Blackwell Reference Online

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A * Semitic language , closely akin to * Hebrew . The term ‘Punic’, which has come to be specialized in the sense of ‘Carthaginian’, derives from a Latinization of the Greek ‘Phoinike’ and so refers to the same language. Phoenicia, towards the end of the second millennium BC, occupied a territory corresponding roughly to modern Lebanon and having as its main sites Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre which in due course came to predominate. Westward expansion from Tyre began in the 9th c. BC with the establishment of a colony at Kition, near Larnaka, on the south coast of Cyprus. According to a tradition that can be neither proved nor disproved, Tyre's principal colony of Carthage, which was in due course to control much of the western Mediterranean, was founded in 814 BC. In the 8th c. BC or a little earlier or later, other colonies were founded either from Tyre or from Carthage elsewhere on the northern coast of Africa, and in Europe, from west to east, at Gadir (Càdiz), along the Mediterranean coast of Andalusia from the Bay of Algeciras to east of Almería, on the island of Ibiza, in southern Sardinia, in western Sicily, and on Malta. For a variety of economic and military reasons, Phoenician influence in the area began to decline from the 6th c. BC onwards and came to an end with the conquest and destruction of Carthage by the Romans in 146 BC. The earliest of the few Phoenician inscriptions ... log in or subscribe to read full text