Phoenician

The language of the Phoenician city-states of the Levantine coast and of the Mediterranean network of colonies and trading posts they established between the eleventh and second centuries BCE. Phoenician is closely related to Hebrew and to the other Canaanite languages, and its speakers consistently called themselves and their language Canaanite (kn’nm); the modern name “Phoenician” derives from Greek Phoiníkē, an exonym of contested etymology.

Phoenician is the language in which the consonantal alphabet that became the ancestor of the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic scripts was first systematized. The language is attested in inscriptions across the Mediterranean, from Byblos and Sidon on the Levantine coast to Cyprus, Sardinia, Malta, and the western colonies including Carthage; the later western dialect known as Punic remained in use in North Africa into the early centuries CE.

@misc{onomastikon-phoenician,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Phoenician},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/phoenician}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}