Phoenicia

The Biblical Hebrew name for the Phoenicians, Ṣīdōnîm, “Sidonians,” after Sidon, the coastal city the Hebrew writers treated as standing for the whole people. The Hebrew Bible has no word for “Phoenicia” at all; where it speaks of the coastal traders it calls them either Canaanites or, more often as a people, Ṣīdōnîm, whether or not the city of Sidon is specifically meant. Hiram of Tyre’s woodcutters are reckoned among the Ṣīdōnîm in the account of Solomon’s temple; Jezebel, a Tyrian princess, is a daughter of the Sidonians; and Deuteronomy notes in passing that “the Sidonians call Hermon Sirion,” using the name for Phoenicians at large.

Ṣīdōnîm is the Hebrew counterpart to the Greek habit of naming the whole people for a part, but it makes the opposite choice from Greek. Where the Greeks named Phoenicia for a commodity, purple, the Hebrews named it for a city, Sidon, generalizing one town’s name to the entire seaboard much as “the Sidonians” could mean any Phoenician. It is a third independent answer to the same naming problem, beside the Phoenicians’ own civic-and-Canaanite self-identification and the Greek color-word: the people who called themselves Canaanites and were called Phoenicians by the Greeks were, to their Israelite neighbors, simply the Sidonians, the men of the great harbor up the coast.

The self-designation of the people we call Phoenician, Kanaʿan, “Canaanite”: they were the coastal branch of the Canaanites and kept that name when their inland kin had largely lost it. The Phoenicians never coined a collective name of their own; in their inscriptions a man is a Tyrian, a Sidonian, a Giblite, and the people as a whole are simply Canaanites. The continuity is striking at the far end of their world: Augustine, writing in fifth-century North Africa, reports that the Punic-speaking country folk around him, the descendants of Phoenician Carthage, still called themselves Chanani, Canaanites, a thousand years and a sea away from Tyre.

Kanaʿan is the name that exposes “Phoenicia” as an outsider’s label. The Greeks called these people Phoiníkē after their purple dye, and that Greek word became their name in every modern language, but to themselves they were Canaanites to the end. The Septuagint preserves the equivalence mechanically, rendering Hebrew Kĕnaʿan as “Phoinike” from one verse to the next, so that the two names can be read as exact translations of each other. This page keeps only the coastal, seafaring sense of the name; the wider Canaanite tradition, shared with the whole Bronze Age Levant, belongs with the land of Canaan itself. Here Kanaʿan stands as the one thing the Phoenicians actually called themselves, beneath the Greek purple-name the world remembers them by.

The Greek name for the Levantine coast and its people, Phoiníkē, built on phoînix and giving the modern “Phoenicia.” It is among the oldest names on the page: Homer already knows the Phoínikes as famed seafarers and traders, sharp dealers who carry cargo and sometimes people across the sea, and from Herodotus onward Phoiníkē is the standard Greek term for the coast of Tyre and Sidon. The Greeks named the people, in the usual way, after what they were known for selling.

What phoînix meant is the entry’s puzzle, because the word carries two senses at once: the crimson-purple dye, the famous Tyrian purple wrung from the murex shell, and the date-palm. Most take the country-name from the color, “the land of purple,” the Greeks naming their suppliers after their most coveted export; some connect it instead to the palm, and a minority trace it back to an Egyptian word fenkhu for the Levantine peoples. Whichever holds, the result is the same: the name by which the world knows this civilization is a Greek merchant’s word for a commodity, not anything its people called themselves. It passed into Latin as Phoenīcē and from there into every modern European language, so that an entire people are remembered, in the end, under the Greek name for the dye in their cargo holds.

The Latin name for Phoenicia, Phoenīcē, taken over from Greek Phoiníkē with the usual naturalization of a Greek toponym. The Roman geographers use it for the coast of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, and in 194 CE the name became official Roman administrative geography when the province of Syria was divided and its southern coastal part organized as Syria Phoenīcē. By then the Phoenician cities had long since lost their independence, but the Greek-given name had hardened into the standard term for the region in both Greek and Latin.

Phoenīcē is the form that carried the name into the modern world along the familiar Greek-via-Latin road. English Phoenicia, French Phénicie, Italian and Spanish Fenicia, German Phönizien: all rest on this Latin rendering of the Greek, exactly as the European names for Egypt, Persia, and Assyria do. The purple-merchants of the Levant thus reached posterity under a Greek nickname, Latinized and passed down through the scholarly languages of Europe, while the name they used for themselves, Canaanite, survived only in scripture and in the antiquarian’s footnote. The thing they were named for outlived them too: “Phoenician purple” remained a byword for imperial luxury long after the last Phoenician city had fallen.

The Syriac name for Phoenicia, Pūnīqē, is the form the Peshitta uses in the Acts of the Apostles, where the disciples scattered by persecution travel “as far as Phoenicia” (Acts 11:19), pass back “through all Phoenicia” (15:3), and find a ship “going to Phoenicia” (21:2). It is taken straight from the Greek Phoiníkē of the underlying text, copied consonant for consonant as ܦܘܢܝܩܐ, with the long vowels marked by waw and yod in the usual way for a Greek loan. The Syriac translators made no attempt to find a native term; they simply carried the Greek name across.

What makes the form striking is that Syriac is itself a dialect of Aramaic, a Northwest Semitic language at home on the very coast the Greeks called Phoiníkē, the language of the inland neighbors of Tyre and Sidon. Yet when Syriac Christians needed a word for the region, they reached not for any inherited Canaanite or Aramaean name but for the Greek merchants’ word, received secondhand through the Greek of the Gospel. The page already shows the Phoenicians naming themselves Kanaʿan and the Hebrews calling them Ṣīdōnîm; here a sister Semitic tongue, which had every means to preserve the Canaanite name, instead remembers the purple-coast under the Greek exonym for the dye in its holds.

The Geʿez name for Phoenicia, Fīnīqē, came into Ethiopic through the Bible, which the Aksumite church rendered from Greek, and it reproduces the Phoiníkē of the Greek text. Dillmann’s lexicon gathers its New Testament occurrences in the Acts of the Apostles (11:19, 15:3, 21:2) beside the Old Testament ones, and records the name in a scatter of spellings, ፊኒቄ, ፊንቄስ, ፊኒቅ, ፊንቂስ, and more, the orthography of the foreign word never quite settling into one shape. The form is a borrowed proper noun with no Geʿez root behind it, which is exactly why scribes treated its spelling so freely.

That instability is the entry’s point. A name with no Semitic root to anchor it, copied by ear from the Greek across generations of manuscripts, drifts in spelling in a way native words do not: some forms keep the bare Greek nominative Phoiníkē (ፊኒቄ), while others carry the Greek sigma over into Geʿez (ፊንቄስ), the shape the Ethiopic Old Testament uses where it speaks of the “kings of Phoenicia.” It is the same Greek-given name that reached Rome as Phoenīcē and the Syriac church as Pūnīqē, here carried to the far southern edge of its travels. At that edge, in a script and a language the Phoenicians never knew existed, their country survives only as a Greek word imperfectly remembered.