Phoenician Traders

When the Israelites walked from Egypt back up to Canaan, they weren’t moving into an empty country. There were already people living in Canaan. The people who lived up in the north of Canaan were called Phoenicians, and they were the greatest sailors in the ancient world.

The northern part of Canaan wasn’t a very good place to grow wheat, because it was rocky and sandy and dry. It wasn’t a good place to raise animals, because there wasn’t enough grass or water to make them fat and healthy. And it was hard to get into or out of—it was surrounded by steep craggy hills.

So the Phoenicians pushed their boats out onto the water and sailed around the Mediterranean Sea. They became traders. They cut down the tall cedar trees that grew in their homeland and floated the logs to other countries. They built beautiful furniture and sold it for a high price. They sold salt and dried fish and embroidered cloth. And they sailed around the coast of the Mediterranean and found the best places to dig up tin and other metals.

The Phoenicians were famous for making glass. Ancient glass-making was a long, complicated process. First, the Phoenicians made a special chemical called lye by pouring water over the ashes from a wood fire and collecting the liquid that oozed out. They mixed this lye with pure sand and melted the sand-lye mixture over a hot, hot fire. To get the fire hot enough to melt sand, slaves probably had to fan the fire with special pumps called bellows for hours and hours.

Once they had melted the sand and lye together, the Phoenicians would pour the mixture into special molds. When the sand-lye mixture cooled, it was hard, shiny glass. Sometimes the Phoenicians colored the glass by putting red, blue, and yellow dyes into it, or wound colored threads around the molds so that the finished glass had a pattern of threads all through it. Sometimes the glass even had gold and jewels in it.

Other ancients peoples made glass too. But the Phoenicians were the first glassmakers to invent glass blowing. Have you ever blown bubbles in your milk through a straw? That’s exactly what the Phoenicians did with their hot liquid glass. Instead of pouring the glass into a mold, a Phoenician glassmaker would dip a hollow pipe made out of thin metal into the sticky melted glass. Some of the glass would cling to the end of the pipe in a glob. Then the glassmaker would blow very gently through the pipe. The glass at the other end would puff out into a big round bubble. As long as the glass was still soft, the glassmaker could stretch it out so that bubble was long and thin, or twist it into different shapes. Finally, the glassmaker would cool the glass and break it carefully off the pipe. Blown glass was the most beautiful and expensive kind of ancient glass. All around the Mediterranean Sea, people were happy to pay the Phoenicians for this blown glass.

The Phoenicians were also known for making a beautiful purple dye out of snails. They collected snails, called murex, from the sea and boiled them with salt water and lemon juice for ten days. The boiling snails smelled awful. As a matter of fact, Phoenician cities like Tyre were famous for their stench—caused by the dye-factories that were boiling snails. “You stink like a man from Tyre” was a favorite insult in ancient times!

When the dye was finished, the Phoenicians dipped wool into it. The dye turned the wool a dark, beautiful purple. It took so many snails to make purple dye that the cloth made from purple wool was expensive. Sometimes it cost a whole year’s pay to buy a purple cloak. So purple was often called “the color of kings” because only kings could afford to wear it.