The Penguin History of the World

Of this troubled time a very little is dimly and remotely reflected in the bardic epics later set down in writing in the Iliad and the Odyssey. They include material transmitted for generations by recitation, whose origins lie in tradition near-contemporary with the events they purport to describe, though later attributed to one poet, Homer. Exactly what is reflected is much harder to agree about; the consensus has recently been that it is hardly anything for Mycenaean times, and little more for what immediately followed them. The central episode of the Iliad, the attack on Troy, is not what matters here, though the account probably reflects a real preponderance of Achaean initiative in the settlement of Asia Minor. What survives is a little social and conceptual information carried incidentally by the poems. Though Homer gives an impression of some special pre-eminence enjoyed by the Mycenaean king, this is information about the post-Mycenaean Aegean of the eighth century BC, when recovery from the Dark Ages begins. It reveals a society whose assumptions are those of barbarian warlords rather than those of rulers commanding regular armies or supervising bureaucracies like those of Asia. Homer’s kings are the greatest of great nobles, the heads of large households, their acknowledged authority tempered by the real power of truculent near-equals and measured by their ability to impose themselves; their lives are troubled and exacting. The poems only fitfully illuminate a primitive society, still in confusion, settling down perhaps, but neither so advanced as Mycenae had been, nor even dimly foreshadowing what Greece was to become.

The new civilization which was at last to emerge from the centuries of confusion owed much to the resumption of intercourse with the East. It was very important that the Hellenes (the name by which the invaders of Greece came to be distinguished from their predecessors) had spread out into the islands and on to the Asian mainland; they provided many points of contact between two cultural worlds. But they were not the only links between Asia and Europe. Seeds of civilization were always carried about by the go-betweens of world history, the great trading peoples.

One of them, another seafaring group, had a long and troubled history, though not so long as its legends said; the Phoenicians claimed that they had arrived in Tyre in about 2700 BC. This may be treated like stories about the descent of the Dorian kings from Heracles. None the less, they were already settled on the coast of modern Lebanon in the second millennium BC, when the Egyptians were getting supplies of cedarwood from them. The Phoenicians were a Semitic people. Like the Arabs of the Red Sea, they became seafarers because geography urged them to look outwards rather than inland. They lived in the narrow coastal strip which was the historic channel of communication between Africa and Asia. Behind them was a shallow hinterland, poor in agricultural resources, cut up by hills running down from the mountains to the sea so that the coastal settlements found it difficult to unite. There were parallels with the experience of later Greek states tempted to the sea in similar circumstances, and in each case the result was not only trade but colonization.

Weak at home – they came under the sway of Hebrew, Egyptian and Hittite in turn – it cannot be entirely coincidental that the Phoenicians emerge from the historical shadows only after the great days of Egypt, Mycenae and the Hittite empire. They, too, prospered in others’ decline. It was after 1000 BC, when the great era of Minoan trade was long past, that the Phoenician cities of Byblos, Tyre and Sidon had their golden age. Their importance then is attested by the biblical account of their part in the building of Solomon’s Temple; ‘thou knowest’, says Solomon, ‘that there is not among us any that can skill to hew timber like unto the Sidonians’, and he paid up appropriately (1 Kings 5: 6). Ancient writers often stressed the Phoenicians’ reputation as traders and colonizers. They were the first people who ventured from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, trading up and down the coasts. As skilled long-distance navigators, they could undertake journeys that other peoples would not even think about.

They also had sought-after products to sell and so needed to develop the skills for long-distance trading. Their dyes were long famous and they delivered textiles, wood, glass and slaves. No doubt commercial need stimulated Phoenician inventiveness; it was at Byblos (from which the Greeks were to take their name for a book) that the alphabet later adopted by the Greeks was invented. This was a great step, making a more widespread literacy possible. Yet no remarkable Phoenician literature survives, while Phoenician art tends to reflect their role of the middleman, borrowing and copying from Asian and Egyptian models, perhaps as the customer demanded.