Phoenician Architecture and Building

During the first millennium BCE, Phoenician builders combined cut stone, rubble, sun-dried earth, timber and plaster to make walls, roof supports, sanctuaries and working surfaces. Along the Levantine coast and in western settlements, they adapted these materials to each structure and to the supplies available nearby. The building phases at Tell el-Burak, Kition and La Fonteta show how those choices changed between homes, temples and town walls.

Stone, earth and structural supports

An ashlar is a stone cut into a regular block; rubble is stone that is less carefully shaped, from rough fieldstones to smaller broken pieces. Builders could combine them in a wall instead of cutting every stone to a uniform face. In pier-and-rubble masonry, blocks form vertical supports at intervals, while smaller stones fill the sections between them. This arrangement uses dressed stone where it carries or organizes the wall and less-worked stone in the intervening stretches.

Archaeologist Maximilian Rönnberg’s study traces this technique across first-millennium BCE buildings in the Levant and farther west. Its presence in Iberia does not make it an ethnic signature of Phoenician builders: the study finds the technique across the Levant and Iberian Peninsula but not in the central Mediterranean. Building knowledge could travel with exchange and contact, while builders adjusted the method to local stone and local practice.

The excavated settlement of Tell el-Burak, south of Sidon on the Lebanese coast, offers a domestic example. Its earliest Iron Age house in the excavated area was a rectangle about five by eight metres, built in pier-and-rubble masonry. In a later phase, occupants continued using that house and built another, two-room dwelling of less carefully made construction. These structures belong to a settlement occupied from the late eighth to the mid-fourth century BCE. They show how construction methods could be used at the scale of a home as well as in prominent public buildings.

Western settlements used earth as well as stone. At the Phoenician site of La Fonteta in southeastern Spain, excavators found houses attached to the town wall and mudbrick in both its lower and upper parts. A mudbrick is a block made by shaping damp earth and letting it dry in the sun. A recent study of the wall also identified a coating of earth over the masonry. These finds show that earth could serve as a formed building block and as a coating over masonry within the same construction.

Roof supports and rebuilding

Large roofs also required supports that could span an interior. At Kition, an ancient city on Cyprus, excavators identified a Phoenician temple phase dated to the late ninth century BCE from the order of the archaeological layers. The rectangular building measured about 35 by 22 metres and used large ashlar blocks in its walls. Rows of column bases inside carried wooden posts that supported the roof. During a later rebuilding, dated approximately 800–600 BCE, stone pillars replaced the wooden supports. The successive phases show builders changing the material of a support while retaining a large roofed interior.

Plaster for working surfaces

A plastered floor or basin needed a smooth, continuous surface that could stand up to repeated use. At Tell el-Burak, a wine press built on the slope outside the settlement shows how stone construction and a prepared surface worked together. The installation is usually dated to the late eighth or seventh century BCE and continued in use into the sixth.

Workers trod grapes in a rectangular basin; the juice, called must, was directed through a channel into a lower collecting vat. At Tell el-Burak the treading basin was surrounded by an ashlar wall and built on a foundation of flat stone slabs. The installation joined pressing and collection in one structure, with stone supports and lined surfaces fitted to the stages of production.

Analysis of the plaster found lime made from limestone mixed with grog, or crushed pottery. A nearby fire pit containing crushed limestone may have been used to heat the stone during lime production. The study’s authors report that the ceramic fragments stiffened the plaster and reduced cracking as it shrank while drying. The lime-and-ceramic mixture suited a surface that repeatedly contacted liquid, and the installation connects material selection to a specific task.

A later Punic, or western Phoenician, farm at Truncu ’e Molas in Sardinia offers a comparison. There, two side-by-side vats survived from a wine press used between the late fifth and mid-second centuries BCE; each was lined with several layers of plaster. The arrangement differs from the Tell el-Burak press, while both cases show builders lining surfaces for handling liquid.