besieged Tyre for 13 years. Tyre survived but was exhausted. The Neo-
Babylonians didn’t last long and soon were replaced by the Persians, under
whom the Phoenicians fared somewhat better. The Phoenicians provided the
Persian Empire with much of itsfleet but, during the Macedonian conquest
of Persia, Tyre provoked the wrath of Alexander the Great and was destroyed
in 332BCE.This opened the gate for the lastflood of refugees into Carthage
and marked the passing of commercial prominence on the eastern shore of
the Mediterranean from the cities of the Levant to a new center on the
Egyptian coast, Alexandria.
During the heyday of the Phoenicians, their only major commercial rivals
in the Mediterranean were the Greeks. The collapse of Mycenaean civiliza-
tion was so complete that it took the Greeks almost four centuries to recover,
a period known as the Dark Ages. The small amount of goods exchanged
during this time was through reciprocity rather than commercial trade.
Grave goods from Cyprus, the Levant, and Egypt dating from the tenth and
ninth centuriesBCEhave been found at one site, probably carried there by
Phoenicians in very casual, sporadic, small-scale trade.
In the Homeric epics, which were composed following the end of the Dark
Ages, the attitude toward trade was decidedly negative, which was not a
residue from the Mycenaeans, who were enthusiastic traders. Goods might be
exchanged on a one-time basis between parties of equal strength, and people
who had frequent contact with each other exchanged gifts, but to trade for
profit was considered a contemptible vocation. For the Homeric Greeks this
was a matter of ethics: it was thought nobler to plunder someone of their
goods than to trade for them. In theOdysseyOdysseus in disguise visits some
Greeks who are holding athletic contests. When he refuses to join in, he is
taunted by a brash young man who lays on Odysseus the deepest of insults:
“You are more like a skipper of a merchant crew, who spends his life on a
hulking tramp, worrying about his outward freight, or keeping a sharp eye
on the cargo when he comes home with his extortionate profits. No: one can
see you are no athlete.”
Beginning in the eighth centuryBCE, Greece underwent a dramatic change
with a population boom amounting to an increase of between 300 and 700
percent over less than a century. The economy changed virtually overnight,
with the production of surplus goods, the appearance of an entrepreneurial
spirit, the emergence of market forces, and the reestablishment of significant
overseas trade. Greece is a relatively small, rocky place with a huge coastline
featuring a multitude of natural harbors and bordered by a sea having an
abundance of islands and lacking tides. The Greeks returned to this sea with
gusto, initially in undecked, broad-bottomed, 20-oared ships but soon in
much larger double-banked 50-oared ships up to 80 feet long, the famous
pentekontors. The old palace-dominated system of the Minoans and
Mycenaeans was not reestablished. Instead profits were the driving force
although, taking a lesson from the Phoenicians, Greek merchants often
Of purple men and oil merchants 67