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By Root 577 0

boats. With decks of pine from Cyprus and oars of oak from Jordan (says Ezekiel), the Phoenician boat was greater than the sum of its far-flung parts. There was of course nothing new about the boat as a concept: boats had been plying the Nile, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow rivers for centuries, and the coasts of Asia and the Mediterranean for almost as long. But, realising their comparative advantage in timber, the Phoenicians built ships of greater capacity, finer trim and more seaworthy mortise joints than any people before them. Eventually they were able to build ships so large that they needed two banks of oars to propel them. Oars, though, were used only for manoeuvring close to shore. These were sailing ships and the larger they were, the more they could amplify the work of their human operators. Using the power of the wind, a comparatively small crew could transport a heavy cargo hundreds of miles further, and much more cheaply, than a caravan of donkeys could ever hope to manage.

Suddenly, for the first time, a large-scale seaborne division of labour became a possibility: wheat from Egypt could feed the Hittites in Anatolia; wool from Anatolia could clothe the Egyptians on the Nile; olive oil from Crete could enrich the diets of Assyrians in Mesopotamia. The ships of what is now Lebanon could trade for profit and scour the seas for tempting products. Grain, wine, honey, oil, resin, spices, ivory, ebony, leather, wool, cloth, tin, lead, iron, silver, horses, slaves, or a purple dye made from a gland in the body of the murex shellfish – there was little the Phoenicians could not find for an ambitious pharaoh with a harem to pamper, or a prosperous Assyrian farmer with a fiancée to impress.

All around the Mediterranean, markets grew into towns and ports into cities. Travelling farther afield, the Phoenicians’ innovations multiplied: better keels, sails, navigational knowledge, accounting systems, log-keeping. Trade, once more, was the flywheel of the innovation machine. To the south, steeped in their religious obsessions, the Israelite pastoralists looked on in puritan horror at the explosion of wealth thus created. Isaiah cheerily anticipates Yahweh’s destruction of Tyre, the ‘market of the nations’, to humble her pride. Ezekiel vents his Schadenfreude when Tyre is attacked: ‘When thy wares went forth out of the seas, thou filledst many peoples; Thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with thy merchandise and thy riches ... Thou art become a terror; and thou shalt never be any more.’ To the west, the warring island farmers of the Aegean looked down in warrior contempt on the bourgeois traders who were suddenly appearing in their midst. Throughout both the Iliad and the Odyssey, ‘Homer’ displays a relentlessly negative attitude to Phoenician traders and hints that they must be pirates. Greek trade in the age of Homer was supposed to handle precious reciprocal gifts between elites, not workaday goods in demand among ordinary people. The snobbery of the elite towards trade has ancient roots.

The effect of the Phoenicians must have been to create a burst of specialisation all around the Mediterranean. Villages, towns and regions would have discovered their comparative advantages in smelting metals, manufacturing pottery, tanning hides or growing grain. Mutual dependence and gains from trade would have emerged in unexpected places. Redressing the natural inequality in the location of metal ores, for example, benefits everybody. Cyprus may have lots of copper and Britain lots of tin, but put them together and bring them to Tyre and you can make the much more useful bronze. Tyrian traders founded Gadir, present-day Cadiz, around 750 BC not to settle the area but to trade with its inhabitants, in particular to exploit the silver ores of the Iberian hinterland – discovered, according to legend, when a forest fire caused rivulets of pure silver to pour from the hillsides. In doing so they must have turned the people of the region from largely self-sufficient peasants into producer-consumers. The Tartessian natives controlled