Purple, Cedar and Wine Trivia Quiz

Answer: Canaanites

The origins of the name Phoenicia lie in the Ancient Egyptian word "fenekhu", which meant "carpenter" - a likely reference to the cedarwood that was one of Phoenicia's chief exports to Egypt and elsewhere. The Egyptian word was borrowed by the Greeks and became "phoinix", which had a number of different meanings - including that of "purple" or "crimson" (a reference to another major Phoenician trade good, Tyrian purple).

According to various reliable sources, the people who inhabited much of present-day Lebanon and parts of coastal Syria called their land Canaan and themselves Canaanites, although in the Bronze Age Canaan (the Biblical promised land) encompassed a larger territory than that of Phoenicia. The inhabitants of Carthage, known to outsiders as Punics (a word derived from "Phoinikes", the plural form of "phoinix"), also referred to themselves as Chanani - as stated by St Augustine in one of his works.

The Canaanite subgroup of the Northwest Semitic Languages also includes Hebrew and Amorite - spoken by a people who flourished in the Levant and Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age. The Elamites inhabited southwestern Iran, while the Cushites lived in present-day Sudan. All these peoples are mentioned in the Bible.

Answer: independent city-states

Much like Ancient Greece, Phoenicia was a collection of independent city-states with a common language and culture, but no shared national identity. The most significant of these city states were Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad, all located on the coast of the Levantine Sea in present-day Lebanon and Syria. These cities were in constant competition with each other, but eventually Tyre became the dominant power in the 10th century BC.

Phoenician cities were ruled by hereditary kings, who - as was the case in much of the ancient world - also had a religious role, being considered representatives of the gods. However, in a society based on seafaring and trade (as illustrated in the photo), merchant families gradually acquired significant amounts of power, forming advisory councils (known as Adirim, "the mighty ones") that shared authority with the monarch. Carthage, the most powerful of the many Phoenician colonies, went a step further, and eventually adopted a republican system - albeit an oligarchic one.

Answer: shipbuilding

Along with the Vikings, the Phoenicians have become synonymous with seafaring and exploration. They became a powerful thalassocracy (i.e. a maritime empire) over 1,000 years before the rise of Mediterranean maritime powers such as Venice and Genoa, creating an extensive trade network in the region and founding many colonies - one of which, Carthage in present-day Tunisia, became even more powerful than the homeland. The key to this expansion was the Phoenicians' expertise in shipbuilding. What made their seagoing vessels so effective was the introduction of a locked mortise and tenon technique that the Romans named "coagmenta punicana", or Phoenician joint.

This particular technique - in which two wooden planks were fastened together with a rectangular wooden knob, then locked into place by dowels (which can be observed in the photo) - secured the planking of underwater hulls, and allowed Phoenician ships to carry up to 500 tons of cargo. The Phoenicians are also believed to have introduced the bireme (a ship with two rows of oars on each side), and possibly also the trireme, which was the standard warship in the Mediterranean from the 7th century BC to the 4th century BC. Wrecks of Phoenician ships, which have allowed experts to study their shipbuilding techniques, have been found in various parts of the Mediterranean.

Answer: Caucasus

Though renowned for their seafaring skills, the Phoenicians also engaged in agriculture, in particular viticulture, contributing to the diffusion of wine in the Mediterranean region. As the climate of the coastal Levant was favourable to the cultivation of wine grapes, the Phoenicians quickly mastered the art of winemaking, exporting their products to Egypt as early as the 3rd millennium BC, during the Old Kingdom period. They also developed different styles of wine - including the ancestor of modern Greek retsina wine, made with the addition of pine resin. A winery dating from around the 7th century BC was discovered in a small town near Sidon, which is believed to have produced wine meant for export.

One of the most significant Phoenician contributions to the wine trade was their widespread use of amphorae (in the photo), pottery vessels with a pointed bottom and curved handles, which were easy to store safely on board a cargo ship. These containers came to be known as "Canaanite jars". The Phoenicians also established vineyards and wineries in their colonies, in particular those in the Iberian Peninsula, planting the seeds of the celebrated winemaking tradition of Spain and Portugal.

The Phoenicians are believed to have learned their knowledge of winemaking from the South Caucasus (Transcaucasia), where wine grapes were first domesticated, and the world's oldest winery (dating from around 4100 BC) was found in the Areni-1 cave in Armenia. This knowledge was brought from the Caucasus along the trade routes that reached the Levant passing through Mesopotamia.

Answer: Sicily and Sardinia

The earliest Phoenician settlements outside the Levant were founded in Cyprus and Crete in the late 10th century BC. However, as the map in the photo shows, most Phoenician colonies were established in the western part of the Mediterranean region, in order to expand the city-states' trading ventures. The most famous of these colonies was Carthage, in present-day Tunisia, founded by Tyre in the 9th century BC, which eventually grew into a powerful empire. A number of colonies were founded in the islands of the central and western Mediterranean, such as Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearic Islands. Some of those small trading outposts are now among the major cities of the Mediterranean region: among them, Málaga in southern Spain and Palermo and Cagliari on the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia.

Palermo, the regional capital of Sicily, was founded in the 8th century BC with the name of Ziz ("flower" in Phoenician). The Greeks, who colonized the island some time later, gave it the name Panormos, meaning "all port" (a reference to its large natural harbour); this name became Panormus in Latin, and eventually Palermo in Italian. Cagliari, the regional capital of Sardinia, was also founded in the 8th century by Phoenicians from Tyre; its original name was Karaly, which became Caralis in Latin, and finally Cagliari in Italian. A number of important Phoenician archaeological sites can be found on both islands.

The Phoenicians were not afraid of crossing the Straits of Gibraltar (which they called the Pillars of Melqart), and founded some colonies on the Atlantic coast as well: these include Cádiz, also in southern Spain, and Lisbon, the capital of Portugal.

Answer: Cadmus

In Book V of his "Histories" (c. 430 BC), Herodotus states that the Phoenicians who came to Greece with Cadmus brought with them the alphabet, which had been unknown to the Greeks before that. The Greeks readily adopted this alphabet, though making some changes to it (namely adding vowels). Modern scholars agree that this happened some time between the 9th and the 8th century as a consequence of the trade exchanges between Archaic Greece and Phoenicia. What made the Phoenician alphabet attractive was that each letter corresponded to a single sound - a much simpler mechanism to master for scribes than complex writing systems such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Phoenician was a Northwest Semitic language, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. Like all Semitic languages, its alphabet was an "abjad", in which only consonants are represented by signs, and vowel sounds are left implicit.

In Greek mythology, Cadmus was the son of the king of Tyre and the brother of Europa, one of Zeus' mortal lovers. Sent by his father to search for his sister, he founded the city of Thebes after slaying a dragon that guarded a spring (as depicted on the 4th-century vase painting in the photo). The kings of Thebes, including the ill-fated Oedipus, were his descendants. While Herodotus estimated that Cadmus lived about 1,600 years before him, the Phoenician alphabet was adopted in Greece no more than 350 years before the historian's time. The chemical element cadmium was named after Cadmus.

Answer: tin

One of the main reasons behind the Phoenician colonization of much of the Mediterranean region was the lack of significant mineral resources in the Phoenician homeland. Some of the earliest colonies were founded on the island of Cyprus, very likely for the purpose of mining for copper; the same may be true for the Phoenician colonies in Sardinia, as at the time the island was very rich in copper and other minerals. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was one of the mainstays of Phoenician craft, as demonstrated by the many bronze artifacts that have been found in archaeological sites. The tin employed by the Phoenicians for the making of bronze did not come from mining operations in their colonies, but was traded from either Galicia (in northern Spain) or northwestern Europe, in particular Cornwall and Brittany.

The theory according to which the Phoenicians reached the coasts of Great Britain and traded with the local population to obtain the much sought-after tin (whose symbol, Sn, comes from its Latin name, "stannum") is mostly based on the account of Greek geographer Strabo (1st century BC). In his work "Geographica", Strabo maintained that the trade between the Phoenicians and the Britons occurred in a group of islands off the west coast of Europe called Cassiterides ("tin place"). Though these islands' precise location is unknown, modern research tends to identify them with the British Isles. The idea is not as far-fetched as it may sound, as Cornwall - one of the few places in Europe to be a rich source of tin - was part of the ancient Atlantic tin trade routes.

The painting in the photo, depicting "Phoenicians Bartering with Ancient Britons", is a large mural by Victorian painter Frederic Leighton, part of a cycle that (rather fittingly) adorns the walls of London's Royal Exchange.

Answer: Astarte

The religions of the ancient Semitic peoples of the Middle East had quite a few shared features - such as a pantheon that included gods with strong connections to royalty and a mother goddess that was also associated with war. In Phoenicia, Melqart ("king of the city", later identified with Heracles) was the tutelary god of Tyre, the most powerful of the Phoenician city-states, while Ba'al ("lord"), the son of the supreme god El, was also worshipped as a weather god.

The most powerful female deity in the Phoenician pantheon, Astarte was the equivalent of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar/Inanna, also associated with love and war. It has been suggested that, when Cyprus became a Phoenician colony, Astarte merged with a local goddess to become Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, sex and beauty - which would not be too surprising, as both the Greeks and the Romans were used to adopting foreign deities into their pantheon. In keeping with her nature as a goddess of love and sexuality, Astarte was often depicted naked (as in the relief from a 5th-century Cypriot sarcophagus in the photo); the presence of lions in her iconography points instead at her association with war and power. Sacred prostitution (both male and female) was practiced at her temples, as was common in the Levant.

Isis was the Egyptian goddess of magic, motherhood and fertility, while the virginal Artemis was the Greek goddess of the hunt and wild animals. The Norse goddess Freyja, like Astarte, was associated with both love and war.

Answer: children

As almost no Phoenician sacred writings have survived (with the exception of a few fragments translated into Greek), most of what is known about Phoenician religion comes from ancient sources such as the Bible and a number of Greek and Roman authors. Tophets, places specially dedicated to child sacrifice, are mentioned in Jeremiah 7:30-32 and 2 Kings 23:10, where the place in question is called the valley of Ben Hinnom, or Gehenna, near Jerusalem. The Biblical texts makes explicit mention of children ("sons and daughters") being burned; in 2 Kings the recipient of such sacrifices is identified as Molech (Moloch in Greek and Latin).

The archeological sites discovered in the Phoenician colonies of the Western Mediterranean (in particular Sardinia and Sicily) and commonly referred to as tophets are cemeteries where urns containing the remains of children and lambs were buried under carved stone markers. The best-known of these (in the photo) is the one in Carthage, known as Tophet of Salammbô - from the title of Gustave Flaubert's 1862 historical novel set in Carthage, one chapter of which describes children being sacrificed to Moloch, a gigantic, bull-headed bronze statue. While some scholars maintain that these cemeteries contain evidence of child sacrifice, others argue that the children buried there had died of natural causes and had been ritually offered to the gods after their death.

In any case, human sacrifice was anything but rare in ancient civilizations, and mentions of children and young people being sacrificed can be found in ancient texts - including Homer's "Iliad" and the Bible.

Answer: Iran

For all their advanced social and economic organization and impressive seafaring skills, the Phoenician city-states were not equally formidable as a military power. They seem not to have been particularly interested in conquest, nor did they often engage in armed conflict with other states, This unusually peaceful nature and the lack of a large military force made Phoenicia an easy target for its larger, powerful neighbours The first of these to annex Phoenicia was the Assyrian Empire in the mid-9th century BC, followed by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the 7th century. However, even under the domination of foreign powers, the Phoenician city-states managed to retain a measure of autonomy, as well as their economic prosperity.

In 539 BC, Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire (also known as the Persian Empire), which grew into the largest empire of its time. Before the Persian king could move against them, the Phoenicians yielded themselves to him, and became a satrapy (province) of the Empire along with the rest of the Levant. Though they paid tribute to Persia, the four Phoenician vassal kingdoms (Tyre, Sidon, Arwad and Byblos) were left to conduct their own affairs. The Phoenician also lent the Persian kings their considerable shipbuilding and seafaring expertise during the Greco-Persian Wars of the late 5th century. In 332 BC, Phoenicia fell to Alexander the Great, and eventually became a Roman province in 63 BC.

The silver coin in the photo, dating from the mid-4th century BC, shows the Persian king riding in a chariot, with a figure - probably the king of Sidon - standing behind him. Persia is now known as Iran, a name meaning "land of the Aryans".