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Thanks Larry. Phoenicia was a collection of maritime city-states, each with a supporting territory tucked into the hills to their east. Their antiquity has been grossly exaggerated under the conventional pseudochronology. If memory serves, in their heyday, Sidon was considered the oldest of the settlements.

Classical Greeks considered Cadmus the Phoenician source of the classical Greek alphabet. The cover story of one of the 1974 Nat Geog was about the Phoenicians, and starts with an anecdote related to the founding of Carthage, which was accomplished by exiles from Tyre.

Carthage was in competition with Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, and fellow Phoenician city-states for territories and colonies in the western Mediterranean, and also explored western Africa, planting colonies there, and circumnavigating that continent.

Persian rule of the Phoenician area and Ionian Anatolia led to the use of those cities' naval power against Greece during the attempted conquest.