on faith.

Genetics gives an alluring clue. The Lebanese, the descendants of the Phoenicians, cluster with the Northern Middle East (along with Kurds and Armenians). This is significant because both Kurds and Armenians are Indo-Iranian groups, nations that speak Indo-European languages (not Semitic ones).

The Semitic-speaking countries lie in the Southern Middle East, a region whose population is somewhat more distant genetically to the Phoenicians.

So we have, at one stroke, a clue to what groups the Phoenicians were more closely allied with. Secondly we have geography as a hint. Phoenicia lies just south of Anatolia. In fact, modern-day Lebanon (the descendant of Phoenicia) shares a border with Anatolia. They're neighbors.

Under the Hittite empire, both Anatolia and the land that would later be Phoenicia were under the same flag, and enjoyed the same cultural influences. It goes without saying that the Hittites also spoke an Indo-European language.

These were the very nations and peoples at the epicenter of the Indo-European genesis in Anatolia, and the people most closely related to Phoenicians, according to genetics.

Since Sir William Jones presented his analysis of Sanskrit in 1786, Western scholars knew that Sanskrit, like Hittite (Nesite or Neshite), was an Indo-European language. Laurence Austine Waddell, a British explorer, was intrigued that this Indo-European-speaking people in Northern India appeared to be pointing to Anatolia as their homeland. What drew his attention there even more were certain provocative correspondences. For instance, the ruling class who first invaded Northern India called themselves “Khattiyo”.

Why this is interesting is that the reason we call the people in Anatolia “Hittites” is because they called themselves Khatti. Since English does not possess certain sounds, the term is transliterated in several different ways, such as the Jewish celebration of Hannukah, which is sometimes spelled Channukah. Likewise, the people who called themselves “Khatti” are variously referred to as “Catti” or Hatti”. And it is from this that the English-speaking nations derived the exonym“Hittite”.

Waddell finds a third leg for support with regard to his theory in the form of religion. For, as he notes, “The ruling clan in India celebrated in the Vedas were the most ardent of all devotees of the Sun and Fire cult associated with worship of the Father-God Indra ... like the Hitto-Phoenicians were especial worshippers of the Father-God Bel (also called by them ‘Indara').”

Waddell goes on to point out the prominence of the swastika (or “sun-cross”) in the worship of Fire or Sun cults. The symbol arose in reference to the two wooden sticks that one rubs together to form fire, so the swastika came to symbolically signify “the Sun-God”.

Waddell then produces a picture of a Phoenician Sun-Goddess bedecked with swastikas:

No educated person, of course, has to be told about the corresponding prevalence of the swastika in the Indo-European religions of Northern India.

Waddell's list of “coincidences” is most compelling, but we leave it as an open question whether it cumulatively amounts to evidence of how the ancient Middle East flowed into Northern India. The question that peaks our interest is rather smaller in scope, namely, whether the Hittites and proto-Phoenicians were, at one time, a single people or, rather, two different tribes of a larger umbrella group.

Waddell provides coins left in ancient Briton by Phoenician mariners with the name “Catti” imprinted on them. Likewise, he notes that “the Phoenicians usually spelt their tribal name of 'Khatti', Catti', or Gad', and were in the habit not infrequently of calling their rivers at their settlements 'Gadi', Cadi, Gad-es, or ‘Ka-desh'.”

Historians have long known that the Spanish city Cadiz was once a Phoenician colony called “Gades”. In Scotland, a river named by the Phoenicians is likewise known as the “Gadie”.

Could these variants of “Catti” be derived from the “Khatti” whence we get the term “Hittite”? No one can say definitively, although the genetic and geographical proximity of the two peoples leave a clear implication.

Another fact that must be considered is that a scholar named Rajeswar Gupta published a controversial study of the Vedas, in which he independently states that the Phoenicians were in Northern India, circa 10,000 BC. If true, this would place them there at approximately the same time that Dr. Russell Gray said that the proto-Indo-European language emerged in Anatolia.

Stanford University, silent on Mr. Gupta's translation of the Vedas, admits that the Phoenicians are known to have traded with the Indian city of Kerala as early as 3000 BC “for ivory, sandalwood, and spices. Their presence in Northern India only decreased as Arabs, Assyrians, and Greeks became more powerful.”

So they were there, the only questions are “How early were they there?” and “Did they arrive with the proto-Hittites as one larger group”?

Waddell would argue yes. But, of course, his legacy is marred by the prejudices of his age. Where he erred, he erred fabulously, such as his assumption that Phoenicians provided the base population for the ancient Britons. Though all historians are unanimous in their concession that the Phoenicians colonized ancient Briton (for their tin trade), the Phoenicians encountered an already-populated island. It wasn't largely empty, as Waddell assumed. Geneticists tell us that the aborigines were related to Spain's mysterious Basque people and were a pre-Aryan people that we would today call paleo-Europids.

Waddell finds some support for his Phoenician theory insofar as Thomas Jefferson, an ethnic Welshman, was disclosed in a DNA test, to possess the K2 haplogroup associated with the Phoenicians. But K2 is rare in the British Isles and is the exception. The predominant Y-chromosome among the ancient Britons was the R1b haplogroup associated with the paleo-Europids. So Phoenicians made a genetic contribution, albeit a much more modest one than Waddell assumed.

Because of his mistakes, it would be easy to dismiss the rest of his work completely, were it not for those troublesome times when he anticipated modern historians by almost a century, such as when he identified Anatolia as the Indo-European homeland, or when he correctly realized that the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language (in an era before experts had definitively deciphered their language).

To recap, Hittite is the oldest recorded Indo-European language, but it had remained completely unknown during the period in which Indo-European linguistics developed because its records are on clay tablets that were excavated only at the end of the 19th century. Even then, it was not identified as Indo-European until 1915, when Bed?ich (Friedrich) Hrozny, a Czech orientalist and linguist, made the discovery through his reading of tablets that had been brought to Vienna from the Istanbul Museum.

So, knowing all that, could he have also been right when he leagued the Phoenicians with the neighboring Hittites?

It will have to remain an open question for now, until geneticists finally get around to analyzing the skeletons of this ancient Anatolian group who lived in, among and around the proto-Phoenicians.

With the rise of a new dynasty in Egypt (the 19th), the southern part of Phoenicia fell again under Egyptian dominion. Seti I (c. 1318–1301 BC) speaks of conquering Asia, and mentions, among others, Tyre and Uzu (Ushu = Palaityros). Although Seti advanced as far as Kadesh on the Orontes, there is no evidence that Egypt could retain its hold on that vast Asian territory, for in the time of Seti's son, Rameses II (c. 1301–1234 BC), Kadesh was firmly in Hittite hands. Yet Egypt supposedly continued to rule the southern part of Phoenicia.

In the famous Eternal Peace Treaty, the Egyptian and Hittite Kings are supposed to divided Syria and Phoenicia into two spheres of influence. The borderline may have passed north of Byblos (cf. Papyrus Anastasi I; Pritchard, Texts, 475ff.). The following peace era was of great importance for the cultural and material development of Phoenicia, where its overseas trade reached a peak.

Napoleon said: “History, is a set of lies agreed upon.” While the master Nineteenth Century politician might have taken a more Machiavellian stance on the subjects at hand, the truth is probably not much less less sinister.

For, though propaganda abounds and has always wielded great influence in the recording of history, the greatest single factor obscuring the truth is simply the scarcity of first-hand material. This leaves historians to, at times, make judgment-calls, educated guesses, and/or nervous conjectures…

Food for thought!