Around 3,000 years ago, the Phoenicians’ shipping routes and trading bases reached as far as the Iberian Peninsula. But there the locals seem to have received the newcomers from the Levant with little enthusiasm, as the discovery of an enormous moat around a Phoenician settlement on the southeast coast of Spain shows. Similar complex fortress structures were previously only known from the Phoenician heartland.
The territory of the Phoenicians actually only extended over a network of city-states in the Levant. But thanks to their highly developed knowledge and skills in seafaring and trade, they dominated large parts of the Mediterranean sea trade in the period from 1000 to around 600 BC. Their shipping routes and trading bases extended from the neighboring kingdoms of the Egyptians, Hittites and Assyrians to the western Mediterranean. Wreck finds of Phoenician trading ships show that the Phoenicians also reached the coast of Spain. The Phoenician traders were attracted by deposits of metal ore in particular.
Fortifications against attacks from neighbors
A discovery in the Spanish region of Valencia now shows that the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula at the time did not necessarily welcome the Phoenician newcomers with open arms – on the contrary. Archaeologists working with Fernando Prados from the Department of Archeology at the University of Alicante have found evidence of this in the remains of an old Phoenician settlement near the present-day town of Guardamar del Segura. Three quarters of this settlement, known as Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño, was destroyed by a quarry in the 1990s. However, on aerial photographs of the area before this destruction, archaeologists were able to identify indications of the existence of a fortification around the old city.
To get to the bottom of these clues, Prados and his team carried out new excavations this year on the edge of Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño. In doing so, they came across the surprisingly well-preserved remains of a trench in front of the fortification wall. “These fortifications are huge and still largely intact,” reports Prados. On the walls of the three-meter-deep and eight-meter-wide trench, the chisel marks with which the workers once drove this depression into the hard ground can still be seen.
Reference to the importance of this base
As the archaeologists report, only one Phoenician fortification was known from the western Mediterranean. This is in the vicinity of the Castillo de Doña Blanca in Cadiz. The current find of the moat now shows that such fortifications were obviously not an isolated case at the time. However, the type of fortification in Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño is unique for this region, explain Prados and his team. Protective structures of the same kind can only be found again in the Phoenician cities of the Middle East, for example in Tell Dor in Israel or in Beirut in Lebanon.
According to the researchers, the size and construction of the fortifications in Cabezo Pequeño del Estaño, which is unusual for the western Mediterranean, suggest that this place was responsible for the Phoenician colonization policy on the Iberian Peninsula from the 9th to 8th centuries BC. played an important role. At the same time, the fortifications demonstrate that the locals were not necessarily friendly to the newcomers. Apparently the Phoenician settlers expected attacks from their neighbors.
Source: University of Alicante