A Short History of the Phoenicians

Every time you read a sentence, you are using a Phoenician invention.The Phoenicians gave the world its alphabet, founded cities from Lebanon to Spain, and built in Carthage an empire that brought Rome to the edge of destruction. They were the ancient Mediterranean's greatest sailors, its most ambitious colonisers, and the channel through which the knowledge and art of the ancient Near East reached the emerging civilisations of Greece and Rome.Yet history has not been kind to them. The Greeks dismissed them as traders. Rome destroyed their greatest city and burned their libraries. The civilisation that did more than almost any other to shape the ancient Mediterranean world has come down to us through the accounts of its rivals and its conquerors - which is to say, through the accounts of people with every reason to diminish it.A Short History of the Phoenicians restores the record. Drawing on the latest archaeology and inscriptional evidence, it tells the story of a civilisation whose alphabet you are reading right now.