[LCM Events] More on "Quest for Phonecians"

[Loai Naamani]

Here is some additional information on the PBS/National Geographic special, "Quest for the Phoenicians", airing tomorrow (Wednesday)
on WGBH at 8pm ET (Cable Channel 23 at MIT).

This is an excerpt from what this production is about:

 

"They were the 'Bad Boys' in the Bible, the envy of the Mediterranean, and their seafaring skills were legendary. But who exactly
were the Phoenicians, what became of them and what was the secret of their success? A new NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SPECIAL sets out to
solve these mysteries through the pioneering work of three very different scientists in 'Quest for the Phoenicians', airing on PBS
Wednesday, October 20, 2004.



Wells has no doubts about the power of the new genetic techniques he is bringing to our understanding of ancient peoples. Nor does
his bespectacled colleague standing beside him on the veranda, Pierre Zalloua, a 37-year-old scientist with a dark goatee and an
intense passion for his Lebanese heritage. The two men hope to find new clues to an age-old riddle: Who were the Phoenicians? 

 

Although they're mentioned frequently in ancient texts as vigorous traders and sailors, we know relatively little about these
puzzling people. Historians refer to them as Canaanites when talking about the culture before 1200 B.C. The Greeks called them the
phoinikes, which means the "red people"-a name that became Phoenicians-after their word for a prized reddish purple cloth the
Phoenicians exported. But they would never have called themselves Phoenicians. Rather, they were citizens of the ports from which
they set sail, walled cities such as Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre.

 

The culture later known as Phoenician was flourishing as early as the third millennium B.C. in the Levant, a coastal region now
divided primarily between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. But it wasn't until around 1100 B.C., after a period of general disorder and
social collapse throughout the region, that they emerged as a significant cultural and political force. 

 

>From the ninth to sixth centuries B.C. they dominated the Mediterranean Sea, establishing emporiums and colonies from Cyprus in the
east to the Aegean Sea, Italy, North Africa, and Spain in the west. They grew rich trading precious metals from abroad and products
such as wine, olive oil, and most notably the timber from the famous cedars of Lebanon, which forested the mountains that rise
steeply from the coast of their homeland. 

 

The armies and peoples that eventually conquered the Phoenicians either destroyed or built over their cities. Their writings, mostly
on fragile papyrus, disintegrated-so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the
Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity. That's ironic, because the Phoenicians
actually developed the modern alphabet and spread it through trade to their ports of call. 

 

Acting as cultural middlemen, the Phoenicians disseminated ideas, myths, and knowledge from the powerful Assyrian and Babylonian
worlds in what is now Syria and Iraq to their contacts in the Aegean. Those ideas helped spark a cultural revival in Greece, one
which led to the Greeks' Golden Age and hence the birth of Western civilization. The Phoenicians imported so much papyrus from Egypt
that the Greeks used their name for the first great Phoenician port, Byblos, to refer to the ancient paper. The name Bible, or "the
book," also derives from Byblos. 

 

Today, Spencer Wells says, "Phoenicians have become ghosts, a vanished civilization." Now he and Zalloua hope to use a different
alphabet, the molecular letters of DNA, to exhume these ghosts." - National Geographic

 


WGBH schedule and show times for this special:
http://www.wgbh.org/schedules/program-info?program_id=346045
<http://www.wgbh.org/schedules/program-info?program_id=346045&episode_id=1852973> &episode_id=1852973 

National Geographic pages on this production (w/ updates after the article had been published):

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature2/index.html

 

Here's a very interesting forum discussing the finings for this research/documentary:

http://seabed.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/forum.tmpl?issue_id=20041001
<http://seabed.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/forum.tmpl?issue_id=20041001&forum_index=1> &forum_index=1


Hope you enjoy it,
L.



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