Phoenician City-States: Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, and the Alphabet

There was never a single unified Phoenician state; the coast was home to a cluster of independent city-states — Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Arwad, Berytus, and others — each with its own king, local pantheon, and foreign policy, even though they shared a common language, script, and cultural traditions. The scarcity of arable land along the thin coastal strip pushed these cities toward commercial and maritime specialization rather than agriculture, while the cedar forests of Lebanon supplied timber of exceptionally high quality, prized across the ancient Near East for shipbuilding and temple construction. Most of what is known about Phoenicia comes from Egyptian, Assyrian, and biblical records and from Greek writers such as Herodotus, rather than from the Phoenicians' own inscriptions, a scarcity of native sources due in part to the fact that Phoenician documents were typically written on perishable materials like papyrus and parchment.