Thread 17950479

Lately I’ve been neck-deep in Phoenician history and I can’t stop thinking about how little attention they get compared to Greece, Rome, or Egypt—even though their impact was just as world-shaping in some ways. These were a people who didn’t build colossal monuments or write endless propaganda about themselves, but who quietly reshaped the entire Mediterranean world.

So Phoenicia thread? Phoenicia thread!

They weren’t an empire in the traditional sense—no single king ruling vast land armies—but a network of independent city-states (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, later Carthage) bound together by shared language, religion, and above all the sea. While the Greeks called them “Phoinikes” (“purple people”) because of their murex dye, they probably called themselves something closer to “Canaanites.”

A few things I find fascinating:

The alphabet. What we write in right now owes more to Phoenician scribes than to anyone else. The Greeks didn’t invent their letters out of nowhere; they took Phoenician consonantal script and modified it to include vowels. Without Phoenician traders spreading writing around, there’s no Latin alphabet, no modern script traditions.

Maritime supremacy. The Phoenicians were master shipbuilders. Their biremes and triremes influenced naval design for centuries. They weren’t just hugging coasts—they were in Spain, Morocco, even possibly circumnavigating Africa under Pharaoh Necho II’s commission (the Herodotus account where sailors saw the sun in the “wrong” position in the southern sky is telling).

Colonies and trade. Carthage gets all the attention, but the Phoenician trading network stretched everywhere: Cadiz, Ibiza, Malta, Sardinia. They weren’t just merchants of luxury goods (glass, purple dye, cedar wood), but cultural middlemen who spread technology, religion, and language.

Religion and influence. Their gods (Baal, Astarte, Melqart) deeply influenced later Mediterranean cults. Melqart of Tyre and Heracles have undeniable overlap. Even child sacrifice, grim as it is, echoes in biblical condemnations of the “Tophet” practices.

>>17950479 (OP)
Just proto-Jews peddling wares to suckers. Nothing more.

>>17950479 (OP)
Didn't they have something to do with law?
>>17950484
That's what I thought. But Jews didnt like them?

>>17950479 (OP)
They sacrifice children to Moloch

>>17950481
>Carthage
A phoenician outpost

Who then is the second greatest Phoenician to have ever existed, after Abd'al Lateef Al-jandali?

>>17950484
Jews had an inferiority complex towards them.

>>17951100
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

>>17950481
Phoenecians were themselves largely of Greek descent. The recent Carthage study confirmed a lot about this and Phoenician samples were hugely Aegean shifted compared to the BA Levantines that came before them.

>>17950479 (OP)
>These were a people who didn’t build colossal monuments or write endless propaganda about themselves
They did both but their buildings and writings were all destroyed by the Romans.

>>17950827
true

>>17951461
This lmao they had literal statues of their leaders in carthage.

>>17951461
Why? Were they a threat already by the time of Rome?

>>17950479 (OP)
I wonder, who would butthurt brown people larp as if the phoenicians didn't exist?

>>17951506
Yes, they had a empire on trade rivaling that of the greeks.
They even went to war with greeks frequently.
They absolutely were a threat to any rising power in the Mediterranean.
It's no coincidence rome eventually conquered both, it absolutely was intended to stop any alternative trade empires.

They invented the Phoenician alphabet, had gods like Astarte that influenced the gods other cultures had, and established trading posts as far as Malta. Truly an underrated civilization.

>>17950484
>>17950505
>>17951136
most Jews today are Punic converts and that's why they cluster by Italians and Greeks

>>17952495
If this was true, they would cluster with North Africans rather than Europeans.

>>17950479 (OP)
Is funny how self-hating Arabs larp as this extinct people today, truly sad and pathetic

>>17951513
Probably Sumerians, Hittites or Akkadians as Assyrians were too barbaric to positively larp as them

>>17952683
Anon you are beyond retarded to think that most Pheonicians would cluster with modern Tunisians, you are using a cherry picked example to prove a norm, retarded

>>17952719
Facts speak for themselves. You must be utterly insane if you think Greeks and Italians were anything more than slaves in Phoenician society.

>>17952727
ywnbap, nafri mutr

>>17952495
Most jews today are slavic and germanic. Judaism never interacted with Carthage. When the Neo-Babylonians started sacking Canaan, the bible dares the Tyrians to flee to a random Iberian outpost because the autists in temple didn't even know Carthage existed kek

>>17950481
Thanks ChatGPT

>>17952767
Less talking and more walking.

tfw Phoenicians were so accustomed to enslaving Whiteoids that their armies carried tens of thousands of manacles, just in case

> There fell in this battle Greeks to the number of two hundred, and of Carthaginians not more than a thousand, but as some have written, upwards of six thousand. In the camp of the Carthaginians were found, along with other goods, many waggons, in which were being transported more than twenty thousand pairs of manacles; for the Carthaginians, having expected to master the Greeks easily, had passed the word along among themselves to take alive as many as possible and, after shackling them, to throw them into slave pens.

>>17950505

Schlomo's Temple was bankrolled by the """Phoenecians""" and all the shekels and other monies that were taken in at the Temple in Jerusalem were sent to the Bank of Tyre. The same place Alexander would later conquer.

>>17952683
Interesting to see how far away Syrians are considering they're so geographically close to Tyre.

>>17952811
they were Greeks lmfao did you not see the study?

>>17952900
he'll ignore that 90% of verified Punic samples plot by Jews and southern Europeans in favor of those that confirm his bias. It's obvious he's some weird race obsessed jeet with a west Eurasian hate boner due to being a creatura

>>17952719
they do though

>>17950479 (OP)
Probably because they were satanic ritual child murderers who were rightly wiped out before their poison could spread beyond Canaan.

>>17951474
Is this image trying to prove something? Or just actually an infographic on biblical references?

This is the thread I've been looking for. I have a question for the /his/torians.

My m8 has a theory that the Phoenician colonists that founded Carthage were religious conservatives that rejected the degradation and apostasy occurring back home, although continued some of it such as child sacrifice. Is there any evidence for/against this?

>>17953216
the image is not trying to do anything
it just states some facts

>>17953251
Okay but genuinely what link is it trying to draw to the holocaust?

>>17950827
Foolish incel, do you not know that scholars reject the notion that Moloch was a god? Moloch was perhaps a title applied to multiple gods, or most likely simply the word for a ritual sacrifice in general.

>>17953255
No link whatsoever because the holocaust never happened