Phoenician seafaring

The story

A people who lived on ships

If we had to choose a single trade for the Phoenicians, it would be sailor. Their cities faced the sea, there was little farmland, and the wood for ships, the cedar of the Lebanon mountains, stood a short way from the harbours. From the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, as the Treccani encyclopedia notes, the Phoenician cities lived mainly by maritime trade. For many centuries, between Egypt, Spain and Sicily, many of the ships you met on the Mediterranean were Phoenician.

What the ships were like

We have no complete Phoenician ship: wood rots under water and archaeologists have found only wrecks and fragments. We therefore have to reconstruct the hulls from drawings, reliefs and the few wrecks discovered. We know that cargo ships had a deep, rounded hull, to hold a lot of goods. They moved by oars and with a large square sail. The Greeks called them gauloi. Warships were instead long and narrow, with rows of rowers, in order to be fast. The techniques of Phoenician builders spread throughout the Mediterranean and were imitated by other peoples.

A wreck of the 7th century BC (perhaps the early 6th), discovered at Mazarrón, near Cartagena, in Spain, shows that ships of this kind could face long routes.

How they found their way

For a long time people thought the Phoenicians sailed only by day and close to the coast, stopping in harbour in the evening. Today historians have corrected this idea: they also used the Sun, the winds, the currents and the stars. It is said that their reference point was the pole star, in the constellation of the Little Bear, and according to one tradition the Greeks even called it “the Phoenician”. It is not well proven, however, that they were the first to use it at night, and it should be taken as tradition, not as sure fact. They moved with caution in any case, between harbours and coasts that they knew.

Round Africa?

The most fascinating story concerns a voyage that perhaps took place, and perhaps did not. It is told by the Greek historian Herodotus, in the 5th century BC. According to him, the pharaoh Necho II (who reigned from about 610 to 595 BC) sent Phoenician sailors from the Red Sea with an order: to sail south, go round Libya, that is, Africa, and return to Egypt through the Pillars of Hercules, the Strait of Gibraltar.

The voyage, says Herodotus, lasted three years. Each autumn the sailors landed at a suitable spot on the coast, sowed a patch of land and waited for the harvest. Then they cut the grain, loaded it and set off again. In the third year they passed the Pillars of Hercules and came back to Egypt. They also reported something that seemed incredible to Herodotus: as they sailed west, round the southern tip of Africa, they had the Sun on their right, that is, to the north. Herodotus writes that he does not believe it. For us that detail is the most convincing clue: if the sailors were really in the southern hemisphere, the Sun was indeed to the north. An invented story would hardly have predicted it.

Scholars remain divided. Herodotus is the only ancient source, no material proof has been found along the African coast, and Greek and Roman authors already doubted it. It remains, then, a voyage that is plausible but not proven.

Towards the Atlantic

Two voyages are attributed to the Carthaginians, descendants of the Phoenicians: that of Hanno along the coast of West Africa and that of Himilco to the north, along the coasts of Atlantic Europe. We discuss them in another card. They show that the Phoenician seafaring tradition continued at Carthage, and that the Mediterranean was no longer enough for people who knew how to sail.

A famous siege

When Alexander the Great besieged Tyre, in 332 BC, the city defended itself for about seven months before surrendering. After that the routes of the Mediterranean passed largely into the hands of other peoples, first the Greeks and then the Romans.