On the Levantine coast, where Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre once faced the eastern Mediterranean, there is no single Phoenician nation to stand in the sand. There were city-states, each proud of its own name, each speaking a Canaanite tongue, and each sending ships out from present-day Lebanon and coastal Syria. To walk there now is to look at a shoreline that outlasted empires, while the people who made it famous called themselves Canaanites, not Phoenicians.

They rose from the Bronze Age Canaanites and survived the Late Bronze Age collapse after c. 1200 BC with little interruption. In the 15th century BC, Thutmose III of Egypt targeted Byblos, Arwad, and Ullasa for their cedarwood and trade routes, and by the mid-14th century BC Egypt counted Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Byblos among its favoured cities. Byblos led in bronze-making and in the movement of tin and lapis lazuli, while Sidon and Tyre began a rivalry that would last for centuries.

The true turn came between 1200 and 1150 BC, when Egypt and the Hittites weakened and Phoenician cities such as Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos kept their independence. By the 10th century BC, Phoenician mariners had reopened long-distance trade between Egypt and Mesopotamia, founded colonies on Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, North Africa, and Iberia, and helped Carthage grow from a Tyrian anchorage into a power by the 7th century BC. Hiram I of Tyre, c. 969 to 936 BC, became the great name of that age.

Their goods travelled as widely as their ships. They sold cedar logs, wine, glassware, ivory carvings, and the costly cloth dyed with Tyrian purple from the Murex snail. Around 1050 BC they developed a 22-letter consonantal alphabet, and through trade it spread to Greece, then into the Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Syriac, and Arabic writing systems. Their shipwrights used mortise and tenon joints, built biremes and perhaps triremes, and left behind cothons, the self-cleaning harbours found at Sidon, Tyre, Atlit, and Acre.

Power did not spare them. Shalmaneser III demanded tribute after 858 BC, Tiglath-Pileser III annexed much of the Levant by 738 BC, and Sargon II besieged Tyre in 721 BC. Sidon was destroyed by Esarhaddon in the 7th century BC, Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Tyre for years, and then Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC, leaving Phoenicia under Persian rule but with its kings still in place. Under Xerxes I, Phoenician ships and engineers built the canal and pontoon bridges for the invasion of Greece, only for Xerxes to blame them after Salamis.