The Phoenicians

The Phoenicians were principally traders. Their original name Canaanite means merchant in Hebrew, They may have been more advanced and civilising than the empires that were to follow. Much of their wealth and influence stemmed from the sea. At Tyre they traded in slaves, cypress, cedar, oak, ebony, ivory, embroidered linen, purple and scarlet cloth, gold, silver, iron, tin, lead, bronze, horses, mules and other livestock, coral, rubies, corn, wax, honey, tallow, balm, wine, wool and spices. The word cinnamon is Phoenician, as are probably words such as cumin, coriander, crocus, myrrh, aloe, balsam, jasper, diamond and sapphire. The Greeks named the North Sea as the Phoenician Star in recognition of their discovery. They were an ingenious and advanced society, their knowledge of the stars allowed them to navigate the oceans, which creates another interesting juxtaposition with early Britain and the Celts where druids too were fluent astronomers and read the stars to invoke their knowledge. Many megalithic sites also betray a distinguished knowledge of astronomy.

The Phoenicians were accomplished textile makers and sought out minerals not just from around Europe and the Mediterranean but probably circumvented the horn of Africa. This seafaring nation left an immense legacy from the 5th century BC which is still being uncovered. Among other things they left us with an alphabet. The city of Byblos gave its name indirectly to the Bible, byblos in Greek meaning papyrus hence book hence The Book. The Tyrian princess Europa gave her name to Europe. They needed this language to communicate with different people around the globe and although it is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, it forms the basis from which both Greek and Latin evolved.
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They also needed language to trade. One early image of trading with new people describes how the sailors would row to the beach and leave a consignment of tradeable goods neatly on the sand and then make their way back to the ship. A fire was lit and the smoke would attract the natives who would come down to inspect the goods. If they wanted to trade the natives would lay up their own goods next to the first pile and then disappear back into the hills or forests. The traders would come back and either take their goods or would return to the ship and light the fire again to indicate they wanted more. In such early basic trade-offs the use of a symbolic language that could be etched in the sand would have represented something of an advance.

One thing is for sure, any ship seeking out new trading posts in strange new lands would have been drawn to bays with oysters as a reliable sign that not only would it likely be settled, but quite possibly there might be minerals there too.

Watchet blue

Wilson Beckles, writing in 1902, pointed out that available tin was not really found in what we now call Cornwall until mid 1750s, so if there was a trade in tin, then the mines would have been in the vast lands that are now submerged. He argued: “Britain became to the Phoenicians what Peru in later years came to be to Spain”.

The parish council’s official guide to the Scilly Isles says boldly: “The isles were found 3,000 years ago by Hamilco, a Carthaginian of the Silures, a Phoeniciean colony in Spain”. If it was that Hamilco, then he is usually thought to have found Britain in 450BC.

The name Silures is probably Roman. Tacitus called them “a naturally fierce people” and speculates: “The dark complexion of the Silures, their usually curly hair, and the fact that Spain is the opposite shore to them, are an evidence that Iberians of a former date crossed over and occupied these parts."

There has been some conjecture on whether modern day Welsh people owe their DNA to this tough tribe (of whom Caractacus was one leader), but so might be said of the early Basques who share the west coast route and have no obvious DNA family either.

Roman writers noted the sophistication of this westerly community.

Diodorus Sicilus reported “the Britons…live in a very hospitable and polite manner”.
He decribed the trade of how the tin was mined, then taken to the islands to be fashioned into ingots and then to Gaul and overland on horse packs to Marseilles in 30 days.

Town names too owe something to the Phonecian alphabet with endings like Pon meaning pennah in Phoencian or a hill; and tre taken from tiara meaning town or castle on a hill.

The Greeks did not arrive until 350 BC, looking for sure for the Phoencian tin treasure trove. They called it Cassiterides deriving from the local dialect as meaning wood-land.

The Phoenicians may well also have tried to keep the location of the tin mines in Cornwall a secret because they were so valuable. They needed the tin and lead to make pans that would not discolour for their famous emblematic purple dyes. Even more emotionally important and quite plausible and another link back to the oyster areas of the west country is that the dye was extracted from crushed shells of the Muricidae, a predatory snail whose poisonous toxins turn purple when exposed to air. It is a voracious predator on other shellfish and so possibly therein was another trade for which the oyster communities would have been a thankful supplier.

The purple dye was so valued in ancient Rome and before then because it required huge numbers of snails – maybe 1200 to dye a single toga. When the snail dies it releases pigmented toxins, so larger molluscs had their shells broken, the veins removed while smaller ones were ground up. In fact some of the snails are edible too, although some people can react badly to the toxins. Equally there were other shells that created the same effects for example Nucella lapillus, the common dog whelk. In 1685 AD William Cole proved the dog whelks he gathered on the shores of Bristol Channel could also be a source of dye and showed how by exposure to sunlight caused the glands to change colour through a spectrum from cloudy white, light green, deep green, sea green, Watchet blue, purplish red and finally a deep purple, emitting a pungent garlic-like odour.

Less wonder then perhaps it was said that a Phoenician captain would have scuppered his ship, rather than reveal the location of the tin mines to an enemy boat following him on the high seas. Or the location of his dyes, which would cost considerably more than gold, in some estimates 15 to 20 times as much.

The Phoencians appear to have settled in Cornwall and inter married. This may have been peaceful or otherwise. Some accounts say that the tin was shipped to France and then taken south to Spain by packhorses, but that does not seem logical. Why risk carrying such a precious cargo on land where it might be hijacked, when transparently they had ships and boats aplenty to take it more safely on the sea?

J.A. Buckley’s 1988 account of The Cornish Mining Industry (Tor Mark Press) has the tin industry stretching from Dartmoor to Land’s End. He writes:

“Historical references... show a well-established and fairly sophisticated tin trade between Cornwall and the Mediterranean by the 4th century BC. There is little evidence that the great events of history - such as the invasion by the Romans and their subsequent withdrawal 400 years later - did any more than temporarily disturb that international trade.”


Pytheas of Massalia (Marseilles) is credited with circumnavigating Britain between 325-250 BC and reported on the importance of west country tin and said the Cornish were “friendly and civilised” which they had learnt from contact with “foreign merchants”.

Even earlier perhaps, possibly 2600BC, there is evidence of mining for copper at Great Orme near Llandudno on the North Wales coast. Bronze is usually a mix of copper and tin, so to have a bronze age it must have come from somewhere. There is more evidence to back this up too – a fragment of a bronze dagger found at Pelynt Cornwall appears to be of Greek design and dates 1200BC

The City of Lions

Another Cornish legend repays the telling here, the more so in the context of what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans and Biloxi in 2005, both also oyster communities. The most compelling thing here is perhaps the more precise dating. It is said that there was a vast area to the west of Lands End, the fourth kingdom, known as Lyonesse. It had 140 churches and notable cities, but was overrun by a huge storm on November 11 1099 and disappeared, leaving only its mountains visible, which are today’s Scilly Isles. There are records dating the events to both 1014 and 1099 when “the exceeding seaflood…and so much to harm did…and ran up so far up as never before did…submerged many towns and mankind innumerable number”.

Only one man, Trevilian, managed to outrun the waves on a white horse and got to the safety of high ground at Perranuthnoe, opposite Newlyn. There are many tales of the church bells from the lost cities being heard in rough weather, great swathes of underwater forests. The Seven Stones Rocks to the west of Lands End are linked to a great city referred to as the City of Lions. Old fishermen called it the Town, and it is often retold that they have dragged up doors and windows in their nets in this area. In calm seas it is possible to see walls beneath the water and possible field boundaries show up at low tide along the sands of the Sampson Flats between the isles of Tresco and Sampson. Some of this has been handed down from notes by the 16th century antiquarian William Camden so the time line is not as exaggerated as in some ancient tales.

People have conjectured that the name Lyonesse might be connected to Lothian in Scotland - written in old French as Loonois - and or with Leonais in Brittany. Or you could go further and postulate a link with Lyons in France, which would have been a believable trading explanation and offers another interesting linguistic link to the Celts, the name deriving from Lugdunum a Celtic god, Lug of light or sun. Certainly Lyons is closer to Lake Neufchatel in Switzerland from where the Celtic expansion through Europe is thought to have stemmed and would in any case have been an important trading city north to south from its position on the Rhone. In both Celtic and Phoenecian explanations of early European history there appear to be plausible links to the oyster communities in the west and their access to the sea

The edge of the world

We know the Phoenicians controlled the western frontier of the Mediterranean world. From Cadiz they oversaw all traffic to the Atlantic. We also know that if the world was flat they might have been concerned about falling off the edge and would therefore have hugger muggered around the coasts. They were traders too so perhaps it was a dynamic and enterprising form of trading rather than colonisation.

There is also a presumption about the centralism of Europe. The classical texts suppose that Marseille was a lynchpin in a world that had Rome, Paris and London almost in a straight line, with only a slight diversion via the Gironde to westerly France. Even the Celts are strategically positioned on this line at Neufchatel in Switzerland, so maybe in those terms that was the world and all peoples outside such a corridor were not regarded as important. This was all post 600BC. In the same way it discounts other vibrant relationships and even cultures and trading such as the east of England coast with Holland and Scandinavia. Or an arcing route along the west coast or even the logic of a passage by land by the Pyrenees to meet boats somewhere like modern day Bilboa. We know from the shells found and the writings of the time that there would be English and Brittany oysters revered in Rome. History books suggest they were taken by cart, but that seems impractical in the extreme. Boats could carry huge numbers and could keep them alive with fresh sea water. The dramatic arrival in Rome of such a cargo might also explain their impact and kudos.

The evidence of the burial tombs contradicts much of the centralist north south thesis. Earlier, perhaps even as far back as 5,000 BC, there were communities stretching from the Orkneys, Ireland, western Britain down as far as Portugal and Spain. And they seem to have shared at least a version of religion, which probably centred on a single female deity, associated with the moon. The megalithic evidence is equally in tune with the idea of the Celts expansion through Europe from the lake Neufchatel in Switzerland. Quite who, or why, or how some race or tribe coordinated such European wide trade and religion may be unclear, but the evidence remains that someone, or perhaps more than one tribe or race did and they undoubtedly operated around the communities set up around the oyster coves where there was shelter and easy fishing.

The technology to move huge stones, some hundreds of tons in weight, could logically have been a development from shipbuilding. At Stonehenge the construction is not thought to have been achieved by stone masons, but from alternative technologies, probably carpenters, which might also point to shipbuilding. And some early examples of the sophistication of early carpenters have recently been unveiled. At Flag Fen a wheel from the late Bronze Age was made with ash, oak and alder carefully worked together and suggests a sophisticated use of toolage both in the carpentry and also in gathering and cutting down of the trees themselves. After all much of the land was covered in forest so there is a logic there too.

In Stonehenge’s case the blue stones of Pressily in western Wales were taken – if we discount the theory that were moved by an Ice Age - via the oyster communities of the Gower and Bristol – then possibly overland, or – via the sea circumventing the whole of Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset and moving north up the Solent, all oyster dependent communities for sure. And if there were religious ambitions here, possibly it was deemed important to show off the endeavours to everyone. The sea thesis has been discredited recently on the grounds that the coastal geography has changed beyond understanding since then and more likely the stones were laid on oak sleds and dragged by oxen, the rivers crossed by fording and damning.

Whatever the truth, the oyster from its geographical location was an important part of such early civilisation. The details may be lost still or waiting to be found but because we have such graphic examples from other times, from other parts of the world of how men have developed and traded from small oyster bearing coves, we can get a full picture of how this may have come about.

Those feet in ancient time

Cornwall has some very lush and fanciful legends from this era. One of the most curious says that “Christ came in a ship and anchored in St. Just Creek” arriving in the district of St Just-in-Roseland, near Place Manor. Across the estuary, so the tale goes, Joseph of Arimathea and the young Jesus, landed at the Strand (now Falmouth town quay), crossed the stream and went up Smithick Hill....In the far west of Cornwall, there are, or supposedly were, two rich lodes of tin. One was named Corpus Christi (the body of Christ) and the other Wheal Jesus. Wheal is the old Cornish word for mine.

In Catholic accounts this “fabulous legend” shows that a Phoenician trader was not unusual in Cornwall at the time, and equally that they chose to land at one of the counties main oyster beds in the Fal. There is a further twist. The coat of arms of the town of East Looe, a few miles east, purports to portray a ship bringing Joseph and the young Jesus to Cornwall, or at least two men who might be them. Certainly the legendary Joseph was said to have been a rich trader and may have made many trips to England and may even have owned mines, which if any of that were true just supports the importance of the west countries at the time.

Theologians use the story to support the idea that perhaps England, or the west of England, was converted to Christianity before the Romans arrived, and if that was the case then such a trade route would have been the logical medium. The Joseph in this interpretation could have been an uncle to Mary. It was therefore he who asked Pilate if he could bury Jesus’s body. Then he was cast off without oars and sails as an exile and washed up mercifully at Marseilles with 12 disciples. He travelled north and eventually sailed for Somerset. It is said he was known already as a trader also in lead. And he was welcomed at Glastonbury, which would have made England the home of the first church in Europe. Some hold this would have been AD37, others say AD63, by which point he would have been quite an old man to undertake such adventures. He is supposed to have lain the holy grail – the cup from which Christ drank at he last supper – at the fecund Chalice Well in Glastonbury. This history contradicts the conventional St Augustine version that has England converting in 597 AD and whether true or not the legends held much credence so much so that in the middle ages at four church councils of Pisa 1409, Constance 1417, Sienna 1424 and Basle 1434, mention that “the Churches of France and Spain must yield in points of antiquity and precedence to that of Britain as the latter Church was founded by Joseph of Arimathea immediately after the passion of Christ.” Glastonbury was called Roma Secunda. On all of which is predicated William Blake’s inspiration for the hymn Jersusalem:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green
And was the holy lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

In these accounts conversion, as probably happened in Ireland, seems to have been extremely swift. Christianity was persecuted in other countries en route at the time so remoteness could have encouraged an evangelical pilgrimage or religious refugees. The ships may have been a community apart and such vessels could have fostered evangelism whether on board or simply as the carriers of a persecuted faithful. Later, around the 5th century AD there is much written about Irish saints coming to Cornwall and then returning to convert that country. The Scilly Isles were known as a place of pilgrimage, although it is unclear precisely why because so many legends entwine. But more concrete are the burial sites on the islands, which date back to the Neolithic era, circa 2,500 BC, which would also coincide with the early might of the Pheonician empire.

Sensitive issues of faith interlock with legend here but at heart we are dealing with more evidence of the recognition of some form of community being active and being known across Europe from well before the Roman and Greek eras.

The Basques

There is another nation on this route who like the Phoenicians have little to show of their early history but geneticists have shown have a DNA and a language that is unique in Europe and goes back into pre-history. The Basques were also great sailors and they had the bay of Arcachon on their doorstep, an abundant source of oysters along the ocean shelf. Their language is also unique in Europe having no apparent connection to any Roman or Greek influence. The Basques too have their scatter of megalithic monuments, The Santimamiñe Cavesat Kortezubi, near Gernika were discovered by chance in 1916 were a prehistoric sanctuary inhabited certainly 13,000 years ago. The walls are etched with drawings of bison and Ibex. Further north, across the boarder in the Haute Garonne the Aurignac lends its name to a people dating back 32,000 and 26,000 BC who had evolved stone cutting and pierced shell jewellery and other art.


In his compelling the A Basque History of the World, Mark Kurlanksy points out that modern day boundaries may well be entrenched and that in early millennia the Basques may well have lived further north which would have taken them alongside the beds at Rayon, Gujan-Mestras : La Hume , Larros. But in fact the Arcachon beds stretch as far as the Spanish border so the tie in is secure. Anchored really.

It may be circumstantial to conjecture that a nation of great shipbuilders who much later became the navigators for the Spanish in the new world, who developed a trade in salt cod across Europe and possibly even found America, who were great whalers might also have owed their original identity to the oyster bays inshore from the storms of Biscay. The profile fits, right down to their commercial acumen as traders, even if there is seemingly no evidence remaining. Guilt by association perhaps. They have one culinary inheritance however often claimed to Bordeaux which is oysters served with little hot sausages. Properly though these sausages should be chorizo because it was the Basques who made the peppers popular, not the French. Serve it with sherry and the case is made. Although in that perhaps we are ahead of ourselves.

The first trading boats could also take another route - the three river route through France along the Seine, Saône and Rhône. The Greeks founded the port of Massilia (Marseille) near the mouth of the Rhône around 600BC to engineer trade between north and south. Oysters on this route could also have been valuable and obvious cargo to sell on the way to inland people who would not have had links to their own coast. Go back even earlier when England was joined to the European landmass, and the Seine and Soane connection flowed directly into another oyster rich estuary, the Thames.

It is easy enough to imagine a community linked by boat from the west coast of Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany that traded with Spain and further south. The Brittany tribe of the Veneti could muster more than 200 ships alone by the start of the first millennium which must have been a notable navy. Equally plausible could be that the Phoenicians were the agents who facilitated this. Fragments of wine and olive oil flasks have been found in Cornwall at Tintagel, Lundy, further west at Glastonbury Tor, and in South Wales at the iron age fort at Dinas Powys. The Isles of Scilly also seem to have been an important trading port as far back as 4000 BC. There is an inevitable geographic that seems to tie them all into the coves and culture of the oyster and suggests an evolved trading republic.

As with all things so ancient, it might be a mistake to presume too much in modern terms as to what these links might have meant. Power and community may have been completely different concepts in those days. One intrigue for archaeologists is how seemingly fragmented, well distanced communities seemed to arrive at innovations like pottery and cloth making at the same times, across Britain and also northern Europe. We should not presume too much, least of all that civilisation was a continuous straightforward evolution without interruption from natural or man made disasters. Or that religious worship might have been as it is today in ceremonial form when possibly it was a continuous act of fealty and endurance and it was those acts that led to the huge megalithic structures. What we can see is the extraordinary amount of evidence of activity among early men and women, all so closely allied to oyster coves.

The historian Sanford Holst in a paper to the Annual Conference of the World History Association on June 19, 2004, at Fairfax, Virginia argued that a lot of the confusion over the might and precise dates of the Phoenicians was down to the fact that their influence came from the sea. They did not in conventional terms start to colonise and empire build in other territories until around 1100 BC adding Cadiz, Malaga and Ibiza in Spain, Tangier in Morocco, Carthage (Tunis) in North Africa, plus colonies on Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. But archaeological dating has shown that Byblos was founded as a small fishing port in 6000BC, and the cedars of Lebanon that grew on the mountainsides provided both wood for ship building and lumber for trade. By 4500BC there is evidence of hundreds of houses. Archaeological dating and writings of the time place the fabled city of Tyre – which at that time was in fact two islands just offshore - as being founded around 2750 BC. This misunderstanding or misinterpretation as to the power and influence of a seaborne community is a constant theme that reoccurs around the world for oyster communities - right up until quite recently when eventually industrialisation and trains that were to fundamentally and fatally undermine them.

Paviland man

The Phoenicians traded with the westerly fringes of Britain from an indeterminate point in early history. They wanted tin from Cornwall badly enough to set up and mine for it. There are references to an area being called the Tin Isles and some remnants of mining has been traced back to 500BC and some further evidence of trading with Spain and Portugal as far as back as the Bronze Age - 2100-1500BC. Tin was rare in Europe and important. It was needed to make bronze, from which we might speculate that perhaps Cornwall, as the main source of tin on the continent, might well have been important in its own right. The natural harbour at Falmouth, with its estuarine oyster beds nearby, would have been an obvious choice to land. Another possible interest would have been copper too, which was also found in Cornish waters. So too Somerset lead.

Swansea may well have been important for similar reasons. The Mumbles area was previously known as Oystermouth. Possibly the Swansea connection is even earlier. In 1826 a skeleton of a woman coloured in red ochre wearing periwinkle decorations was discovered at Paviland Cave on the Gower peninsula. At first it was thought that she had been ritually buried at the time of the Romans, but more modern tests found her to be a man and have dated him to 24,000 BC which suggest that southern Wales could have been a pivotal community for early trading. The body lay surrounded by oyster shells. In the same coves also were drawings similar to those found in coves in Brittany. Irish tin has been found in early Welsh artefacts. He wore a pendant of honed fox teeth which might have been used to pick out the flesh of winkles.

Ireland, Cornwall and southern Wales are, or were, all rich in oysters, which would logically have been welcome to the Phoenician seafarers not just as sustenance but also as another cargo to take back to what is now Lebanon or other ports en route. Any ship captain ploughing the coastal routes north from Africa would have passed oyster reefs along what is now Portugal, Spain, France and up the Channel. They would hardly be likely to pass up such a ready supply of easily gathered nutritious foods. With warships perhaps having as many as 170 oarsmen to feed, the oyster would have been a welcome and essential resource.

From Boyne to Carnac

However distant, we know that at some point in the Neolithic era, between 5,000 and 2,000 BC that men managed to assemble stones of more than 350 tons apiece and place them upright for whatever reason. More than 3000 still can be found around Carnac in Brittany, as they are at Stonehenge and Avebury. Carnac nestles back a few kilometres from the huge oyster beds of the bay of Quiberon. At Carnac also has been found one of those inspiring sculptures of a Celtic goddess, The Giver of Birth, dated 3500BC. The Grand Menir at Carnac was erected around 4500 BC, two millennia before Stonehenge

Water itself was often regarded as sacred. Offerings to gods and goddesses were cast in the currents. The middens near oyster coves could have been evidence also of larger gatherings rather than just domestic bric a brac.

The dramatic burial mound at Newgrange on the River Boyne in Ireland pre-dates Stonehenge and the building of the pyramids. It is thought to have been erected around 3200 BC. The Boyne itself is the site of many other Neolithic monuments and artefacts and was clearly an important community or meeting point in the period.

Siman Bostock writing in Celtic Connections in 1996 says:

“All that remained of these people at Newgrange were four huge, shallow stone basins on the floor of the alcoves of the inner chamber; some cremated human remains, nine heads and pins damaged from funeral pyres, stone pendants, seven stone balls, fragments of flint tools, animal bones and shells (the remains of ritual feasts, offerings to the spirits or nourishment for the dead)…”

A few miles north of the Boyne is Carlingford, which is still one of the oyster capitals of Ireland. Bostock goes on:

“We can speculate that the Celts were the most influential tribes of northern Europe and that their contact with the southern Mediterranean might have been initiated by the seafaring Phoenicians. In neither culture does anything survive of their own histories because the Celts strictly followed an oral tradition of storytelling and opposed the written word; while the Phoenicians wrote on papyrus that did not survive and also as sailors perhaps the water would have destroyed any records. Later, probably between 500-100BC the Celts introduced money. Previously they had traded in animals and gold alone, but as highly prized mercenaries they needed other currencies to recompense their services. They preferred gold and silver coinage, but had a third denomination known as potin, which was cut in strips and then weighed. It was made from a tin alloy, much of it seemingly coming from Cornwall.”

Neither the Greeks, and certainly not the Romans, had much incentive to aggrandise such cultures of the people they were conquering and colonising. This western alliance may have been deliberately consigned to the very dog ends of history until the archaeology began to suggest otherwise.

Donald Harden opens his history of the Phoenicians like this:

“Until archaeology came to the rescue in the middle of the 19th century our knowledge of the Phoenicians derived from the writings of other nations, notably the Jews, Greeks and Romans, with whom they were from time to time in contact, not always on a friendly basis; for the Phoenician literature has almost wholly perished. Such a picture was bound to be distorted.”

As with the megaliths, there is a certain irresistible tracing of Phoenician myth and history tantalisingly close to these oyster communities.

Celts, megaliths and Phoenicians

The Neolithic people who built Newgrange seem to have belonged to a rich and powerful culture, farming and trading along the Atlantic coastline from the Orkneys to Brittany and beyond
Siman Bostock, Celtic Connections 1996



There may have been trade in British oysters before the Greek and Roman eras. The megalithic map of Europe can be overlaid almost precisely with the geography of oyster colonies. The long barrows and ancient stone tombs are rarely found more than 30 miles from the sea.