From Tyre, Sidon and Byblos, seafaring city-states built a trading web from Lebanon to Spain — and invented the alphabet you are reading now.
Phoenicia was a seafaring civilization of independent city-states — Tyre, Sidon and Byblos above all — on the coast of modern Lebanon, flourishing from about 1200 to 332 BCE. The Phoenicians were the great merchants of the ancient Mediterranean, and their alphabet became the ancestor of the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic scripts.
