The Phoenicians were the Semitic-speaking Canaanite city-states of the Levantine coast — chiefly Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Arwad — who flourished from roughly 1200 to 300 BCE, especially in the centuries after the Bronze Age Collapse. They were the master maritime traders and shipbuilders of the Mediterranean, planting trading posts and colonies from Cyprus to the Atlantic, the greatest of them Carthage. They were never a unified empire but a network of independent cities, usually under the overlordship of Assyria, then Babylon, then Persia, whose navy they supplied. Their consonantal script reshaped writing across the Mediterranean, and their purple dye gave them their outside name.
They left almost no books, yet they may have given the world its letters. The people we call Phoenicians did not call themselves that. The name is Greek, and it seems to point to a color: the deep reddish purple of a dye they made from crushed sea snails, so costly it was a luxury few could afford. They were a scatter of trading cities on a thin strip of coast, hemmed between the mountains and the sea. So they took to the water. Their ships reached Spain, North Africa, perhaps the Atlantic, trading metal, cloth, and that famous dye. Wherever they sailed they carried a small kit of marks for sounds, and that kit, borrowed and reshaped, became a chief ancestor of most alphabets in use today.