As you will have gathered, we have been to Tunisia. The question may well have occurred to you: “Whatever for? What is there to do?” Which is why I decided one had better begin at the very beginning.
You know the sort of scene—a guide, obliged to play for time, draws himself up and announces:
I take it, ladies and gentlemen, that you are acquainted with the lives of the New Testament figures? They go back, of course, to the Old. But allow me to remind you. Briefly. Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat John. John begat Judas and his brethren…
—and so onward, with the confidence of a man who has never in his life been interrupted. The begats have served as a byword for stalling since long before there were tour buses.
Well then: to understand what Tunisia is, one really must start in the days of Abraham and turn back the pages of a history both very ancient and, in all likelihood, patchily familiar to you. For Abraham, if the Bible is to be believed, lived in the 13th–12th centuries BC—precisely when Phoenicia came into being. Though it would be better still to begin a little earlier.
Canaan—a narrow coastal ribbon of land—is today divided between Syria, Lebanon, Israel with the not-universally-recognised Palestine, and Jordan. The etymology of the name is disputed: by one account it contains the Semitic root knʿ ‘low, subordinate,’ which might refer either to the lie of the land or to subjection to Egypt; by another, it derives from the Hurrian Kinaḫḫu ‘land of purple,’ which ties it to the later Greek reading of the name “Phoenicia.”
In the 2nd millennium BC, city-states arise here, one of whose chief exports becomes the celebrated cedar of Lebanon. Egypt had so keen an interest in a reliable supply that the pharaoh Thutmose III undertook seventeen(!) military campaigns to annex Canaan, whose capital became Gaza. Syria he never managed to subdue, and so her southern frontier becomes the northern limit of the Promised Land.
The Birth of Phoenicia: Woodcutters and Purple
Following the incursion of the Sea Peoples (Aegean tribes driven into aggressive migration by a shortage of resources brought on by climatic factors) and the formation of the tribes—biblically, the “houses”—of Israel, Egypt withdrew from Canaan by the middle of the 12th century BC.
In the northern part of Canaan (modern Lebanon), Egypt’s departure allowed the coastal cities to rise, forming a new civilisation which we call Phoenicia. The name derives from the ancient Egyptian fnḫw /fɛnɛxuː/ ‘woodcutters, carpenters’—it is thought this was what the Egyptians called the inhabitants of Canaan who supplied them with timber. The Greeks took pains to preserve the word’s phonetic shape (arriving at Φοινίκη, Lat. Phoenīcē), but furnished it with an entirely new meaning.
Since one of the most valuable and sought-after Canaanite commodities proved to be purple—a dye made from the local molluscs—along with the fabrics coloured by it, Phoenicia came to be construed as the “Land of Purple,” and Greek acquired the word φοῖνιξ (Lat. phoenix), denoting Phoenician purple, the date (that is, Phoenician) palm, and the mythical bird alike.
Thalassocracy and the Carthaginian Legacy
As for timber, the Phoenicians stopped trading in it—they hadn’t enough for themselves. They became instead a thalassocracy, a maritime power, and set about building large keeled ships (up to thirty metres long) with a ram and a square sail, emerging as the dominant force in the Mediterranean. They founded colonies in Spain, on Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and along the entire North African coast; they ventured into the Atlantic as far as the British, Azorean, and Canary Islands, and even sailed clean around Africa (the voyage from the Red Sea to Gibraltar took three years). Modern genetic research indicates that a substantial proportion of the Mediterranean coastal population descends from the Phoenicians—on Malta, for instance, no fewer than a third.
The largest Phoenician colony was Carthage, which became the capital of Phoenician holdings from Gibraltar to Libya. And it is with Carthage that modern Tunisia begins. But of that, in the posts to come. Don’t touch that dial!
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