THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY
H I S T O R Y N O T E S
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COLCHIANS, PHOENICIANS AND CANAANITES
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN CLASSICAL WEST ASIAN CIVILIZATIONS
"It is undoubtedly a fact that the Colchians are of Egyptian
descent. I noticed this myself before I heard anyone mention it."
--Herodotus, The Histories
We now know that modern humanity originated in Africa, and that all modern humans can ultimately trace their ancestral roots back to the African continent. Herodotus, the European father of history, regarded Colchis, a land located along the western slope of the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea, as an African colony. He not only pointed to the Colchians' black skin and woolly hair, but also to their oral traditions, language, methods of weaving, and practice of circumcision. Saint Jerome, writing during the fourth century, called Colchis the "Second Ethiopia." Two hundred years later, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, described an "Ethiopian" presence in the same region. Even today, in the same district about which Herodotus wrote, lives a numerically minute black-skinned, woolly-haired community.
Phoenicia was the name given by the Greeks, in the first millennium B.C.E., to the coastal provinces of modern Lebanon and northern Israel, although occasionally the term seems to have been applied to the entire Mediterranean seaboard from Syria to Palestine. Phoenicia was not considered a nation, in the strict sense of the word, but rather as a chain of coastal cities, of which the most important were Sidon, Byblos, Tyre and Ras Shamra. To the Greeks the term Phoenician, from the root Phoenix, had connotations of red, and it is likely that the name was derived from the physical appearance of the people themselves.
The Phoenicians were a coastal branch of the Canaanites, who, according to Biblical traditions, were the brothers of Kush (Ethiopia) and Mizraim (Kmt)--members of the Hamite ethnic group. In other words, the Bible states that the ancient Canaanites, Ethiopians and Egyptians were all African nations. Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop claimed that "Phoenician history is therefore incomprehensible only if we ignore the Biblical data, according to which the Phoenicians, in other words, the Canaanites, were originally Negroes, already civilized, with whom nomadic, uncultured white tribes later mixed." While acknowledging the Biblical data, Diop cautioned that the economic relations shared by the Kamites and Phoenicians should not be minimized in explaining the strong sense of solidarity which generally existed between them. There was frequently a Kamite presence: military, diplomatic, religious or commercial, both in the Canaanite hinterland and the Phoenician city-states themselves, and Diop goes on to state that, "Even throughout the most troubled periods of great misfortune, Egypt could count on the Phoenicians as one can count more or less on a brother."
The Phoenicians were the great seafarers of their time and dominated the Mediterranean shipping lanes. Phoenician inscriptions have been found as far north as central Turkey and as far west as Tunisia where the famous ancient city of Carthage was founded. It was among the Canaanites that one of the most important and meaningful inventions in human history is attested--the alphabet.