The bronze age civilisations in the Middle East, the Mitanni, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians and Hittites, have gone. Only Egypt and the Elamites survived the chaos of the bronze age collapse, both weakened and soon to be conquered by a resurgent Assyria. Surprising survivors, barely affected internally, although they lost much of the bronze age trading network, were the southern Canaanite city states.

From the ashes of the bronze age collapse, the Arameans, Assyrians and the Greeks, began to carve out new territories and redraw the map of the eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, the coastal Canaanite cities, Byblos, Sidon and Tyre, expanded their maritime trading networks west. The Greeks later called these traders, Phoenicians.

The maritime routes to the central Mediterranean had been known for centuries if not millennia, but in 1000 BC, the seas west of Sardinia remained a mystery to those traders from the east.

When the Phoenicians first made landfall in Sardinia, they found that well-established local maritime trading networks were already connecting Sardinia with Etruria in west and central Italy, the Bouches-du-Rhone in southern France, the Almeria coast in northeastern Spain and as far west as Huelva on the Atlantic coast of Spain.

During the 8th and 7th centuries BC, the newly resurgent Assyrian Empire dominated the Middle East.

The growing Assyrian economy demanded huge quantities of olive oil, wine, grain, copper, silver, gold and lead, jewellery and fine ceramics, not to mention the purple dye for which the Phoenicians were famous, all products now being carried to Tyre from the western and central Mediterranean on board the wide beam, deep draft cargo boats known to the Greeks as gauloi or tubs.

Meanwhile the Greeks were expanding their trading empire, reaching Sicily in 734 BC, Marseilles about 600 BC, Empuries on the coast of Catalonia during the early 6th century BC and at an as yet unplaced colony called Hemeroskopeion, that was probably close to Alicante, a few years later.

In the western Mediterranean, the boundaries between the competing trading networks were set, the years that followed saw expansions and contractions of those boundaries as a result of warfare rather than the peaceful establishment of trading centres.

This series of articles looks at the latest evidence of the Phoenician expansion into the western Mediterranean that overturns some long-established theories.

Introductory Video

Video by: Julie Evans