A mound of crushed sea snails reveals ancient Sidon's royal purple industry
Near Sidon's southern harbour lies a huge heap of broken Murex trunculus shells, waste from a Phoenician dye industry so prized that its purple became a byword for royalty. Alongside glassmaking, it helped make Sidon, possibly the oldest Phoenician city, a hub of a Mediterranean trading empire.
Today Sidon, or Saida, is Lebanon's third-largest city and capital of the South Governorate, about 40 kilometres from both Tyre and Beirut, with roughly 80,000 people inside the city limits. Its Phoenician name probably meant fishing town. People have lived there since deep prehistory: one site holds stone tools from the Acheulean, and another a Heavy Neolithic assemblage thought to predate the invention of pottery.
Built on a promontory with two harbours, it traded with Egypt in the Middle Bronze Age and around 1350 BC was an Egyptian possession ruled by Zimredda. Homer praised its glassmakers, dyers and embroiderers. Settlers from Sidon founded Tyre, and the two cities later quarrelled over which was Phoenicia's true mother city. Genesis even turns Sidon into a person, the first-born son of Canaan and so a great-grandson of Noah.
A long line of powers took the city: Assyrians, Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II, Persians and then Alexander the Great in 333 BC. Under Persian rule it overtook Tyre as Phoenicia's leading city, and Cambyses II rewarded its help in conquering Egypt with Dor, Joppa and the Plain of Sharon. Its fleet sailed with the Persians against the Greeks at Salamis in 480 BC, and warships became a regular motif on its coins.
Its tombs are spectacular. In 1855 the sarcophagus of King Eshmunazar II turned up, its inscription naming Eshmun and the Lord of Sidon as chief gods and his mother as a priestess of Astarte. The Hellenistic necropolis yielded the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus, probably made for King Abdalonymus rather than Alexander, and the Sarcophagus of the Crying Women, both now in Istanbul's Archaeological Museum. Later Sidon became a Roman colony, and Crusaders called it Sagittus.
Source: Sidon
