(I’m reading and editing up the AI processed transcript, and this guy appears to conform to his own description, above)
Transcript pt 1
So, there’s a civilization that gave the entire Western world its alphabet. Every letter I’m about to say out loud, every letter on your screen right now was more or less made by them, or at least laid the foundations for it. And they themselves did not leave a single sentence behind about them. Not one, which is rather ironic. They can invent writing, yet apparently they didn’t bother to write anything down. These are the Phoenicians. And most of what you’re going to hear today was written down by Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, and Hebrew prophets, which is to say that it was written by their customers, their landlords, and the people who hated them most.
And we’re going to do something a little bit different today. This isn’t the story of a people. It’s rather the story of a people-shaped hole and everything that we’ve managed to reconstruct by looking at the things surrounding it. Because obviously, we don’t have any written record of themselves, or at least very little. So, this is the best that we can do. But to my surprise, we can actually piece together quite the puzzle to figure out one of the strangest ancient civilizations in the world.
And the best place to start is one of the very few times we actually get to watch these guys at work because around 1075 BC, an Egyptian priest named um Waman gets sent on an errand. He works at the temple of Aean at thieves and his boss wants cedarwood, which is good cedar, the kind that only grows on the mountains of what is now Lebanon. So he wanted it to build a sacred barge. So Winnamon um gets sent a merchant ship with a Levantine captain and sails north with a load of gold and silver to pay for it. He does not have a good trip.
First, he stops at a port called Dor, which is at this point being run by a group of the sea peoples called the Tjeker [’Civ’s guess]. I don’t know how to say it. And while he’s there, one of his own crew robs him of all of his gold and silver. Literally his own guy. So now he’s an ambassador of Egypt with no money and a whole crew to feed. He goes on to Byblos anyways which takes a certain amount of nerve and Byblos is run by a prince named uh Zakar Bal and Zakar Ballal is not impressed when has arrived broke without proper credentials representing a country that used to own this coastline and Zacharal’s response is essentially hey that’s nice go home and bring back the money and then we’ll talk which 400 years earlier would have been unthinkable because Egypt gave orders on this coast and the thing about cedar is that it was given as gifts between different heads of states as political gifts, but now it’s a product and there’s a price for it.
And the Egyptian temple leader dude is standing in a foreign harbor being told that it’s not good enough. He needs to send him an invoice and send he does. He sends word back home and then a partial payment arrives. Then Zakarbal has the trees cut. 300 men and oxen move them and takes his fee in gold, silver, linen, rope, oxhides, and 500 rolls of finished papyrus. Then as Winnamon is leaving, he’s ambushed by Tijer ships that were sent to arrest him. Zarkobal steps in to save him. He escapes, gets blown off course by a storm, washes up on Cyprus, is met by an unnamed queen, and then he loses the papyrus. That’s it. We don’t really know what happened to him. So that’s kind of the introduction to these people. Somebody else’s bad day written down by somebody else entirely, ending in a tragic story of one of these Phoenician men.
Regards,