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Masters of the Mediterranean

By Carolina López-Ruiz, David Schloen, José Suárez Padilla
Sidebar to: From Tyre to Tarshish: The Phoenicians in Spain

ERICH LESSING / ART RESOURCE, NY

Scholars long thought the main impetus for Phoenicia’s westward expansion was the Assyrian Empire, which demanded heavy tribute from the Phoenician city-states in the form of silver and timber. But archaeology indicates that intense trade with Iberia, and especially the areas west of the Strait of Gibraltar that were rich in metals, began a century or more before the rise of Assyria in the eighth century BCE. Early Phoenician settlements at sites such as Gadir, Carthage, and others now put the expansion in the mid- to late ninth century. In fact, as the Assyrians pushed westward in the eighth century, Tyre and Sidon enjoyed a more lenient treatment, precisely because they functioned as critical gateways to the Mediterranean.

We therefore need a different model to explain how and why the Phoeni­cians began to sail west. As a start, the independent city-states of the Phoeni­cian coast were largely unscathed by the destructions and collapses that affected other Canaanite centers around 1200 BCE. Taking advantage of their centuries-long maritime experience, the Phoenician cities leveraged previous though irregular contacts with distant Mediterranean ports to establish an extensive network of stable, interconnected settlements far to the west.

It is unlikely that long-distance trade of this scope could have succeeded without state sponsorship. Even if we cannot attribute this initiative to Hiram, the tenth-century king of Tyre whom the Bible presents as King Solomon’s ally in a joint trading venture that involved “ships of Tarshish” (1 Kings 10:22), we might attribute it to the later Tyrian king Ittobaal (Ethbaal), father of the infamous Jezebel. Archaeological evidence, including radiocarbon dates from Gadir, the earliest and most famous of Phoenicia’s Iberian colonies, shows that regular trade was well established by the late ninth century, with permanent colonial settlements underway within a matter of decades.