Who Were the Phoenicians? Part IV

For those who still want to claim, despite the last three posts, that the Phoenicians were involved in bringing Mulek to the Western Hemisphere, and that Phoenicia, or some Phoenician sailors, could have conducted such a voyage in 586 B.C., it should once again be understood that Phoenicia was rarely independent of foreign control and direct rule after the beginning of the 7th century (700 B.C. onward). And those who controlled Phoenicia considered Judah their enemy, preventing their vassal state from assisting in the escape from Palestine of any Jewish community, no matter how small.

Map shows the location of Phoenician trading posts established along the eastern Mediterranean around 600 B.C., with a few to the west

One of those recent posts gave a list of such conquests and occupations. After that time the same condition arose. Throughout the 6th century (600-501 B.D.) the Phoenicians were involved in such a fierce mercantile competition in the Mediterranean that they had little time to do anything else. The ships leaving Phoenician ports, especially Tyre and Sidon, were laden with merchandise for sale or trade, and these ships were all busy in sailing among the ports they had established in the northern Mediterranean, a few as far west as Spain, and a couple as far south as Carthage, but ALL within the Mediterranean.

This competition was so fierce, and meant the future to the Phoenician sailors, merchants, and government, that in 530 B.C., they burned the great trading city of Tartessus— a harbor city and surrounding culture on the south coast of the Iberian peninsula (in modern Andalusia, Spain), at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, and Isaiah's “Tarshish of the proud ships”—which closed the whole western Mediterranean and Atlantic areas to all trade but their own. Such a venture was a calculated risk, but one of desperation to salvage the trading centers around the Mediterranean. Had they failed, they undoubtedly would not have survived as a nation.

Map showing the extent of the Phoenician Trading Route in 600 B.C.

In the seventy years between 600 B.C. and this attack on Tartessus, Phoenicia was involved in a death struggle with Iberian merchants over bringing tin to the eastern Mediterranean and, through those ports, to the eastern world. Since tin was an essential component of true bronze, and comparatively rare, such trade was the life-blood of commerce in the merchant world. All nations required it and whoever controlled that trade controlled the merchant world. As a result, it is unlikely Phoenicia would have been making distance voyages for any reason but trade, nor would they have risked valuable ships to such foolhardy enterprises as taking a small group of people across an unknown ocean that had frightened mariners for a thousand hears before and would for another thousand years after.

The fact that Lehi, in the ship Nephi built, made a deep-ocean crossing, even with inexperienced men handling the sailing chores, was possible only because of the intervention of the Lord. He not only told Nephi how to build a ship that would survive such a voyage (not after the manner of men 1 Nephi18:2) but by giving Lehi the liahona, a compass that worked by faith and told them the course to take.

Phoenician sailors would first of all not had such a device, nor if it was available to them, doubtfully would have trusted their lives to it as heathens believing in Baal. The problem is, that as modern man, we have crossed oceans, gone in any direction we choose, with ease driven over mountain passes that would have given Hannibal pause for concern, and paid very little attention to the difficulties of travel while riding in air conditioned vehicles with two or three hundred horses under the hood and a gas station every few miles. We do not need compasses, nor even directions usually, to reach an unknown destination—especially if we have GPS in our car. Or we travel with someone else driving the bus, taxi, airplane, or ship—we just have to settle back and leave the driving to them.

We forget that in ancient times, a voyage was a major life-threatening venture, taken in questionably serviceable vessels, with no maps, no Stop-n-Go food centers, and no way to adjust to wind, current, or other difficulties. You went where the winds and currents took you, or you stayed close in to shore on coastal voyages. And voyages of great distance cost a lot of money and had to be paid by someone where a profit could be realized. Such a venture to the Land of Promise would only have been undertaken by a king, paying for it out of the kingdom’s treasury, or in the case of Lehi, paid for by individual labor using resources found along a seashore. In 600 B.C. in the eastern Mediterranean, there were no such resources—everything was controlled and “owned” by those kingdoms that surrounded the Mediterranean.

(See the next post, “Who Were the Phoenicians? Part V.” Were the Phoenicians explorers and colonizers, or merchants and tradesmen?)