Phoenicians
Discover the Phoenicians — master sailors and traders who invented the alphabet and connected the ancient Mediterranean through commerce.
The Phoenicians were never an empire in the traditional sense. Operating from a string of independent city-states along the coast of modern Lebanon — Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Berytus — they built something arguably more influential: a commercial network that connected the entire Mediterranean world. From roughly 1500 to 300 BCE, Phoenician ships carried not just goods but ideas, technologies, and cultural practices across vast distances.
Their most transformative contribution was the alphabet. Around 1050 BCE, the Phoenicians developed a writing system of just 22 consonant signs — radically simpler than the hundreds of cuneiform signs or Egyptian hieroglyphs. This alphabet was adopted and adapted by the Greeks (who added vowels), the Etruscans, the Romans, and ultimately became the ancestor of nearly every alphabet in use today. Every time you read this sentence, you're using a descendant of the Phoenician alphabet.
Phoenician colonies, most famously Carthage in North Africa, extended their commercial reach throughout the western Mediterranean. They traded purple dye (from which their Greek name derives), cedar wood, glass, and metalwork. In an age before empire builders like Alexander the Great, the Phoenicians demonstrated that commerce and cultural exchange could connect the world as effectively as conquest.