The Alphabet, the Colonies and a Name Nobody Used

Josephine Quinn's study opens with a difficulty the atlas keeps. There is little evidence that the people called Phoenicians thought of themselves as one people. They identified as Tyrians, Sidonians and Byblians, the collective label is Greek, and the modern picture of a Phoenician nation was assembled in the nineteenth century and afterwards put to national use in more than one country.

What is not in doubt is what they did. From the coastal cities of what is now Lebanon they ran the carrying trade of the early first millennium BCE, planting settlements at Carthage, in Sicily, Sardinia, Ibiza and southern Spain, and reaching the Atlantic. Carthage became a power in its own right and fought Rome three times before its destruction in 146 BCE.

The consequential bequest is the alphabet. The linear consonantal script developed in the Levant was carried by traders to the Aegean, where Greeks added signs for vowels, and from Greek it passed to Etruscan and Latin and so to most of the writing systems of Europe. It also went east into Aramaic, and from there to Hebrew, to Arabic and to the scripts of India. A commercial notation of twenty two signs became the vehicle of most of the world's scripture.