CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Phoenician Art
Luxury arts of the Phoenician city-states of the Levant and their colonies: carved ivories, engraved metal bowls, glass and sarcophagi.
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About
The Phoenicians were the seafaring people of the Levantine coast, living in city-states such as Tyre, Sidon and Byblos in present-day Lebanon. In the early 1st millennium BC they dominated Mediterranean trade and founded colonies from Cyprus to Carthage and southern Spain, and their alphabet, adapted by the Greeks, became their most lasting export. Their workshops were famous for luxury goods: cloth dyed purple with murex shells, glass, carved ivory and engraved metal bowls.
Phoenician style is recognisably mixed. Craftsmen combined Egyptian motifs, such as sphinxes and the winged sun disc, with Near Eastern trees of life and hunting scenes. Ivory plaques that once decorated furniture, many excavated at the Assyrian capital of Nimrud, show a woman looking out of a window, and a lioness attacking a man among lotus flowers inlaid with lapis and carnelian. Later, royal tombs at Sidon held stone sarcophagi in Egyptian and Greek forms, and Carthage produced grimacing terracotta masks.