The Phoenicians Knew Something They Shouldn't Have [18:07]

YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.

Yes, tell the WHOLE story. Then, they messed with Alexander the Great and refused to negotiate. Bad mistake. Something to read about.

Yup, Tyre. His engineers built a temporary land bridge, and it’s still there. 😁

Transcript

Most empires in the ancient world ran on the same fuel: land. More fields meant more grain. More grain meant more people. And more people meant bigger armies, which then captured more land. But one civilization owned almost no land at all. And yet ended up shaping the entire region. And it’s because they understood something everyone else missed. Something that still decides who holds power today. Hey people, welcome back. If you’re new here, I’m Michael, and on this channel, we explore the recurring patterns that shape and shatter civilizations. Let’s get into it.

Stand on the coast of Lebanon 3,000 years ago, and you are looking at a strip of land that by every rule of the age should never have produced a great power. But the cities scattered along that coastline were about to outlast almost every empire that surrounded them. And to see how strange that is, let’s look at the rules that everyone else played by. For the ancient world, power had a formula. Land grew grain. Grain fed people. People filled armies, and armies then took more land. Every major civilization ran the same loop, and the winners simply ran it the hardest.

Egypt held the Nile floodplain and fed itself off that river for 30 centuries. Assyria built a war machine that flattened cities from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Babylon absorbed whole peoples. Persia eventually stretched from India to Greece. An empire so wide that a royal messenger needed around three months to cross it. Bigger borders, larger harvests, stronger armies. That was the game, and everyone understood the game. For thousands of years, the map was the scoreboard. But then there is Phoenicia, a strip of coastline roughly 200 miles long and in places only a few miles deep.

Today, you could drive across the entire land in an afternoon. Mountains press in from the east. The sea blocks the west, and the coast had gifts, good natural harbors among them. But they were gifts of the wrong kind for the only game anyone was playing. The narrow coastal plain could support prosperous cities, but it could never support the vast agricultural base or the mass armies that Egypt, Assyria, or Babylon drew on. By the formula, then, these cities had no future. Too small to conquer, anyone squeezed in between empires that could crush them in a single campaigning season. So, how do you survive when you can’t play the only game on the board?

Well, it’s simple. You find a different board. The mountains that pressed the Phoenicians against the sea were covered in prized timber. Cedar above all, straight, durable wood, wanted across the eastern Mediterranean for ships and temples alike. Timber was one of the most valuable things they had, and timber helped turn the sea from a wall into a road. But necessity, more than adventure, pushed them onto it. When your land can’t raise the kind of armies your neighbors have, you either take someone else’s land, which requires exactly the army you cannot raise, or you trade. So, the Phoenicians traded, and they turned out to be better at it than anyone else alive. Their cities, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and in time dozens of others turned themselves into workshops facing the water. They built sturdy seagoing merchantmen that could haul cargo across long open water routes.

Ancient writers even associated their sailors with steering by the northern stars, the more precise way of holding a course at night. They worked out routes to Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Sicily, North Africa, Spain, and eventually slipped past Gibraltar into the Atlantic. Farther than most Mediterranean societies of their age regularly ventured. And where the great land empires expanded through annexation, the early Phoenician cities expanded through ports, merchant quarters, and strategic settlements.

Carthage, the most famous of them, began as one of many footholds planted along the western routes. Now, it was not always gentle, but Carthage would one day build an empire of its own. Remember that because something subtle is implied here. A conquered city hates you, and they just wait. But a trading city wants you back next season with a fuller hold of cargo. The Phoenician cities still paid tribute to the empires around them and sometimes endured sieges. Yet even the conquerors tended to leave the ports running because everyone needed what came through them. And every voyage widened Phoenician influence without moving a single border.

So trading posts are useful. But how does a chain of harbors make a set of small cities rich enough to matter to empires? Well, the answer obviously starts with a snail. Off the Phoenician coast lives a sea snail called the Murex, and inside it a gland holding a few drops of secretion. Processed correctly, those drops become a purple dye of unusual durability, a color that could deepen with light exposure during production. But the yield is absurd. Producing even a small quantity of dye could take thousands of shellfish, sometimes many thousands. That made the color so expensive that wearing purple became roughly what owning a private jet is now. Kings wore it. Roman emperors would later reserve it by law, and the Phoenician cities became the ancient world’s most famous producers and exporters of it. The Greek name for them, Phoenician, which we still use today, probably comes from a word meaning the purple people.

So, purple was the flagship. Behind it moved timber, glass, silver from Spain, tin for bronze, wine, ivory, works metal, and increasingly other people’s cargo carried on Phoenician ships for a fee. Now, there is actually a surviving Egyptian document called the Report of Wenamun, written around 1075 BC, that shows how far the balance had quietly tilted. When Wenamun is an Egyptian temple official sent to Byblos to buy cedar the way Egypt had for a thousand years, Zakar Baal, the ruler of Byblos, doesn’t rush to receive Egypt’s envoy.

In fact, the text has Wenamun stuck in the harbor for weeks, receiving daily messages telling him to leave. And when they finally negotiate, Zakar Baal sends for the journal rolls of his ancestors, records of what Egypt actually paid in the past, has them read out, and demands the full price. Now, I find that scene more revealing than any battle. An envoy of Egypt argued down by a ruler just consulting his ledgers. This historical episode captures a shift in bargaining power. Egypt still had the land, the temples, and the ancient prestige. But Byblos had the cedar and the route. And in that negotiation, the route mattered more.

And yet cargo was only half of what those ships carried because tucked in amongst the dye, the timber, and the ingots, the Phoenicians were also shipping something that cost them nothing to load. And it would outlive every empire in this story. And you’re probably using it now.

We’ll come back to it because underneath all of this, something larger was taking shape. The Mediterranean looks like a sea, but by around 700 BC, it was functioning more like a communication system. Every port in it began exchanging goods. And along with the goods went languages, gods, technology, prices, rumors, recipes, and news. But no single authority ran this system. The Phoenician cities were actually independent, often rivals. There was no head office. Yet their merchants, settlements, and ships became the system’s most persistent connectors. Nobody owned this web.

Yet a remarkable share of its traffic ran through Phoenician hands anyway. But the mechanism underneath is the part that interests me. A trade network becomes more valuable as it grows. Each new port makes every existing port a little bit richer because each one now reaches one more market. So growth feeds growth. Economists in the 20th century would eventually name this a network effect and use it to explain why one platform tends to swallow its whole field.

Without ever naming the principle, the Phoenician world was benefiting from it roughly 2,800 years early. And notice what much of this system never really required: permanent occupation. Merchants and ports kept using the network because they had their own reasons to. They were incentivized to. An empire has to hold its provinces by force forever. But a network mostly holds its members by benefit. And so that is why networks can grow faster than empires and are often much harder to kill. Which brings us back to that cargo that I promised you.

That cheap weightless export was the alphabet. Writing already existed and had for 2,000 years. But the great systems of the palace and temple bureaucracies, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mesopotamian cuneiform used hundreds of signs and demanded years of specialist training. That complexity kept writing concentrated among professional scribes attached to courts, temples, and administrations. So, the Phoenician merchants needed something faster: contracts, price lists, letters to agents in foreign ports. And by building on earlier Canaanite experiments, they actually standardized a compact set of 22 signs for consonant sounds.

While the old systems took years of schooling to master, these 22 signs brought the barrier down to something a busy trading house could live with. And because it traveled on the trade routes, it spread the way useful things spread through networks: sideways, organically, port to port, with nobody ordering it. And then the Greeks adapted it and made full use of vowels. Through Etruscan hands, Greek letters gave rise to the Latin alphabet on your screen. Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic scripts descend from the same family. The empires carved monuments to be remembered forever. And most of these inscriptions now need specialists to read. But the Phoenicians shipped a convenience for accounts. And billions of people still write inscriptions from its extended family.

And it kept happening. Venice, a cluster of islands in a lagoon, salt marsh, and fish with no farmland at all. Yet by the 13th century, it was the richest city in Europe because it sat on the connection between Europe and the East and made itself the middleman nobody could route around. It’s the same constraint. It’s the same answer. In time, Venice defended that position with warships and conquered ports of its own. Or we could take the Dutch Republic, half of it below sea level, its population smaller than a single province of some of its rivals.

Yet at its 17th-century height, Dutch shipping carried an extraordinary share of Europe’s seaborne trade and Amsterdam became the center of a cluster of financial inventions like exchange trading in company shares, marine insurance, and a clearing bank. While Spain had silver mines and enormous armies for most of a century, routes and credit let the small republic outmaneuver the empire of silver. Or Britain. Britain was never Europe’s largest country in people or farmland, but it mastered shipping, ports, and the naval protection of trade lanes. And for about a century, if goods crossed an ocean, they probably moved on British routes under British insurance priced in British currency.

Notice though what Britain added to the model: colonies, plantations, industrial power, and the strongest navy on Earth. Network control and territorial force fused together. And so by now, a second pattern should be visible underneath the first. Commercial networks may begin as an alternative to conquest. But once they grow rich enough, they attract enemies, need protection, and tend to produce empires of their own. Carthage did it. Venice did it. The Dutch did it. Britain did it. On a global scale, armies kept mattering. What changed was the prize. Increasingly, the wars were about who controlled the network. The United States inherited and rebuilt that network’s position after the Second World War: containerized shipping, the dollar, which sits on one side of roughly 90% of all currency trades on Earth, and then a layer no map can show: the internet, GPS, cloud computing, the plumbing of our global logistics.

America has plenty of territory, but its deepest influence runs through things you can’t draw a border around. Four different centuries, but the same move over and over. Each age has one defining network and the power that recognizes it first gains influence far out of proportion from its size. Which of course leaves the obvious question: what is the network now? Well, several candidates are actually competing for the title. Take undersea cables. More than 600 submarine cable systems now carry almost all intercontinental data, well over 95% of it. A vast share of international communication and finance depends on bundles of glass fiber roughly the width of a garden hose lying on the seabed.

Or semiconductors. A strikingly large share of the world’s most advanced chips comes from one company, TSMC, on the island of Taiwan. Even though the wider supply chain spans several other countries, which is part of why great powers now watch Taiwan the way they once watched straits and canals. Or what about satellite constellations, cloud regions, payment rails where exclusion from a major financial messaging network can apply the same kind of pressure once delivered by blockades. And behind all of it, AI models with the data centers and the electricity they run on.

But just look at what today’s real contests are about. Countries still argue over borders, and those arguments still turn deadly. The competition that keeps strategists awake though is about position inside systems. Who fabricates the chips? Whose cables carry the traffic? Whose currency settles the trade? Whose standards does everyone else have to build on? Some states still play the land game, spending fortunes to annex territory. Others spend those same fortunes buying ports, laying cable, subsidizing chip plants, and stacking launch capacity. History offers no guarantee about which approach wins this time. It does keep a scoreboard, though, and for about 3,000 years, the scoreboard has leaned one way: toward whoever quietly runs the connections everyone else depends on.

But now, one last thing about the Phoenicians, and it’s the strangest part. We aren’t entirely sure they even existed at all. The historian Josephine Quinn has argued that the Phoenicians never called themselves Phoenicians and may never have thought of themselves as one people at all, only as Tyrians, Sidonians, or men of Byblos. Other scholars point to the shared script and shared gods and push back. The argument is genuinely unsettled, which means the civilization in this story may have been a network that later ages mistook for a nation. Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BC and dismantled the last great Punic power, though Punic towns and the Punic language survived in North Africa for centuries afterward.

And about a century later, Rome rebuilt Carthage itself as a port. The harbor, the location, and the fertile land behind it were too valuable to leave empty. The state had died, but the connections had not. The port just reopened under new management. Nobody today fears Assyria. The empires that played the land game perfectly are colored shapes on classroom maps. But you wrote something today in letters that came off a Phoenician trade route. And you paid for something through commercial habits first worked out in ports like Tyre. When everyone believes power means owning more of the map, the next great power is usually somewhere quiet, building the connections the map doesn’t show. The Phoenicians worked that out early. The interesting question is which small landless overlooked player is working it out right now.

Guys, if you want to hear about these ideas in more detail and help support my work, then consider joining my Substack. The link is in the description below. Thanks so much for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments. Like, subscribe to the channel, all of that. And I’ll see you next time.

Rhyme from grade school =>

“Phoenician sailors crossed the seas,
And taught the Greeks their ABCs.

Razed the city to the bedrock.

Nice find there, SunkenCiv.

It's the Network! I watched the whole video without stopping to do the other things I "have to" do :-)

Wonder how high school teachers are explaining Ancient History. Networking and trade is a great way to understand a dimension above and beyond the conquest of armies.

I could see myself buying a history book that uses that angle. Victor David Hanson, are you busy the next few months?

Bfl

Your posts are real favorites here. Thank you !!

Producing even a small quantity of dye could take thousands of shellfish, sometimes many thousands.

Centuries later, this was the basis for a famous essay, Rand's The Virtue of Shellfishness.

OK, to be serious, Carthage was powerful not just because of its strategic harbor but because of the vast farmland around it, which we know today as the Sahara desert. But like the Phoenicians, they had to buy their defense because they didn't have their own source of arrow fodder, so they bought the Vandals, then reneged, bringing on their destruction by the said Vandals.

Good post. Again.

Vikings also used trading a great deal…

Fascinating - thanks for posting!

Thank you, SunkenCiv, for another wonderfully informative article.

Perhaps President Trump understands what this article teaches and makes it a highlight of his plan to make America Great Again…….

Our country is in serious trouble. We don't win anymore.We don't beat China in trade. We don't beat Japan, with their millions and millions of cars coming into this country, in trade. We can't beat Mexico, at the border or in trade.We can't do anything right. Our military has to be strengthened. Our vets have to be taken care of. We have to end Obamacare, and we have to make our country great again, and I will do that.
Donald Trump

I’m guessing the Phoenicians owned the routes to Cornwall and all its tin.

https://rumble.com/v7ehxiy-nails-in-his-feet.html

Another example of an “empire” with major influence and little land, based on trading is the Hanseatic league in the baltic sea and north sea...

Wonder how high school teachers are explaining Ancient History. Networking and trade is a great way to understand a dimension above and beyond the conquest of armies.

Oh please. All modern teachers know that it wasn't networks. It was white capitalist armies oppressing minorities exclusively and that's why reparations' must now be made. Or something like that.