Cyprus-Forum.com

[yialousa1971]

The only thing Hellenes and Cypriots need to conquer now is the traitorous and villainous church, and then our true identity as Hellenes will be complete....

It's over dude...

Is that how you treat your mother?

[Oracle]

So GR! ...

Are you going to wait for the DNA traces to be published, regarding their migratory roots ..... (those done to date for others back written historical records, where they exist) ... or are you going to jump to some uneducated conclusion?

That we have communicated and mixed in the past with Phoenicians is well known; since, not only were they good sea-faring people but so were we (the Greeks).

[Simon]

Give it up Paphitis, because it’s by no accident that Cypriots and the Lebanese look so much alike and have always been so close (not just geographically close).

Agreed!

It is also no accident that Hellenism is the one and only surviving influence in Cyprus... So why is that so?

You also can't differentiate between a Greek or Cypriot, apart from dialect. And even that is not so between Cypriots and Greeks from Crete, Rhodos and Kos.

You mean like the “Hellenic” alphabet/language which came from…

Phoenician -> Cypriot - > Greek

More accurately described as:

Phoenician -> Greek Cyprus -> rest of Greek world

[Simon]

Who were the Phoenicians?

We know they dominated sea trade in the Mediterranean for 3,000 years. Now DNA testing and recent archaeological finds are revealing just what the Phoenician legacy meant to the ancient world—and to our own.



"I am a Phoenician," says the young man, giving the name of a people who vanished from history 2,000 years ago. "At least I feel like I'm one of them. My relatives have been fishermen and sailors here for centuries."

"Good, we can use some real Phoenicians," says Spencer Wells, an American geneticist, who wraps the young man's arm in a tourniquet as they sit on the veranda of a restaurant in Byblos, Lebanon, an ancient city of stone on the Mediterranean. The young man, Pierre Abi Saad, has arrived late, eager to participate in an experiment to shed new light on the mysterious Phoenicians. He joins a group of volunteers—fishermen, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers—gathered around tables under the restaurant awning. Wells, a lanky, 34-year-old extrovert, has convinced Saad and the others to give him a sample of their blood.

"What will it tell you?" Saad asks.

"Your blood contains DNA, which is like a history book," Wells replies. "Many different people have come to Byblos over the centuries, and your blood carries traces of their DNA. It's going to tell us something about your relationships going back thousands of years."

Wells has no doubts about the power of the new genetic techniques he is bringing to our understanding of ancient peoples. Nor does his bespectacled colleague standing beside him on the veranda, Pierre Zalloua, a 37-year-old scientist with a dark goatee and an intense passion for his Lebanese heritage. The two men hope to find new clues to an age-old riddle: Who were the Phoenicians?

Although they're mentioned frequently in ancient texts as vigorous traders and sailors, we know relatively little about these puzzling people. Historians refer to them as Canaanites when talking about the culture before 1200 B.C. The Greeks called them the phoinikes, which means the "red people"—a name that became Phoenicians—after their word for a prized reddish purple cloth the Phoenicians exported. But they would never have called themselves Phoenicians. Rather, they were citizens of the ports from which they set sail, walled cities such as Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre.

The culture later known as Phoenician was flourishing as early as the third millennium B.C. in the Levant, a coastal region now divided primarily between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. But it wasn't until around 1100 B.C., after a period of general disorder and social collapse throughout the region, that they emerged as a significant cultural and political force.

From the ninth to sixth centuries B.C. they dominated the Mediterranean Sea, establishing emporiums and colonies from Cyprus in the east to the Aegean Sea, Italy, North Africa, and Spain in the west. They grew rich trading precious metals from abroad and products such as wine, olive oil, and most notably the timber from the famous cedars of Lebanon, which forested the mountains that rise steeply from the coast of their homeland.

The armies and peoples that eventually conquered the Phoenicians either destroyed or built over their cities. Their writings, mostly on fragile papyrus, disintegrated—so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity. That's ironic, because the Phoenicians actually developed the modern alphabet and spread it through trade to their ports of call.

Acting as cultural middlemen, the Phoenicians disseminated ideas, myths, and knowledge from the powerful Assyrian and Babylonian worlds in what is now Syria and Iraq to their contacts in the Aegean. Those ideas helped spark a cultural revival in Greece, one which led to the Greeks' Golden Age and hence the birth of Western civilization. The Phoenicians imported so much papyrus from Egypt that the Greeks used their name for the first great Phoenician port, Byblos, to refer to the ancient paper. The name Bible, or "the book," also derives from Byblos.

Today, Spencer Wells says, "Phoenicians have become ghosts, a vanished civilization." Now he and Zalloua hope to use a different alphabet, the molecular letters of DNA, to exhume these ghosts.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0 ... index.html


Phoenicia on the Wiki...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia


Regards, GR.

AND??

What is in this post that we didn't already know? What are you attempting to prove here GR, if anything?

[Get Real!]

Give it up Paphitis, because it’s by no accident that Cypriots and the Lebanese look so much alike and have always been so close (not just geographically close).

Agreed!

It is also no accident that Hellenism is the one and only surviving influence in Cyprus... So why is that so?

You also can't differentiate between a Greek or Cypriot, apart from dialect. And even that is not so between Cypriots and Greeks from Crete, Rhodos and Kos.

You mean like the “Hellenic” alphabet/language which came from…

Phoenician -> Cypriot - > Greek

More accurately described as:

Phoenician -> Greek Cyprus -> rest of Greek world

Rubbish! There’s no such thing as “Greek Cyprus”, and whoever heard of “rest of Greek world”? You’ve got some serious delusions Simon!

[Get Real!]

Who were the Phoenicians?

AND??

What is in this post that we didn't already know? What are you attempting to prove here GR, if anything?

I'm EDUCATING your uneducated Greek compatriots so that they may stop making fools of them selves by claiming that Phoenicians were Greek!

[Piratis]

Who were the Phoenicians?

AND??

What is in this post that we didn't already know? What are you attempting to prove here GR, if anything?

I'm EDUCATING your uneducated Greek compatriots so that they may stop making fools of them selves by claiming that Phoenicians were Greek!

Who made such claim?

There’s no such thing as “Greek Cyprus”

Cyprus is as Greek as any other Greek island or Greek territory. Also Cyprus is more Greek than say "Istanbul" is Turkish, Paris is French or London is English.

If the point that you are trying to make is that in Cyprus people existed and exist who are not Greek, then you are really not telling us anything new or extraordinary. There are very few places in our world which are inhabited exclusively by just one ethnicity.

t is amazing that the Hellenistic culture, language and identity survived so many invasions and occupations in Cyprus!

Paphitis, you are right in this, but the Phoenicians were not invaders of Cyprus. The Phoenicians created their own colony in Cyprus, the didn't invade or occupy what belonged to others, and they lived peacefully along with the rest of the population in Cyprus for centuries until they were gradually assimilated.

[Get Real!]

Who made such claim?

Yialousa, and that Tsokos girl.

There’s no such thing as “Greek Cyprus”

Cyprus is as Greek as any other Greek island or Greek territory.

It’s all in your head Piratis… you're imagining things.

[CBBB]

Who made such claim?

Yialousa, and that Tsokos girl.

There’s no such thing as “Greek Cyprus”

Cyprus is as Greek as any other Greek island or Greek territory.

It’s all in your head Piratis… you're imagining things.

He needs to go down Trikoupi Street in the evening to see how Greek Cyprus is!

[Get Real!]

Who made such claim?

Yialousa, and that Tsokos girl.

There’s no such thing as “Greek Cyprus”

Cyprus is as Greek as any other Greek island or Greek territory.

It’s all in your head Piratis… you're imagining things.

He needs to go down Trikoupi Street in the evening to see how Greek Cyprus is!

Sorry mate, I can't remember which one that is...