For most of the first millennium BCE, the Mediterranean was a Phoenician sea. From their home cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos along the coast of modern Lebanon, Phoenician merchants ran the longest-distance trading network of the ancient world. They sailed to Britain for tin, to Spain for silver, to Egypt for grain. They founded Carthage in 814 BCE, which would later challenge Rome. They were probably the first to circumnavigate Africa — a 600 BCE expedition described by Herodotus.

They invented the alphabet. Around 1050 BCE, Phoenician scribes had refined an earlier proto-Sinaitic script into 22 simple consonant signs. The Greeks adopted it, added vowels, and passed it to the Romans. The Romans passed it to the rest of Europe. Every Latin-derived alphabet — every letter on this screen — descends from those 22 Phoenician marks.

But the Phoenicians left almost no records.

They wrote their own histories on papyrus, which the Mediterranean climate destroyed. The cities they wrote in were repeatedly conquered and burned — Tyre by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, Carthage by Rome in 146 BCE, with archives deliberately erased. Almost everything we know about the Phoenicians comes from people who hated them: Greek and Roman historians who portrayed them as treacherous merchants and child sacrificers.

You can name famous Greeks. Famous Romans. Famous Egyptians. Try to name a Phoenician. Most people can't. The civilization that gave us the technology of writing has, ironically, almost no surviving voices of its own. It survives in fragments: tombstones, ship cargo, the alphabet itself.

A whole civilization, almost edited out of history.