Purple travelers
Their ships laden with fabulous cargoes criss-crossed the whole Mediterranean; the Roman emperors adorned themselves with their dazzling purple; the pharaohs of Egypt had themselves embalmed in shrouds treated with their cedar oil; Solomon used the talents of their craftsmen to decorate the temple in Jerusalem and build his palace.
Who were these enterprising and inventive people? The Phoenicians, settled on the edge of the eastern Mediterranean, in a region corresponding to present-day Lebanon and a small part of Israel and Syria. Of Semitic origin, they are the Canaanites of the Bible, those whose pagan practices attracted the wrath of the Hebrew patriarchs. Yet even the Old Testament writers acknowledge that they had a genius for commerce, and in Hebrew kena'ani means "Canaanite," but also a mirr-hinr].
It was the ancient Greeks who gave them the name of Phoenicians. Phenicia means "land of the purple", the precious dye that made them famous and whose marvelous brilliance the poets of antiquity never ceased to sing. Sidon, one of the two great Phoenician cities, drew its fame from its fine glassware:beads, bottles, vases and goblets in bright colors. In Sidon as in Tire, the second largest city, richly embroidered fabrics, fine carvings in wood and ivory, metal objects of incomparable delicacy were made. And it is in the 10th century BC. BC that the craftsmen of Tire erected the temple and the palace of Solomon, splendidly adorned with gold and silver objects.
Around 1200 BC. The Canaanites were forced by the invaders to turn to the sea for their livelihood, and thus they built the greatest maritime empire the world had ever seen. At the height of their power, between the twelfth and eighth centuries BC. J.-C., the Phoenicians had the monopoly of the maritime trade. Their merchants established a vast network of trade routes which covered all the known world of the time, and it was perhaps to facilitate communications with their distant correspondents that the Phoenicians created an alphabet, an invention which was to constitute the basis of all the written languages of the West. Yet their power began to wane in the eighth century, partly because the Greeks gradually established colonies in the Mediterranean, thus breaking the monopoly they had claimed, partly because the territory they possessed fell with the time under the domination of the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian empires, and finally under that of the Greeks of Alexander.
But the civilization and ingenuity of the Phoenicians did not disappear. The blowing of glass, for example, was invented by them in the first century of our era. And above all, their purple was still unparalleled. symbol of the highest dignity. Emperors wore purple tunics; senators, white tunics striped with two purple stripes; the coat of members of the aristocracy was often adorned with a narrow purple stripe which descended from each shoulder. The purple industry actually survived the Roman Empire, and Europe in the early Middle Ages was still importing this rare dye from the Levant when the Phoenicians had long since fallen under the yoke of the Saracens. P>
The Murex, purveyor of Pourpri
Dyeing was one of the great industries of Tire and Sidon, but Tire was especially famous for the quality of its purple. The Phoenicians seem to have jealously guarded the secrets of their technique, but we do know certain data. This "manna" came from coastal waters, where murex, gastropod molluscs, abounded. To bait them, the fishermen shredded mussels and frogs, which they placed at the bottom of their traps. Once the shells were on the beach, their precious gill glands were removed, then they were heated in lead containers to remove impurities, before adding a mordant to fix the color.
The purple of the fabrics certainly varied with the importance of the character who wore it, but also, certainly, with the mollusc provider. Murex trunculus furnishes a violet purple, but the colorless secretion of Muscella lapillus changes, under the effect of sunlight, from light green to bright purple after a whole gradation of tones:dark green, glaucous, light blue, reddish . Archaeologists have found huge piles of empty shells where the dye was made. Nothing astonishing, if one knows that it is necessary; 400 Muscella lapillus to obtain 7 milligrams of dry purple, and 10,000 Murex for 1.2 g of crystalline purple.
Phoenician explorations
The Phoenicians were excellent navigators, always looking for new markets and new sources of raw materials. We know that they founded counters on the coasts of Spain and Morocco, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, and that they often went to the region of Cadiz to load copper and lead ore there. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, a Phoenician fleet circumnavigated Africa around 600 BC. J.-C. on behalf of Pharaoh Nechao. The expedition would have left the Red Sea, to return three years later through the Strait of Gibraltar.
It took another 2,000 years for European navigators to pass the Cape of Good Hope, so it seems difficult to believe Herodotus' account. However, one detail catches the eye:the Phoenicians claim that they had the sun “on their right hand” when they traveled west; in other words, the sun was in the north. Herodotus did not believe this part of their account, whereas for modern geographers, who know well that a ship must cross the equator to circumnavigate Africa, it pleads in favor of their sincerity.
Did the Phoenicians also go to the British Isles? It has often been said. It is also claimed that they would have reached the shores of America. This assertion is supported by the fact that some Mexican statuettes display Semitic features and that a number of Native Americans honored bearded gods, while the natives of the mainland were all beardless. Most scholars, however, reject this theory. The Phoenician galleys advanced mainly by oar, even if they were sometimes equipped with a sail. They mainly did cabotage, from island to island or along the coast. The roads leading to the rich mines of Spain, for example, were lined with trading posts where navigators anchored at night. Perhaps they were able to reach Britain or circumnavigate Africa, in stages. But crossing the immensity of the Atlantic? That's pretty unlikely.