Phoenician Defence and Warfare

During the first millennium BCE, Phoenician city-states occupied the Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean, including the shoreline of modern Lebanon and neighbouring regions. Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad had local rulers and forces, but their security also depended on surrounding territory, ports and sea routes. Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires altered the demands placed on these cities. Farther west, Phoenician-descended communities faced different political settings and mobilized forces in different ways.

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Walls that protected people and stores

A fortified settlement needed to channel movement toward gates and defend the approaches an attacker could reach most easily. At Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño, an eighth-century BCE Phoenician settlement by the Segura estuary in present-day Alicante, Spain, archaeologists have documented a wall about four metres thick. The surviving town covered a rise above the estuary. Its most accessible landward side carried a substantial defensive line of hollow towers and linked wall compartments.

Some of those compartments were casemates: enclosed chambers formed between parallel wall faces connected by crosswalls. At Cabezo, the rooms measured about 1.55 by 4.70 metres. The arrangement made a thick, tied-together barrier while leaving protected interior spaces that could hold goods. Researchers describe these western Phoenician casemate walls as serving storage as well as defence. The wall followed the ground, while interior buttresses and later exterior sloping supports helped stabilize sections built on an unstable coastal rise. This site shows how fortification could protect a settlement’s people and valuable stores without being only a fighting platform.

Tyre’s setting created a different defensive problem. The city stood on an island ringed by high walls, while its mainland territory supplied fields and access to the interior. An enemy could threaten those land resources without immediately taking the island. In a siege, defenders needed more than strong masonry: they needed food, water and a harbour entrance that remained open to friendly ships. A fleet could bring supplies or prevent attackers from closing the city’s approaches.

Local fleets under imperial command

Under Achaemenid Persia, the empire ruled by kings based in Iran, Phoenician ships served in campaigns far from their home ports. Herodotus records that Phoenicians together with Syrians of Palestine furnished ships for Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480 BCE. He describes their sailors and fighters with linen body armour, shields and javelins. He also says that Persian, Median or Saka troops served as fighting men aboard the fleet’s ships, while the best-sailing vessels came from Phoenicia, especially Sidon. His account therefore distinguishes local ship provision and sailing skill from the wider imperial command and infantry carried aboard.

The city rulers remained visible within this larger force. Herodotus names Tetramnestus of Sidon, Matten of Tyre and Merbalus of Arwad among notable figures in the fleet, after its commanders. A subject city’s contribution involved more than sending rowers: Ships required construction and repair, trained crews, equipment and provisions. The surviving account shows how an empire could assemble ships supplied by coastal cities and place them within a centrally directed expedition.

Defending island Tyre

A much earlier siege is known through Josephus, a first-century CE writer who quotes Tyrian king lists: he says Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Tyre for thirteen years during King Ithobal’s reign, beginning in Nebuchadnezzar’s seventh regnal year. This has often been placed around 586–573 BCE, but Helen Dixon’s study of the surviving manuscripts notes that the more commonly transmitted duration is three years and ten months. The exact length is therefore uncertain. The report points to the prolonged pressure an island city could face when a mainland empire sought to compel it.

Alexander’s siege of Tyre in 332 BCE shows how walls, ships and control of supply interacted. Arrian, a Greek historian writing centuries later, describes Tyre as an island with high walls and an active fleet. At first, the Persians controlled the sea, so the Tyrians could send triremes, warships propelled by rowers seated in three tiers, against workmen building an approach from the mainland.

Alexander’s engineers raised a mole, a broad causeway of stone, timber and stakes across the shallow water toward the island. As the water deepened and the work neared the walls, Tyrian ships attacked the workers. The Macedonians placed towers and siege engines on the mole, screening workers with hides against arrows and fire. The defenders then towed a burning transport ship into the structure, setting its towers and engines alight, and followed with smaller boats that cut down its protective barrier.

The balance shifted when Alexander gained the fleets of Phoenician cities. After Byblos, Arwad and Sidon came under his control, Arrian says their kings brought about eighty Phoenician ships to his side. With additional Cypriot ships, Alexander could block both harbour entrances. Tyrian defenders had earlier guarded the narrow mouths with triremes to keep hostile ships from anchoring inside. Once a blockade prevented ships from entering or leaving, the island’s walls could no longer secure its maritime lifeline. Tyre fell when Alexander’s ships forced the harbour barriers and entered through both harbours. Arrian reports that about 8,000 Tyrians died in the capture and that some 30,000 captured Tyrians and mercenaries were sold into slavery; those who took refuge in the temple of Heracles received amnesty. His account records the human cost that followed the military breach.

Carthage’s later army and the cost of service

In the third century BCE, Carthage in North Africa, near modern Tunis, was a territorial power whose military system differed from the eastern city fleets described above. After the First Punic War with Rome ended in 241 BCE, Carthage had to settle the pay owed to forces returning from Sicily. Polybius describes these hired troops as a mixed force that included Libyans, Iberians, Celts, Ligurians, Greeks and men from the Balearic Islands.

When Hanno, the commander responsible for Africa, told the soldiers that Carthage could not meet their claims and asked them to accept reduced wages, the troops began meeting in separate national groups and in larger assemblies. Their different languages made it difficult for a single commander to address them directly; he had to negotiate through their officers. The dispute widened into revolt, drawing in Libyan communities that supplied troops and provisions. Polybius also records Carthage responding by recruiting additional hired troops, arming citizens of military age, drilling its cavalry and preparing the ships it still had. This later Punic crisis shows how a western state’s reliance on paid forces tied military command to pay, communication and access to its own territory.