"'Phoenicia' and 'Phoenician' are somewhat artificial terms which were applied by the classical authors to the city-states of the narrow coastal strip that corresponds roughly to northern Lebanon, and the inhabitants who occupied them, from c.1200 BC onwards....Their chief cities were Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. The Greek word from which 'Phoenicia' derived meant 'purple', and was a translation of the name 'Canaan' which may have had some etymological connection with the purple dye produced from local murex shellfish for which the region was famous.
"The Phoenicians did not suddenly arrive upon the historical scene as invaders or immigrants. They were Canaanites, and cannot be differentiated either ethnically or culturally from the general mass of Canaanites. They just happened to be the survivors of the havoc that overwhelmed the eastern Mediterranean at the start of the Iron Age around 1200 BC, with the onslaught of the Sea Peoples, the collapse of the Hittite empire, the disintegration of Mycenaean power, and the destruction of the great coastal cities of Ugarit, Aradus and Sidon."
     - Magnus Magnusson, BC - The Archaeology of the Bible Lands

"Plutarch (A.D. 46-120), a priest of the Pythian Apollo at Chaeronia, Boeotia, wrote a treatise called On Isis and Osiris. During the Roman period Byblos was associated with Egypt in myth and ritual. This was seen in the myth of Isis and Osiris. The Byblian episodes of this myth appear nowhere in native Egyptian literature of any period and were obviously added to the myth in the Hellenistic age as part of the general syncretism of this age. In Plutarch's account the search by Isis for Osiris' body brought her to the shores of Byblos."
     - Nina Jidejian, Byblos Through the Ages

"Some of the inhabitants of Byblos maintain that the Egyptian Osiris is buried in their town, and that the public mourning and secret rites are performed in memory not of Adonis but of Osiris. I will tell you why this story seems worthy of credence. A human head comes every year from Egypt to Byblos, floating on its seven days' journey thence; it never varies from its course but goes straight to Byblos. The whole occurrence is miraculous. It occurs every year, and it came to pass while I was myself in Byblos, and I saw the head in that city."
     - Lucian, The Syrian Goddess

"Phoenician ritual is illustrated by an alabaster statuette from Tutugi (Galera), near Granada in Spain. From its artistic style it must be eastern of the seventh or sixth century BC, but the tomb in which it was found was perhaps not earlier than the fourth. It represents Astarte seated on a throne flanked by sphinxes. She holds a large bowl outstretched under her breasts, which are pierced. This is clearly a miracle-working statuette, which at an appropriate time in the cult ceremony enabled milk to flow through the breasts into the bowl from a hollow that would be filled through the head. Until the miracle was to happen the holes in the breasts were blocked with wax, or other material, removable by gentle heating."
     - Donald Harden, The Phoenicians

"Herodotus (4.42) says that the Pharaoh Necho II, who reigned c. 615-595 B.C., determined to see if Africa could be circumnavigated. Accordingly, he commissioned a number of ships manned by Phoenicians for the task. These sailed down the Red Sea and down the east coast of Africa. Every year they settled for a while on the coast, cleared a strip of land, planted a crop and, when they had harvested it, continued on their journey. In the third year they sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and back to Egypt again. They reported that as they sailed around Africa they had the sun on their right. Herodotus refuses to believe this possible 'but perhaps others may.' For us of course this is conclusive proof that such a voyage was made. It is another instance of how Herodotus' dedication to recording exactly what he had heard, irrespective of whether he believed it or not, has given proof of an event which he described.

"Herodotus (4.43) also mentions a Carthaginian called Sataspes, who, because he had used violence against a maiden, was given a choice by the Great King Xerxes of being impaled on a stake or of sailing around Africa. He elected to attempt the circumnavigation but lost heart after many months at sea. He returned to 'civilisation' and reported that 'at the farthest point he had reached, the coast was occupied by a dwarfish race' and 'whenever he landed, they left their towns and fled to the mountains; but his men did them no wrong, only entering into their cities and taking some of their cattle. The reason why he had not sailed around Libya was, he said, because the ship stopped and would not go any further. Xerxes however did not believe this and Sataspes was impaled by the king's orders in accordance with the former sentence."
"Sataspes may have reached Cape Palmas. He may have been caught in the doldrums off the Cape Verde coast of Senegal and hence unable to proceed further. Some of the Arab voyagers down the west coast of Africa in medieval times reported that at a certain stage they could go no further.
"Herodotus and possibly Hanno report dwarves in West Africa. Sataspes' dwarves have been identified as early Bushmen, still found in South Africa but which may have been found further north 2500 years ago. Pygmies were also found in the Cameroons."
     - Ciaran Branigan, "The Ciccumnavigation of Africa"

"'Phoenician' means 'red haired'. The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians expanded all across North Africa and western Europe. They pushed past the Straits of Gibraltar and founded the city of Gades (present day Cadiz) in Spain. While active in Spain, these Phoenician/Carthaginian descendants are called 'Celtiberians' by archaeologists. Later, some sailed away from Spain and colonized the British Isles, where they are simply called 'Celts' by archaeologists. In their migrations throughout the Mediterranean, these Celts picked up a number of different languages and alphabets. These languages and writing systems were in use by different Celtic groups at different times. Memories of some of these scripts were retained up until the medieval period in Ireland. The Book of Ballymote, believed to have been composed about 1200 A.D., gives an alphabet, described as 'African'. Until recently, scholars considered that this 'African' script was some sort of cryptic monkish secret alphabet, or maybe just gibberish, but since 1960 this alphabet has been shown to be an actual ancient North African one in use about 1000 B.C." [Fell, America B.C.]
     - Michael Bradley, Holy Grail Across the Atlantic

"Mention...of both the gens Hiernorum and the insula Albionum suggest that Himilco [c. 425 BC] did not stop at Brittany - the Oestrymnian promontory as he calls it - but passed on across the channel, and in effect led the way for Carthage to take part in the Cornish tin trade, which we may assume was already being exploited by Mediterranean traders via the overland route. There is, unfortunately, no direct archaeological evidence of Phoenician contacts with Britain at this period to support the Himilco story, though a number of Iron Age finds in Cornwall indicates Iberian contacts."
     - Donald Harden, The Phoenicians

"Following the breakdown of Aegean civilization, ca. 1200 B.C., central Europe developed a distinctive Late Bronze Age culture from which the Celts emerged. By about 700 B.C. the Hallstatt culture - the culture of the Celts - covered much of western Europe. It lasted into the fifth century B.C."
     - Barry Cunliffe, The Celtic World

Hyperlinks

·Chalice of the First Sacrament
·The Lost Tribe of Benjamin
·The Kabbalah
·Pythagoras
·The Eruption of Thera