Fenikeli

(İng. Phoenician)

Göndermeler

Diğer

Furthermore, unlike their Canaanite, Egyptian, Assyrian and Persian counterparts, Phoenician monarchs did not, as far as is known, recount their exploits and political endeavours in monumental commemorative inscriptions or reliefs.

Comparisons between the political activities of Phoenician kings and those undertaken by their Near Eastern counterparts reveal little difference in the patterns of thought and behaviour and thus there can be little doubt that Phoenician royal ideologies were inspired and influenced by Mesopotamian and Canaanite traditions.

The three fundamental and intertwined tenets of Near Eastern kingship can thus be identified in Phoenician royal ideology: that the monarch belonged to heaven and thus his kingship was a god-given gift; that he had a judicial responsibility to guard and protect his subjects against the harsh realities of life; and that kingship was sacred.

for much of the Iron Age, beer was equally as important as bread within the Phoenician diet.

As Phoenician is now an extinct or ‘dead’ language, information about its development, grammar, use of idiom and vocalisation must be gleaned solely from the extant written sources.

Although the classical sources record that there were a great number of lengthy Phoenician treatises exploring a diversity of subjects (including history, philosophy, law, religion, natural history and economics), not a single fragment of these texts has survived in its original form.

The first substantial Phoenician texts are a series of Byblian royal inscriptions dating to the tenth century.

Although earlier inscriptions can be dextrograde (written and read left to right), sinistrograde (written and read right to left), or boustrophedon (a method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and then from left to right) and written either vertically or horizontally, by the tenth century the direction of Phoenician writing had been standardised as horizontal and sinistrograde.

By the dawn of the first millennium, the Phoenician cities had become large industrial and commercial centres which specialised in the manufacture of luxury and prestige items. Due to the exceptionally high prices such items could command, they were either destined to be exchanged in markets outside of the Levant or, less frequently, to satisfy the needs of a very restricted number of wealthy clients within Phoenicia itself.

Herodotus (4.16) provides an insight into the operation of Phoenician barter when he recounts a story that was supposedly told to him by some Carthaginian merchants. According to this account, when exchanging with a primitive North African tribe, the Carthaginians would deposit their wares on the beach for the natives to inspect. The indigenous traders would then set out a quantity of gold. Once both parties were satisfied, they would collect their goods and depart. Although this is likely to be a fictitious incident, it nevertheless reveals the Greek perception of how Phoenician barter functioned.

This perhaps helps to explain why, in comparison with other urban centres in the ancient Near East, Phoenician cities were relatively small in size, ranging from an average of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres) for smaller cities (such as Berytus and Sarepta) to 40-plus hectares (100-plus acres) for the largest cities (Arwad and Sidon).

Organised around an irregular network of narrow streets and winding paths, these residential districts tended to be overcrowded and densely packed. With little or no room to expand outwards, many homeowners solved the problem by expanding upwards, meaning that the typical Phoenician house had two or more storeys (when present, the upper floors replicated the layout of the lower storeys).

Significantly, as evinced in De Dea Syria, the Phoenician cities still showed signs of religious autonomy in the second century CE despite all of the inducements towards syncretism which had been offered firstly by Hellenisation and then by Romanisation.

Phoenician temples (at least those consecrated to ‘Ashtart) employed guards, servants, barbers, scribes, musicians, butchers, bakers, a ‘water master’, a ‘sacrificer’ and sacred prostitutes.

Like their contemporaries in Ugarit and Canaan, Phoenician cultic personnel are believed to have received a share of the temple’s income in the form of food, drink, textiles, wool and occasionally silver.

In the late seventh century, the Phoenician workshops in the eastern Mediterranean began producing glass apotropaic pendants in the shape of demon masks, animals and anthropoid heads (both male and female).