Master Seafarers - Phoenicians & Greeks

The Phoenicians were fearless seafarers who travelled from the eastern end of the Mediterranean as far as West Africa and the British Isles.

Driven westward by an inhospitable homeland and the search for metal, the Phoenicians established their principal colony at Carthage, which became the capital of Western Phoenicia.

They were experts in harbour construction and shipbuilding, and their designs and techniques were admired and copied by the Greeks and Romans. The Phoenician shipwrecks and harbour ruins presented in this volume of the Encyclopaedia of Underwater Archaeology bear witness to this skill.

Initially, the Greeks got on well with their Phoenician neighbours and flourishing trade between the two led to intensive cultural exchange. By the 5th century BC however, Athens under Themosticles was a sea power with enormous political ambition and the peaceful coexistence could not last.

Phoenician settlements were often built over, so little remains of this enigmatic people - not a single Phoenician papyrus has survived, yet they devised the beginnings of our modern alphabet. Underwater excavations of
shipwrecks and harbours have provided a wealth of new information, as well as supplementing and revising established knowledge of Greek History and culture.