Phoenicians culture/religion
Culture
Early Phoenician culture was influenced to a large degree by their Semitic origins and Semitic neighbors. Their later culture was heavily influenced by the Greeks.
There are few objects known today that are clearly Phoenician. One of their lasting artifacts was a proto-alphabet where each letter represented a consonant. This cut down significantly the number of symbols required to make written words because the vowels were implied. Later, advances by the Greeks added symbols for vowel sounds, creating the first true alphabet.
The early Phoenician economy was built on timber and cloth dyeing. Dyes ranging in color from a pink to a deep purple were made from the rotting gland of a sea snail. Having limited natural resources, they imported raw materials and fashioned them into more valuable objects that could be shipped profitably, such as jewelry, metalwork, furniture, and housewares. While exploring the western Mediterranean, they either discovered large metal deposits in Spain or took them from Greeks. By fortifying sites on Sicily and North Africa, they effectively denied other traders access to the riches of Spain, the west African coast with gold, exotic woods, and slaves, and Britain with tin (used to make bronze).
Religion
Phoenician religion was polytheistic and their gods required continual sacrifices to forestall disaster, especially Baal, the god of storms. No significant Phoenician temple has been discovered, but most of their ancient cities lie buried under modern cities. The Bible records human sacrifices by the Phoenicians but this practice was eventually stopped. It did carry on in Carthage. A cemetery outside of Carthage was found to contain thousands of urns of infants sacrificed to the gods. Noble families of Carthage got into the habit of substituting animals and slaves for their children, but following a military disaster in 320 BC, 500 infants from the best families were sacrificed.
http://www.angelfire.com/empire2/unkemptgoose/Phonecian.html Olivia Havel
