Phoenician

Phoenician may refer to:

Phoenician may also be:

See also

Phoenicians and wine

The culture of the ancient Phoenicians was one of the first to have had a significant effect on the history of wine. Phoenicia was a civilization centered in the northern reaches of Canaan along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in what is now Lebanon. Between 1550 BC and 300 BC, the Phoenicians developed a maritime trading culture that expanded their influence from the Levant to North Africa, the Greek Isles, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula. Through contact and trade, they spread not only their alphabet but also their knowledge of viticulture and winemaking, including the propagation of several ancestral varieties of the Vitis vinifera species of wine grapes.

They either introduced or encouraged the dissemination of wine knowledge to several regions that today continue to produce wine suitable for international consumption. These include modern-day Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal.

The Phoenicians and their Punic descendants of Carthage had a direct influence on the growing winemaking cultures of the ancient Greeks and Romans that would later spread viticulture across Europe. The agricultural treatises of the Carthaginian writer Mago were among the most important early texts in the history of wine to record ancient knowledge of winemaking and viticulture. While no original copies of Mago's or other Phoenician wine writers' works have survived, there is evidence from quotations of Greek and Roman writers such as Columella that the Phoenicians were skilled winemakers and viticulturists.

Phoenician language

Phoenician, sometimes identified with Canaanite Hebrew, was a language originally spoken in the coastal (Mediterranean) region then called "Canaan" in Phoenician, Arabic, Greek, and Aramaic, "Phoenicia" in Greek and Latin, and "Pūt" in Ancient Egyptian. It is a part of the Canaanite subgroup of the Northwest Semitic language family. Other members of the family are Hebrew, Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite. The area where Phoenician was spoken includes modern-day Lebanon, coastal Syria, coastal northern Israel, parts of Cyprus and, at least as a prestige language, some adjacent areas of Anatolia. It was also spoken in the area of Phoenician colonization along the coasts of the Southwestern Mediterranean, including those of modern Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and Algeria, as well as Malta, the west of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Balearic islands and southernmost Spain.

Phoenician, together with Punic, is currently known only from approximately 10,000 inscriptions, as well as occasional glosses in books written in other languages, since the language was primarily written on papyrus and parchment rather than stone. Roman authors such as Sallust allude to some books written in Punic language, but none have survived except occasionally in translation (e.g., Mago's treatise) or in snippets (e.g., in Plautus' plays). The Cippi of Melqart, a bilingual inscription in Ancient Greek and Carthaginian discovered in Malta in 1694, was the key which allowed French scholar Abbé Barthelemy to decipher and reconstruct the alphabet in 1758, although as late as 1837 only 70 Phoenician inscriptions were known to scholars.