Chapter 2 The Phoenicians

hi this is miss hattie from olympian high school want to teach you about another society that influenced the broader mesopotamian region and was influenced by mesopotamian peoples and that is phoenicia so we've already studied israel in another video lecture sinisha it would be basically where modern day lebanon is you know where lebanon is so it's this purple area so israel is south of where the phoenicians would be so this is going to correspond to sly 26 and 27 in the powerpoint and to page 50ish in your in your textbook okay couple things want you to know about the phoenicians that want you to draw and that will help you remember it you're going to draw big sailboat because want you to remember them as maritime travelers and that's going to help diffuse or spread out lot of the things that they are known for the other thing want you to write down is red and purple dyes big cedar tree because cedarwood is going to be something that they're exporting even today the flag of lebanon has cedar tree on it it's red and purple dyes cedar tree and the alphabet except their alphabet is going to be one without consonants so let's talk little bit about the phoenicians so the phoenicians again they're north of the israelites kingdom and palestine between the mediterranean sea and the lebanon mountains they spoke semitic language so similar to hebrew and arabic modern-day arabic they called themselves canaanites and their land canaan but the greeks eventually called them phoenician which is why we call them phoenician so they never built one united area called phoenicia instead they were bunch of little city-states like tier sidon beirut and biblos today beirut is the capital of lebanon and they were often taken over by other people so sometimes they were under the subjected to the rule of people from mesopotamia or from egypt but they're really powerful because of the way they traded they had the best boats in that area they didn't actually have lot of fertile land so they ended up depending on trade to get the things they needed like food so two words you need to know import and export when you import something like the word in you're bringing it into your land when you export something like the word exit you're taking it sending it out so want you to know that the phoenicians often traded to get things like food and they imported that food and raw materials and in exchange they exported high quality metal goods textiles pottery glass works of art they're really really famous for these really beautiful red and purple textiles that they got from special kind of mollusk that was found in the waters near venetian as told you they're expert seafarers and they're going to establish commercial colonies far away you can read about all the distant lands that they visited and they also are going to be very similar to the mesopotamians and that they're going to borrow some of the mesopotamian deities so for example in babylon and assyria there was goddess named ishtar that the phoenicians basically had as their prominent or most major navy which is start they also used to associate certain gods or goddesses deities with natural phenomena like mountain sky lightning and they also built temples and had ceremonies to honor their gods now they did use the mesopotamian way of recording information called cuneiform for really long time although most of their cuneiform writing has disappeared but then they started tinkering and experimenting with something that would be easier to do than cuneiform and by 1500 bce the abce they came up with an early alphabetic script so instead of having to memorize different symbols you could use symbols that represented sounds and that makes it way easier so literacy is going to be improved now their early alphabet only had consonants no vowels but later on now because they're spreading everywhere they're going to spread this alphabet around it's much easier than cumia form and it just tells you that they it diffused as they traded and traveled the greeks are eventually going to take the phoenician alphabet and add vowels and then the romans are going to take that alphabet that the greeks added vowels to and also spread it to different lands so hope that was helpful now you know about another group of people the phoenicians that both were influenced by mesopotamian traditions and also influence the large and mesopotamian area hope that helps