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Phoenician Discoveries

ramonmercado

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Published online: 6 January 2006;
| doi:10.1038/news060102-11

Long-lost Phoenician ports found

Old Mediterranean harbours discovered buried under modern cities.
by Philip Ball



Thanks to political tensions easing in Lebanon, archaeologists have finally managed to locate the sites of ancient Phoenician harbours in the seaports that dominated Mediterranean trade thousands of years ago.

By drilling out cores of sediment from the modern urban centres of these cities, geologists have mapped out the former coastlines that the sediments have long since buried. From this they have pinpointed the likely sites of the old harbours, and have marked out locations that, they say, are in dire need of exploration and conservation.

The modern cities of Tyre and Sidon on the Lebanese coast were once the major launching points of the seafaring Phoenicians. They were to the ancient world what Venice, Shanghai, Liverpool and New York have been in later times: some of the greatest of the world's ports, and crucial conduits for trade and cultural exchange. From the harbours of the Phoenician cities, ships carried precious dyes and textiles, soda and glass throughout the Mediterranean and beyond.

Both cities still carry the same name, but the coastlines on which they sit have been reshaped by silting since the time of the Phoenicians, about 3,000 years ago. Sidon has extended out to sea through the build-up of silt. And Tyre, which was once an island, has been joined up to the mainland by silting, while much of the old land has sunk beneath the waves.

If urbanization isn't correctly regulated, many important archaeological sites will be damaged or lost.

Nick Marriner
CEREGE, Aix-en-Provence, France



But whereas these major geographical changes were roughly known, no one knew the exact shape of the old coastline, which would in turn reveal the positions of the ancient harbours themselves.

Digging in

Nick Marriner of the European Centre for Research and Teaching on the Geosciences of the Environment (CEREGE) in Aix-en-Provence, France, and his colleagues set out to drill beneath the modern city centres to determine how the coastlines have changed over time1-3.

Marriner explains that the political situation in Lebanon, with a civil war that only ended in 1990, has hindered attempts to explore its ancient history. Much of what is known about the Phoenician cities comes from indirect or old sources. "At Tyre, there are presently no large-scale excavation sites, and much of our knowledge derives from work undertaken during the nineteenth century through to the early 1970s," Marriner says.

Some of that early archaeological work has been challenged on further scrutiny. In the 1930s, for example, the French archaeologist and pioneer of aerial photography Antoine Poidebard claimed to have found the location of the southern harbour of ancient Tyre, which is now submerged. But recent work suggests that he instead found an urban part of the old city, rather than a port4.

To get a clearer picture, Marriner and his colleagues drilled a total of 40 cores throughout the two cities, and used radiocarbon dating of seeds, wood, charcoal and marine mollusc shells to determine the age of each layer.

The results shed some light on what is known of the cities. Both of the Lebanese sites were occupied since at least the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years BC). Tyre was conquered in 332 years BC by Alexander the Great. And both sites were later occupied by the Romans, then the Arabs and the Mameluke Turks.

Marriner's examination of the soil shows that the rate of coastal silting shot up tenfold during the Roman occupation. Their geological records show that the Romans and subsequently the Byzantines must have been forced to dredge the harbours to keep them workable. Trade during this period is known to have declined sharply.

Save and protect

Most importantly, the work indicates where the old harbours lay: underneath today's urban centres.

Marriner hopes that his findings will help efforts to protect the cultural heritage of the two cities, and says that the Directorate General of Antiquities of Lebanon is very interested in the results. "They are rich historical and archaeological archives, and the real test is protecting them from the pressures of urban development," he says.

Both Tyre and Sidon are undergoing rapid, uncontrolled urban expansion. "There are plans to develop areas of Tyre as a tourist resort," says Marriner. "If this is not correctly regulated many important archaeological sites will be damaged or lost."

References

Marriner N., et al. Geology, 34. 1 - 4 (2006).
Marriner N., et al. J. Archaeol. Sci., 32. 1302 - 1327 (2005).
Marriner N., et al. J. Archaeol. Sci., (submitted) (2005).
El Amouri M., et al. Bull. d'Archéol. et d'Architect. Libanaises, (in press) (2005).


Story from [email protected]:
http://news.nature.com//news/2006/060102/060102-11.html
 
More than 30 years of excavations have unearthed a Phoenician city that was extremely prosperous and indeed truly cosmopolitan after the 1200 BCE collapse. It boasted monumental administrative structures, among the largest known around the Mediterranean and it maintained close commercial connections with Cyprus, Egypt and other Phoenician port cities.

It imported silver from Anatolia and the west Mediterranean, it produced purple dye and resins – among the most coveted commodities of the era. It even imported cinnamon from South Asia and indeed produced the earliest evidence for sustainable trade with this distant region.

As a matter of fact, no other city in the Levant produced such ample evidence for extensive and far-flung commercial networks during the 11th-9th centuries BCE. So why did no memory of Phoenician Dor make it into the Greek and Latin traditions? Why do we not hear about 'Dorian' colonies in the West? We now think that we may have the answer. Excavations have revealed that around the mid-ninth century BCE the Phoenician town was transformed and replaced by a new and imposing administrative center with new monumental buildings that recall Israelite cities such as Megiddo and Dan. None of the Phoenician structures, which functioned for hundreds of years, remained intact. We believe that this drastic change occurred during the reign of King Ahab, who battled Israel's enemies on all fronts.

http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-I...765?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
 
Evidence of honey but no trace of bears on wreck.

The oldest shipwreck ever found in Central Mediterranean, located to the west of the Maltese island of Gozo and dated to 2,700 years ago is proving to be a treasure trove.

University of Malta archaeologists have retrieved a number of amphorae and urns, the likes of which have not been documented before. Scientific analysis conducted in laboratories have indicated that the cargo on board must have also included Gozitan honey.

The Phoenician shipwreck lies over 100 metres below sea-level. Over the past decade, Dr Timmy Gambin, an archaeologist from the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta, has been documenting the site, re-creating three dimensional imagery, and retrieving select objects from its cargo which includes grinding-stones carved out of volcanic rock.

Dr Gambin managed to retrieve an amphora, previously identified from photos as possibly of Greek origin. “The shape of this amphora is unlike whatever we have seen before, Nothing like it has ever been documented so it is not a case of going back to the literature and compare it with what we have in stock. We know nothing about its provenance as yet and the fact that we have retrieved the amphora intact means that we cannot look at the provenance of the clay thus making it all the harder to establish its origin”.

Read more at https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blog...ons-raised-by-latest.html#5cM3UFT2ZaaOzF0O.99
 
This could fit under a few other Threads but perhaps best finds a home here.

Nevada Author Claims Phoenicians Mistook Maya Cities for Atlantis
2/16/2019

This weekend, I am devoting my time to working on my new book about the myths and legends of the pyramids, so I have only a short topic to discuss with you today. It concerns a “new” hypothesis about the location of Atlantis that was recently described in the Nevada Appeal, a newspaper in Carson City publishing two weekly editions. The Appealpublished a column by local historian and amateur archaeologist Dennis Cassinelli, who has written four books on Great Basin history, including Uncovering Archaeology, in which he attacks the “current system” of science and claims to have found evidence for lost civilizations of an Old World flavor in the Great Basin region, along with Mormon-style evidence of Christ’s visitation. ...

My theory is Central America was actually the lost continent of Atlantis. Even before Christ arrived, a Phoenician ship likely landed on the coast of Central America. The sailors saw the massive pyramids and the wonderful cities of the Mayans, believing they had landed in Atlantis. Upon their return, they reported the wonders of "Atlantis" to the world. Many years later, another group of mariners attempted to make the same voyage. However, being less skillful, they gave up on the Atlantic crossing before landing in Central America. Embarrassed to admit their failure, they reported the beautiful continent of Atlantis had simply sunk into the sea, never to be seen again.

It annoys me when someone claiming to be a historian doesn’t seem to be aware of the work of earlier writers who trod the same ground. The claim that Mexico and the Maya lands were “Atlantis” is as old as the Spanish Conquest. In the nineteenth century both Brasseur de Bourbourg and Augustus Le Plongeon famously pursued the claim, with the latter imagining the Maya lands as the fountainhead of world civilization.

At least Cassinelli has an unusual spin on the idea, asserting that “Atlantis” itself was a myth but that Phoenicians described the Maya cities as Atlantis because of the myth. This is basically what happened with Francisco López de Gómara in 1552 when he applied the Atlantis myth to explain what he saw in Mexico. But you really have to love the way Cassinelli openly makes up stories that can’t be true—the “embarrassed” expedition—without bothering to justify them with evidence.

Factually speaking, for the story to be true, all of this would have had to have occurred before Plato wrote of Atlantis in order for him to have incorporated the “embarrassed” expedition’s claim of a missing continent. That means that the last journeys would have had to take place around 400 BCE, during the Maya Preclassic period, when pyramids were much smaller and cities were only starting to rise. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/nevada-author-claims-phoenicians-mistook-maya-cities-for-atlantis
 
Sacred pools used as observatories.

On a tiny island off Sicily’s west coast, a huge pool long ago displayed the star-studded reflections of the gods.

Scientists have long thought that an ancient rectangular basin, on the island of Motya, served as an artificial inner harbor, or perhaps a dry dock, for Phoenician mariners roughly 2,550 years ago. Instead, the water-filled structure is the largest known sacred pool from the ancient Mediterranean world, says archaeologist Lorenzo Nigro of Sapienza University of Rome.

Phoenicians, who adopted cultural influences from many Mediterranean societies on their sea travels, put the pool at the center of a religious compound in a port city also dubbed Motya, Nigro reports in the April Antiquity.

The pool and three nearby temples were aligned with the positions of specific stars and constellations on key days of the year, such as the summer and winter solstices, Nigro found. Each of those celestial bodies was associated with a particular Phoenician god.

At night, the reflecting surface of the pool, which was slightly longer and wider than an Olympic-sized swimming pool, was used to make astronomical observations by marking stars’ positions with poles, Nigro suspects. Discoveries of a navigation instrument’s pointer in one temple and the worn statue of an Egyptian god associated with astronomy found in a corner of the pool support that possibility. ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sacred-pool-ancient-seafarers-phoenicians-largest-mediterranean
 
Workers discover ‘unprecedented’ Phoenician necropolis in southern Spain.

Preliminary surveys in Osuna have turned up eight burial vaults as well as staircases.

Workers upgrading water supplies in southern Spain have come across an “unprecedented” and well-preserved necropolis of subterranean limestone vaults where the Phoenicians who lived on the Iberian peninsula 2,500 years ago laid their dead.

Archaeologists exploring the site – which was discovered amid the Roman ruins in the town of Osuna, 55 miles (90km) east of Seville – say the Phoenician-Carthaginian cemetery dates back to the fourth or fifth century BC and is highly unusual as such sites are normally found in coastal areas rather than so far inland.


Although the local ruins of the Roman city of Urso are well known, the discovery of the Phoenician necropolis has stunned archaeologists and locals. The only similar finds have been made around the coast of Cádiz, which was founded by the Phoenicians in 1100BC and which is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe.

Preliminary surveys have so far turned up eight burial vaults as well as staircases and areas that are thought to have served as atriums.
(c) The Guardian. '22
 
A Phoenician port later used by the Romans.


Archaeologists have unearthed more ancient ruins of what they believe was once a bustling port city near the capital of modern-day Morocco.

The experts dug out thermal baths and working class neighbourhoods at Chellah, near Rabat, which the country hopes will lure tourists and scholars in the years ahead.

On Friday, researchers from Morocco’s National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage presented new discoveries at Chellah — a 1.2-square-mile Unesco World Heritage Site with a footprint almost five times the size of Pompeii.

Morocco Excavation

Recently unearthed archaeological ruins in Chellah (Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP)

Scholars believe the area was first settled by the Phoenicians and emerged as a key Roman empire outpost from the second to the fifth century.

The fortified necropolis and surrounding settlements were built near the Atlantic Ocean along the banks of the Bou Regreg river.

Findings have included bricks inscribed in neo-Punic, a language that pre-dates the Romans’ arrival in Morocco.

https://www.breakingnews.ie/world/a...-moroccan-unesco-site-at-chellah-1547399.html
 
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