Canaanite sailors gave the Mediterranean its alphabet
Phoenicians were Semitic-speaking city-dwellers along today's Lebanese coast, heirs of Bronze Age Canaan who rode out the Late Bronze collapse. Greeks coined the name; they called themselves Canaanites. Their ships linked Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece for more than a thousand years and planted Carthage far to the west.
Autonomy defined them: Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, and peers kept separate kings and merchant oligarchies without a shared national label. Demonyms stuck to cities, Tyrian or Sidonian, and even a first-century BC epitaph by Meleager of Gadara greets Syrians and Phoenicians in different words. Egyptian obelisks at Karnak speak of a land of carpenters (fnḫw), likely nodding to Levantine timber, a word that seems to underlie Greek phoînix, which could mean a Phoenician, crimson dye, or a date palm.
Because native narrative histories barely survive, scholars lean on others' chronicles and Mediterranean archaeology. Consensus places their high era from about 1200 BC through the Persian period ending 332 BC. Whether they form a people distinct from broader Canaanites remains argued; Jonathan Tubb counts Israelites, Moabites and Phoenicians alike as ethnically Canaanite. Herodotus and Strabo preserve migration legends from the Red Sea or the Gulf, but most scholars reject them, and genetic work finds modern Lebanese descend largely from a Canaanite-related population.
Thutmose III already targeted Byblos, Arwad, and Ullasa in the fifteenth century BC for cedar and inland routes; by the mid-fourteenth, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Byblos ranked as favoured Egyptian partners, with Byblos leading bronze work and the tin and lapis trade. They weathered the Late Bronze Age collapse, then planted colonies on Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta and the coasts of North Africa and Iberia. Tyre peaked under Hiram I in the tenth century BC.
Their most durable export was the earliest verified alphabet, adapted from Proto-Sinaitic signs. Greeks borrowed it, and from Greek came Latin and Cyrillic, with further influence on Syriac and Arabic writing.
Source: Phoenicia
