Ships, stars, and colonies

CHAPTER VI

Maritime Technology, Navigation, and the Colonies—How the Phœnicians Became the Lords of the Sea

The sea was not a choice. It was a necessity. The mountains of Lebanon pressed against the narrow coastal plain, leaving the Phœnician cities with limited agricultural land. To the east, the great empires blocked overland expansion. The only route open lay westward, into the water.

The Ships

The Phœnician round ship — the gaulos — was a broad-beamed cargo vessel designed for bulk goods. The bireme — a galley with two banks of oars — was the warship, fast and manoeuvrable, with a pointed ram bow. A relief from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh depicts a Phœnician-style bireme with two rows of oars, a ram, and armed soldiers. The Assyrians, a land power, employed Phœnician shipwrights to build their fleet. The later Greek trireme was a development of the Phœnician bireme.

Navigation

The constellation Ursa Minor was known to the Greeks as Phoinike, "the Phœnician," because Phœnician captains used it to steer. The ability to navigate by the stars allowed them to sail at night and to traverse open water far from land.

The Circumnavigation of Africa

Herodotus (4.42) records that Pharaoh Necho II commissioned a Phœnician fleet to sail around Africa from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. The Phœnicians accomplished this in three years, sailing south along the east coast, rounding the Cape, and returning through the Pillars of Hercules. Herodotus adds the detail that as they sailed west, they had the sun on their right — to the north. This phenomenon, impossible to imagine without having crossed the equator, confirms the voyage.

The Network of Trading Posts

The principal settlements:

· Kition on Cyprus, established by Tyre in the 10th century BCE.

· Motya in Sicily, an island-city founded in the 8th century, excavated by Lorenzo Nigro.

· Carthage in North Africa, founded by Elissa of Tyre around 814 BCE. The city grew into a metropolis with double harbours and a constitution praised by Aristotle.

· Utica in Tunisia, reputedly older than Carthage, founded around 1178 BCE.

· Gadir (Cádiz) beyond the Pillars of Hercules, founded perhaps as early as 1100 BCE, commanding the silver trade of Tartessos.

· Tharros, Nora, Sulcis in Sardinia; Malaka, Sexi in Spain; Lixus, Mogador in Morocco.

The Phœnicians did not "colonise" in the Greek manner. They established trading posts that grew organically into cities. Their network spanned the entire Mediterranean and reached into the Atlantic.

The Voyage of Hanno

Around 500 BCE, the Carthaginian admiral Hanno led an expedition of sixty ships beyond the Pillars of Hercules to found colonies on the West African coast. His Periplus describes the founding of cities, an encounter with gorillas, and a volcanic mountain. No Greek voyage of comparable ambition is recorded before Pytheas of Massalia, two centuries later.

Correction of the Greek Pretence

The Greek colonisation of the central and western Mediterranean began no earlier than the eighth century BCE — at least two centuries after Phœnician ships had been plying those waters. When the first Euboean traders reached the Bay of Naples, Phœnician ships had already been sailing to Tartessos for generations. The Greeks, when they acknowledged Phœnician priority at all, characterised it as mere commerce, not true colonisation. This distinction is self-serving. The Phœnician trading posts endured far longer than many Greek colonies, and Carthage alone outlasted every Greek city-state except Rome.

Sources for Chapter VI: Herodotus, Histories 4.42; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.13; Strabo, Geography 1.1.6, 3.5; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 16.216; Sennacherib's palace relief, British Museum (BM 124772); Periplus of Hanno; Lorenzo Nigro, Motya and the Phoenician Ceramic Repertoire between the Levant and the West (2013); María Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2001); Marilyn R. Bierling (trans. and ed.), The Phoenicians in Spain: An Archaeological Review of the Eighth–Sixth Centuries B.C.E. (Eisenbrauns, 2002).