Afro-Asiatic, Northwest Semitic (Canaanite) · Phoenician alphabet
Phoenician
𐤊𐤍𐤏𐤍 knʿn, “Canaan”
- Spoken
- c. 1050 BC – AD 400s (as Punic)
- Where
- The Levantine coast, today Lebanon, with colonies across the Mediterranean
If you can read this sentence, you owe something to Phoenician. Its 22-letter alphabet, written right to left with consonants only, was carried by merchants from Tyre and Sidon to every corner of the Mediterranean. The Greeks borrowed it and added vowels, the Etruscans and Romans borrowed it from them, and the Arameans passed their version east. Yet Phoenician itself survives mostly as tomb inscriptions, dedications and coins, and its speakers' own books are lost.
Where and when
Phoenician was spoken in a string of independent port cities on the coast of modern Lebanon and northern Israel: Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, Arwad. Their wealth came from cedar wood, purple dye and long-distance trade. The language was close to Hebrew and Moabite, all part of the Canaanite branch of Semitic.
From about 1000 BC Phoenicians founded colonies in Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia, Spain and North Africa. Carthage, founded by Tyrians according to tradition in 814 BC, became the capital of a western empire, and its dialect, Punic, outlived the language of the homeland by centuries. Inscriptions from Malta, Sardinia and Spain show how far the language travelled.
How it fell silent
In the homeland, Phoenician was squeezed between two bigger languages. Under Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian rule, Aramaic became the shared language of the Levant, and after Alexander took Tyre in 332 BC, Greek became the language of the elite and of trade. By the first century BC the cities of the coast were writing mainly in Greek, and Phoenician speech there had probably faded.
In the west, Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, but Punic kept going in the North African countryside. Around AD 400 St Augustine, a bishop in Hippo, says local peasants still called themselves Canaanites and spoke Punic. It probably gave way to Latin and then Arabic in late antiquity, and no one can say exactly when the last speakers died.
How it may have sounded
-
𐤀𐤍𐤊 𐤕𐤁𐤍𐤕
ʾnk tbnt
Say it roughly ah-NOH-kee TAB-nit/ʔanoːkiː tabnit/
“I am Tabnit”
The first words of the sarcophagus of King Tabnit of Sidon (about 500 BC); only the consonants are written, and the vowels are borrowed from Hebrew anokhi and from Punic words spelled in Latin.
-
𐤌𐤋𐤊 𐤑𐤃𐤍𐤌
mlk ṣdnm
Say it roughly MIL-k tsee-doh-NEEM
“king of the Sidonians”
A royal title from the same inscription; Assyrian records spell the word for king as milk-, so scholars think Phoenician said something like milk rather than Hebrew melekh.
Your name, set in stone
Phoenician writes consonants only, right to left, with 22 letters. Your name keeps its skeleton and loses its vowels, except where a weak letter such as aleph, yod or waw stands in for one.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- Greek alpha, beta, gamma come from Phoenician letter names meaning ox, house and perhaps camel.
- A Roman comedy, Plautus's Poenulus, contains whole speeches in Punic, our longest Punic text in vowels.
- St Augustine, around AD 400, says North African farmers still called themselves Canaanites.