Trade in the Ancient World
Picture this. You command the army of a great city, and your soldiers need bronze swords. Bronze is mostly copper, which you can find — but it needs a small amount of tin to hold an edge. Without tin, blades bend like soft clay. And there is almost no tin anywhere near you. The nearest supply lies across the sea, past the last mapped shore, and your enemies need it just as badly.
Key Terms
- Phoenicians
- A trading people who lived on a narrow, rocky coast and built the first great trade network by sea.
- Maritime Trade
- Buying and selling goods by carrying them across the sea in ships.
- Bronze
- A hard metal made by mixing about 90 parts copper with 10 parts tin.
- Tin
- The rare metal Phoenician sailors traveled 2,500 miles to find, because it turns soft copper into hard bronze.
- Phonetic Alphabet
- A writing system of just 22 marks, where each mark stands for one sound of speech.
- Celestial Navigation
- Finding your way across open water by tracking the position of the stars.
- Tyrian Purple
- A costly purple dye made from crushed sea snails that never faded in the sun.
- Levant
- The narrow strip of coastal land, in modern Lebanon, where the Phoenicians made their home.
- Cedar
- The tall, sweet-smelling trees the Phoenicians cut down and shaped into the hulls of their ships.
- Strait of Gibraltar
- The narrow gate where the Mediterranean Sea ends and the open Atlantic Ocean begins.
- Gadir
- The Phoenician outpost founded around 1100 BC on the Atlantic side of the strait — today called Cádiz, Spain.
- Cornwall
- The southwest tip of Britain where Phoenician sailors dug tin out of the cold ground.
- North Star
- The one steady point in the night sky that never moves, which Phoenician captains steered by.
- Murex
- The small sea snail whose crushed glands made the famous Tyrian purple dye.
- King Hiram of Tyre
- The Phoenician king who sent cedar, gold, and craftsmen to help build Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.
- King Solomon
- The Israelite king who received cedar and craftsmen from Tyre to help raise the First Temple.
- Copper
- The common reddish metal that becomes hard bronze once mixed with a small amount of tin.
- Prudence
- The careful judgment under pressure that let a captain read the stars, weigh the danger, and steer wisely.
- Manilius
- The Roman poet who remembered the Phoenicians as "the first to guide their ships by the stars."
- Tyre
- The rich Phoenician port city ruled by King Hiram, famous for its purple dye and cedar trade.