6. Phoenicia, the Secret World Power
The most important superpower in history was Phoenicia. The Phoenician aristocrats commanded 3 secret weapons: a monopoly on bronze, a far-reaching navy, and a level of deception where they even disguised their national identity. All 3 combined enabled them to secretly colonize the entire world, which they rule to this day.
Sources of Phoenician power
Among the ancient nations with their fraudulent aristocracies, one empire was the most powerful & deceptive. It has shaped world history like no other, and rules to this day: Phoenicia.
In addition to the trickery used by all aristocratic scum, the Phoenician elites also controlled 2 very important natural resources: bronze & cedar-wood. The bronze gave them undefeatable armies, and the cedar-wood a navy with global reach. The combination of those 3 made them all-powerful.
Bronze
The Roman historian Livy confirms that the Phoenician city Tyre was invincible through bronze, and used this invincibility to plunder foreign coasts with their ships at whim:
Because of their immense possessions of bronze, the Tyrians surpassed all others, as nothing could overcome their armies and their ships. And so they could plunder freely from all lands.
Copper smelting had already pushed humanity towards oligarchic power, by granting better weapons to the few against the many. The discovery of bronze went one step further: It was superior to copper, but even more rare. It therefore enabled a near-global monopoly to one central superpower: Phoenicia.
The reason is that bronze is usually an alloy of mostly copper, plus tin. Copper already isn’t too abundant, but tin is extremely rare, enabling easy monopolies on the resulting bronze. Through naval trade & colonization, Phoenicia had acquired just such a monopoly. They traded some tin & bronze, but the bulk went into their own armory, making them undefeatable.
Here’s the official quantities in the earth crust according to Wikipedia:
| Metal | Occurrence |
|---|---|
| iron | 50,000 ppm |
| copper | 70 ppm |
| tin | 2 ppm |
| silver | 0.1 ppm |
| gold | 0.005 ppm |
Officially, Phoenicia was a center for bronze-making by the Late Bronze Age. It’s unclear where this bronze came from. The locations of metal deposits in antiquity are a mystery, maybe due to censoring. No tin deposits are officially known on the Phoenician coast, but Phoenicians mined copper on nearby Cyprus. The Cyprus yields were so great that copper was named for this island! And finds of tin objects are clustered in the Eastern Mediterranean, so some large tin source must’ve been there, giving the Phoenician nobles a head-start on bronze weaponry.
As the next step, their navy would’ve enabled them to grab all copper & tin resources along the Mediterranean. And ultimately, the Phoenician navy could then reach all lands from Britain to India, maybe even farther, so they would’ve monopolized tin trade of the entire Western hemisphere. With that, they had a monopoly on bronze.
Cedar-wood
The earliest civilizations had very little wood.
In the beginning, the most powerful ancient civilizations in the Western hemisphere were Egypt & Mesopotamia, because of their rivers: Nile, Euphrates & Tigris. The courses were fertile, but water from seasonal flooding had to be harnessed by irrigation channels. That needed pooled labor, so water became a monopolized resource. This monopoly enabled the ultra-powerful & corrupt aristocratic systems still in place today.
However, apart from the river courses, Egypt & Mesopotamia were arid & infertile. Most importantly, there were no woods. The only large plants were date-palms & reed-grass. Some wood was imported, but there was no capacity for building large native fleets.
But in Phoenicia, the Lebanese mountains right next to the coast provided abundant cedar-wood, hard & durable, and very well-suited for shipbuilding.
Their navy enabled the Phoenician lords to gobble up all nearby bronze resources, and then gave their undefeatable bronze-clad armies a global reach. The centers of power migrated from Egypt & Mesopotamia to the Phoenician coast, and the world was taken over from there. And with the aristocratic power of deception, the world was taken over secretly.
Secret colonization
The descendants of Phoenician elites and native aristocratic traitors rule to this day, without any of their subjects even knowing. This is because the Phoenician elites were also at the forefront of deception.
Aristocrats from all high cultures used deception against their own subjects, to some degree. But the Phoenicians nobles went one step further: They not only disguised themselves as commoners. No, as seafaring merchant lords they also disguised themselves as being other peoples entirely. To cheat indigenous populations, make pacts with their corrupt elites, run hidden takeovers of their lands. This was a long con. To pretend that the conquered lands were still independent, Phoenicians ruling as governors even adopted local language & culture of the invaded peoples, forever. Nations & religions were only ever tools for them anyway.
We’ll see that Mesopotamia, Greece & Rome were already secret Phoenician colonies, and after that pretty much the entire world. Secret colonization had become the norm by antiquity.
Livy tells how they did it: Whenever the Phoenician overlords didn’t feel like openly plundering foreign coasts with their invicible armies, they just used their insane wealth to bribe local rulers into gradually giving up their nations. Step by step, they became the possessors of the land.
Usually, the Tyrians came in intimacy and secrecy to the local noble authorities. After these nobles then swiftly forced an approval among all the other local men, it could all begin, and the Tyrians could go on to possess the lands.
The place where they first came out was called “Tyre”, and the name of the region is “Tyrian coast”. The people as a whole are called “Phoenicians”.
They first came as givers of merchandise. From there, by persuasion and gifts, they obtained the role of being allies. And from being allied armed forces, they obtained a position where they could hold the whole land in bondage.
The Bible describes Tyre as the center of a vast concealed network. An entire superpower’s rulership was hidden away, just like individual people are hidden with the disguises provided by the overlords:
Because of what has been said of Tyre, about her being a hidden city: Aha, she is now being examined, she who was a cloaking for the peoples, now she is too turned over for us.
Therefore the hidden lords say: Behold, we are for you, Tyre, and we will make come up for you many false bodies, just like we make come up individual people in veils.
And they shall pervert the appearance of Tyre, and make her nobility secret, and we will conceal her rulership, and make her like a concealed network.
She shall be only for spreading out nets, in the middle of the peoples, for we have spoken, say the hidden lords.
And she shall become a mock-up for the people. And her assistants in the field will be hidden with confusion, and they shall know that we are all hidden.
In addition to disguising as local people, the Phoenicians also used invented foreign identities, most importantly the Trojans and the Jews, as we’ll see later.
Ultimately, the Phoenician overlords even abandoned their original Phoenician homeland & culture completely. They vilified it and all but erased it from history.
Phoenicia conquered Mesopotamia with bronze-weapons
One very early hint to Phoenician secret colonization is the very sudden conquest of Sumerian-dominated Mesopotamia by local Semitic-speaking city-states under the king Sargon around 2330 BC. Sargon came out of nowhere, and his capital Akkad has never been found by archaeologists.
What was his secret? As today, the sudden rise of a seemingly independent power means that an existing superpower is secretly at play. The famous Birth Legend of Sargon confirms this:
- Sargon’s hometown was really the “city of bronze”, located at “foreign shores”.
- He was instituted as a “foreign overseer” over the Sumerians.
- He defeated all resistance with “bronze weapons”.
All this points to Sargon being a puppet king for Phoenicia, perhaps for the city Byblos. So while the conquering was official, the power that was ultimately behind the conquering was disguised.
A decorative king, a king of decoration, a king of appearances am I.
My mother was a high lady. My father will not be made known. In truth, he was from a secret office.
My city was the city of bronze, which is placed at the shores of the foreign princes.
My mother the high lady conceived me in secrecy. She birthed me, and placed me into a surrounded environment, of which all leaks had been sealed off securely with lies and bribes.
The anointer, the changer of rulers, raised me as a duplicate copy. The anointer, the changer of rulers, appointed me as a foreign overseer.
The great possessors favoured me in my work as a foreign overseer. Many years I acted as a king.
I ruled over the Sumerian people. I cut down mighty hostilities with axes of copper alloys.
(There are probably more texts about Phoenicia colonizing Mesopotamia, but cuneiform is hard, and I’m all alone.)
Did Phoenicians invent deception?
So did the Phoenicians also invent deception? The ancient texts say no, and I’d also say no. Many ancient texts talk about the invention of deception, and they all say it was a general aristocratic thing, which also makes more sense.
The History by Diodorus Siculus even speculates that deception was invented in Egypt, because the subjects were most brainwashed there, and the rulers could stage the biggest known hoaxed events. However, I think this isn’t due to some regional specialty, but simply the fact that Egypt is one of the oldest civilizations, so rulers & subjects had evolved for the longest time in a corrupting hierarchy.
The Egyptians say that according to the original beginning of it all, the first mockery came to be in Egypt, because of the mild manners of the subdued people there, and because of the ruthless character of the rulers.
As proof that the production of false images had been among them from the beginning, they attempt to bring up the fact that even now such large and great imitating acts are still produced sometimes among the religious inferiors, still to the effect that all those seeing it become confused.
So Egypt may have developed independently at first. But very few civilizations did.
Next: We’ll see that the cradle of European civilization, Greece, was a Phoenician colony from the early beginnings.