page_title: Phoenicia
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Phoenicia / History / Origins
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Couvercle de sarcophage anthropoïde féminin phénicien (détail). Tête de jeune femme English: Cover of a phoenician anthropoid sarcophagus of a woman (detail). Head of a young women
context_page_description: Phoenicia was an ancient Semitic-speaking thalassocratic civilization that originated in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, specifically modern Lebanon. It was concentrated along the coast of Lebanon and included some coastal areas of Syria and northern Palestine reaching as far north as Arwad and as far south as Acre and possibly Gaza. At its height between 1100 and 200 BC, Phoenician civilization spread across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula.
  The term Phoenicia is an exonym originating from ancient Greek that most likely described Tyrian purple, a major export of Canaanite port towns; it did not correspond precisely to Phoenician culture or society as it would have been understood natively. Scholars thus debate whether the Phoenicians were actually a distinct civilization from the Canaanites and other residents of the Levant.
  The Phoenicians came to prominence following the collapse of most major cultures during the Late Bronze Age. They were renowned in antiquity as adept merchants, expert seafarers, and intrepid explorers.
context_section_description: Herodotus believed that the Phoenicians originated from Bahrain, a view shared centuries later by the historian Strabo. This theory was accepted by the 19th-century German classicist Arnold Heeren, who noted that Greek geographers described "two islands, named Tyrus or Tylos, and Aradus, which boasted that they were the mother country of the Phoenicians, and exhibited relics of Phoenician temples." The people of modern Tyre in Lebanon, have particularly long maintained Persian Gulf origins, and the similarity in the words "Tylos" and "Tyre" has been commented upon. The Dilmun civilization thrived in Bahrain during the period 2200–1600 BC, as shown by excavations of settlements and the Dilmun burial mounds. However, some scholars note that there is little evidence Bahrain was occupied during the time when such migration had supposedly taken place. Moreover, recent genetic researches have shown that "present-day Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age" based on ancient DNA samples from skeletons found in modern-day Lebanon.
  Certain scholars suggest there is enough evidence for a Semitic dispersal to the fertile crescent circa 2500 BC. By contrast, other scholars, such as Sabatino Moscati, believe the Phoenicians originated from an admixture of previous non-Semitic inhabitants with the Semitic arrivals. However, in reality, the ethnogenesis of the Canaanites, and more specifically, Phoenicians, is much more complex. 
  The Canaanite culture that gave rise to the Phoenicians apparently developed in situ from the earlier Ghassulian chalcolithic culture. Ghassulian itself developed from the Circum-Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex, which in turn developed from a fusion of their ancestral Natufian and Harifian cultures with Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) farming cultures, practicing the domestication of animals during the 6200 BC climatic crisis, which led to the Neolithic Revolution in the Levant. Byblos is attested as an archaeological site from the Early Bronze Age. The Late Bronze Age state of Ugarit is considered quintessentially Canaanite archaeologically, even though the Ugaritic language does not belong to the Canaanite languages proper.
caption: Cover of a Phoenician anthropoid sarcophagus of a woman, made of marble, 350–325 BC, from Sidon, now in the Louvre.
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