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Phoenicia: Cities
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Phoenicia was the name given to the city-states of the narrow coastal strip that corresponds roughly to northern Lebanon from 1200 BB onwards. Their chief cities were Byblos, Tyre and Sidon. During the later Roman epoch Byblos became associated with Egypt in myth and ritual when the city became a centre for the cult of the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris. This cult is attested to by Lucian in 'The Syrian Goddess'. He reports that he personally had seen the head which miraculously floated from Egyptr to Byblos every years.
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Unfortunately, as with much of what was once Phoenicia, little remains of the great cities that stood at the center of this ancient maritime power. None of the original buildings they lived in and temples they built are still standing, and there is no great wealth of art depicting exactly how they lived. In fact, it has taken chance and persistent digging just to uncover some of the foundation traces of these intrepid people, despite the once heralded majesty of their municipalities. And, albeit informative, what has been physically brought to light does not pack the same kind of punch that tripping through Pompeii or the Roman Forum does. Nevertheless, the capital cities of Phoenicia's past - Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, Ugarit and Carthage - are worth the trip, both for the discovery of the people who inhabit the modern cities and for the academic thrill of writing a postcard home from the place that made writing a letter home possible in the first place.
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Phoenicia now became part of the fifth satrapy of the Persian Empire, and entered upon a spell of comparative peace and growing prosperity. Favoured for the sake of Period, 538their fleet, and having common interests against 333 B. C. Greece,' the Phoenicians were among the most loyal subjects of the empire. At this period Sidon occupied the position of leading state; in the fleet her king ranked next to Xerxes and before the king of Tyre (Herod. viii. 67); her situation afforded advantages for expansion which Tyre on its small and densely populated island could not rival. The city was distinguished by its cosmopolitan character; the satrap resided there when he came to Phoenicia, and the Persian monarch had his paradise outside the walls.
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Phoenicia was based upon independent city states, and eventually, colonies as far away as in Spain. The Phoenicians were merchants and traders, and even if they colonized certain strategic spots in today's Syria, Cyprus, Libya, Tunisia, Italy, Malta, Algeria, Morocco and Spain, they were never warlords.
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Between the withdrawal of Egyptian rule in Syria and the western advance of Assyria there was an interval during which the city-states of Phoenicia owned no suzerain. Byblos had kings of its own, among them Ahiram, Abi-baal, and Ethbaal (Ittoba'al) in the 10th century, as excavations have shown.
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Although its inhabitants had a homogeneous civilization and considered themselves a single nation, Phoenicia was not a unified state but a group of city-kingdoms, one of which usually dominated the others. The most important of these cities were Simyra, Zarephath (Sarafand), Byblos, Jubeil, Arwad (Rouad), Acco (Acre), Sidon (Sayda), Tripolis (Tripoli), Tyre (Sur), and Berytus (Beirut). The two most dominant were Tyre and Sidon, which alternated as sites of the ruling power.
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