Fenikeliler

(İng. Phoenicians)

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Diğer

Therefore, as the population of Phoenicia increased, demand quickly outstripped production and thus the Phoenicians never achieved self-sufficiency in terms of foodstuffs.

Although the region of the Levant which became known as Phoenicia has a long history of human occupation which dates back at least as far as the tenth millennium BCE, scholars are generally of the opinion that it was during the Early Iron Age, in around 1200 BCE , that the Phoenicians first emerged as a distinct cultural entity.

The Early Iron Age was therefore a period of commercial expansion for the coastal cities of Phoenicia, both at home and overseas. This period of prosperity also resulted in the emergence of urbanisation, an important innovation that would come to be synonymous with the Phoenicians. At Tyre and Sarepta, for instance, architectural innovation and a move towards urbanism led both cities to alter their layout significantly during this period.

Aside from pickling in oil, salting was the only means of long-term preservation known to the Phoenicians

Though the Phoenicians are known to have employed three primary forms of voluntary exchange mechanism (gift giving, barter and monetarised market exchange), the prevalence, importance and degree of overlap between these types of exchange are far from certain.

According to Philo, the Phoenicians associated the notion of death with the god Muth, a primordial deity that presided over the muddy, putrid netherworld to which spirits were believed to descend. Philo’s account appears to reflect a wider religious tradition which held that after death the soul of the deceased transitioned to an unknown, bleak and desolate place where it joined the spirits of its ancestors.

Although archaeology has shown that Pliny was wrong to attribute the invention of glass to the Phoenicians, as it first appears in the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni in the sixteenth century, the material and literary records pertaining to the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age indicate that he was right to allude to the long history of glassmaking in Phoenicia.

In contrast to the Greeks, who colonised Sicily in order to gain direct control of its agricultural land and resources, the Phoenicians settled on the island because its location allowed them to dominate the newly established markets and trade routes in North Africa, Italy and Iberia.

Many of the Latin sources, for instance, demonstrate an almost instinctive hostility towards the Phoenicians as a result of the devastating and costly wars fought by Rome and Carthage during the latter half of the first millennium.