Erken Demir Çağı

(İng. Early Iron Age)

Göndermeler

Diğer

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.

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.