The Phoenicians and their coast
The Phoenicians were the people of a string of city-states on the coast of what is now Lebanon and neighbouring areas, among them Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. From roughly the early first millennium BC they were among the most active seafarers in the Mediterranean, and their cities sent out trading expeditions and founded colonies as far west as Spain and North Africa. They left few narrative accounts of their own, and much of what is known comes from Greek, Roman and biblical sources, supplemented by archaeology. This matters when judging the harbours: descriptions are often written by outsiders, sometimes much later.
Tyre: a city on an island
Tyre stood on an island a short distance from the mainland, with a mainland settlement facing it. The island position gave natural protection and made the city difficult to attack. Ancient sources describe two harbours, one on the northern side usually called the Sidonian harbour and one on the southern side called the Egyptian harbour, so named for their orientation and the traffic they served. Ships could use whichever was better sheltered from the prevailing conditions.
Archaeologists have studied the area, and geological work has shown that the coast has changed considerably since antiquity. The causeway that Alexander the Great built in 332 BC during his siege of the city, a project reported by ancient historians, trapped sediment over time and turned the island into a peninsula. The modern landscape is therefore very different from the one the Phoenicians knew, and reconstructing the ancient harbours requires careful study of the sea floor and the coastal deposits.
What can be said with reasonable confidence is that Tyre’s harbours combined shelter, quays and storage for merchant ships, and that the city’s reputation rested on its fleets. The trade routes it served are covered more broadly under ancient maritime commerce and the Mediterranean seafaring of the period.
Carthage and the cothon
Carthage was founded, according to tradition, in the late ninth century BC by settlers from Tyre, on the coast of what is now Tunisia. It grew into a great power with a fleet, an overseas empire and extensive trade across the western Mediterranean. Its harbours are better described than those of Tyre, largely because the Greek historian Appian, writing in the second century AD, gave an account of them when describing the Roman destruction of the city in 146 BC.
According to that account, the harbour complex had two parts. A rectangular outer basin served merchant vessels, with quays and an entrance that could be closed by chains. Beyond it lay an inner circular basin for warships. In the middle of the circle stood an island, on which the admiral’s headquarters was said to be placed, with docks around the circumference. Appian reports space for a very large number of ships, with covered slips or sheds in which vessels were kept; the figure given is in the region of two hundred, though such numbers in ancient writers should be treated cautiously.
The Phoenician and Punic term for an artificial harbour of this kind is often given as cothon. Historians use it to describe enclosed man-made basins connected to the sea by a narrow channel.
What excavations have shown
Archaeological work at Carthage in the twentieth century, including international excavations in the 1970s, uncovered the remains of two connected basins in the area traditionally identified with the harbours. The circular shape of the naval basin and the rectangular outline of the commercial one matched the general description, although the dating of different phases and the exact details are debated. Some of the structures that survive are later than the earliest Punic city, and Roman rebuilding after the destruction of the old city complicates the evidence.
A reasonable summary is that Carthage had an artificial naval harbour of unusual design, protected from observation and attack, and that the ancient description is broadly consistent with the archaeology, though details such as ship numbers and exact dimensions remain uncertain.
Ships and function
The harbours existed to serve particular kinds of vessel. Warships of the period were oared galleys, light in construction, which were vulnerable to rot if left constantly in the water. Like the ship sheds of Greek cities, covered slips allowed them to be hauled out, kept dry and launched when needed. The design of the vessels themselves is discussed in the history of the trireme design used by Greek and other fleets of the period, and the Phoenician contingents in the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis are a reminder of how highly regarded their ships and crews were.
Merchant ships were broader, deeper and driven mainly by sail. They needed quays, warehouses and a market. The Phoenician network of trade reached the metal-bearing regions of the west, and the tin trade routes and silver of Iberia were among the commodities that attracted merchants, although the details of specific routes are often reconstructed rather than documented.
Siege, destruction and legacy
Both cities suffered dramatic ends to their independence. Alexander’s siege of Tyre in 332 BC succeeded after about seven months, helped by the causeway and by ships supplied by other Phoenician cities and by Cyprus. Tyre continued as an important city under later rulers. Carthage fared worse. After the Punic Wars it was besieged by Rome, and in 146 BC the city was captured and largely destroyed. Rome later founded a new colony on the site, and Carthage again became a major city of the empire. The Roman navy fleets had been built partly in response to Carthaginian naval power, and the contest between the two states shaped Mediterranean history.
The harbours of Tyre and Carthage matter to maritime history because they show that artificial, enclosed and planned harbours existed more than two thousand years ago. They also show how much depends on indirect evidence, since the Phoenicians themselves left few records of how they designed and used their ports.