Two of the first human civilizations began in the Mediterranean area. Civilization first developed in Mesopotamia beginning with Sumer in the 4th millennium BC. Soon after, the Nile River valley was unified under the Pharaohs in the 4th millennium BC, and civilization quickly spread through the fertile crescent to the east coast of the sea and throughout the Levant, which happens to make the Mediterranean countries of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.

Hellenic civilization acquired placenames signifying east-west probably in lieu of the Nile River Valley first and as far as Magna Graecia. The Balkans area of southeastern Europe situated at a major crossroads between mainland Europe and the Near East divided by land from Mediterranean waters. In time, from the Copper Age of Old Europe, Minoan civilization grew into the arrival of the Aegan and the Mycenean period of city-states and large empires developed in Asia Minor, such as the Hittites. The mountains (i.e, Taurus Mountains) is more of a barrier than the riversides whether a family is Indo-European or a dialect the culture area, the latter uses the term empire as of the time Proto-Greek is yet foreign.

The Hittites were pioneers of the Iron Age. The two most notable city-states of these were the Greek city states and the Phoenicians in the north of ancient Canaan with its heartland along the coastal plains of what are now Lebanon and Syria.

The ancient city Tyre in modern Lebanon on the Mediterranean is north of Acre and South of Sidon.

TYRE appears on monuments as early as 1300 BC, and claiming, according to Herodotus, to have been founded about 2700 BC. Colonies on the coasts and neighbouring islands of the Aegean Sea, in Greece, on the northern coast of Africa, at Carthage and other places, in Sicily and Corsica, in Spain at Tartessus, but it was often attacked by Egypt when Egypt was not assited by the Phoenicians of the mainland. While Tyre paid tribute to the Babylonians, it later fell under the power of the Persians. The people of southernmost Tyre kept ancient boundaries of a city state and called themselves the Canaani and the Phoenicians became known as the Phoenician "Purple People." Phoenician Punic colonies of North Africa continued to be a source of knowledge about the Phoenicians. Saint Augustine's mother Saint Monica, is said to be of Punic origin.

The earliest known inscriptions in Phoenician come from Byblos and date back to ca. 1000 BC. Phoenician inscriptions are found in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Cyprus and other locations, as late as the early centuries of the Christian Era. Punic, a language that developed from Phoenician in Phoenician colonies around the western Mediterranean beginning in the 9th century BC, slowly supplanted Phoenician there, similar to the way Italian supplanted Latin.

At the beginning of the 2nd century BC, the Seleucid monarchy reasserted its primacy on the former Phoenician coast and the last of the old Phoenician city-kings disappeared. The Amarna letters, dated to the 14th century BC, although written in Akkadian, the language of diplomacy at the time, contain solecisms that are not 'mistakes', but actually early Canaanite words and phrases. The Phoenicians are credited with developing the Phoenician alphabet, an alphabet has been termed an abjad or a script that contains no vowels. An abjad is a segmental script containing symbols for consonants only, or where vowels are optionally written with diacritics or only written word-initially. A cuneiform abjad originated to the north in Ugarit, a Canaanite city of northern Syria, in the 14th century BC. It is found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age (from ca. the 15th century), by convention taken to last until a cut-off date of 1050 BC, after which it is called Phoenician. This was the ancestor of nearly every alphabet in use today, from Greek, Hebrew, Roman and Berber in the West to Thai, Mongol, and perhaps Hangul in the East.

Herodotus's account (written c. 440 BC) refers to a faint memory from 1000 years earlier, and so may be subject to question (History, I:1), such that Hellene-Phoenician interactions, the abduction of Io from Pylos, abduction of Europa by the Cretans. According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began to quarrel. This people, who had formerly reached the shores of the Erythraean Sea, having migrated to the Mediterranean from an unknown origin and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the wares of Egypt and Assyria.

Phoenician culture must have been inspired from an external source, such that the Phoenicians were sea-traders from the Land of Punt who co-opted the Canaanite population; or that they were connected with the Minoans; or the Sea Peoples or the Philistines further south, that they represent the activities of supposed coastal maritime Israelite tribes like Dan.

 

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