Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

When we think of prominent, dominant ancient societies, the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome are the ones that immediately come to

mind. But what about the Phoenicians? Who were they and why do they matter?

While speaking to Emily Briffitt for today's episode, the historian Josephine Quinn explores the

story of these ancient seafarers, traders and city builders, who connected

the ports along the Mediterranean and left an extraordinary legacy in their wake long before

Greece and Rome rose to power. We are covering so many questions today, lots of lovely ones

from listeners, all about the Phoenicians.

So to introduce us to the topic of our chat, who were the Phoenicians?

Well, we're talking about people who lived in the port cities of the coast of the eastern Mediterranean.

So cities like Tyre and Saiden and Beirut, basically the area of

modern Lebanon, give or take. These are people who tend to be overlooked in ancient history these

days because that really focuses on Greece and Rome. But actually, they were extraordinary

navigators. They discovered the pole star. They founded all sorts of

settlements in the Western Mediterranean before the Greeks were sailing around the Mediterranean. And I've

been writing about them for the last sort of 15, 20 years. So I'm very excited to talk about them

today. And we're talking about quite a long time frame here, aren't we?

Right. So the cities themselves go back to the Bronze Age.

So we're talking that the earliest archaeological remains can go anything up to about 4,000 years ago.

But in the Bronze Age, they're stuck in between these enormous empires, the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Babylonians, so on.

And so they don't really have a lot of room to manoeuvre. What we know about them in that era is

the odd letter that the king of one of these cities will send to Pharaoh or something like that.

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