The Phoenicians were involved in coastal trade from as early as 3000 BC. (a wreck discovered at Galeidonya, on the southern coast of Turkey dates from 1375 BC, and items discovered on it show it came from a developed maritime trading society on the Canaanite coast). The first clients they would have found Southwards along their coast from their cities at Tyre, Byblos, Sidon, Sarepta, Aradus, and Ugarit, would have been the Egyptians, who were engaged in a fever of Pyramid building fuelled by the wealth provided by the fertility of the Nile basin. The first products they traded were timbers for building construction from the cedar trees for which Lebanon is still renown, Phoenician crafts which were valued in Egypt, such as the manufacture of glass, silk from their trading with tribes to the east, possibly originating in India, and which the Phoenicians dyed with the purple ink they obtained from a marine snail found on their coast, a whelk, the Murex Murex, (other shades of purple requiring the addition of inks from other species of marine snails, all of which were more or less common throughout the Mediterranean).

This purple silk was favoured by aristocratic Egyptians, and was extremely expensive. It was later adopted by the Romans and later by the Royal Houses of Europe ; the colour has become known as "Tyrrhian Purple" or "Royal Purple". Its high cost led the Romans to use a white toga with a narrow band of purple material. The process was tedious and consequently expensive. For example the length necessary to make one robe would have been sold for the equivalent of the wages of a sea-captain for one year. (The greatest extravagance of all time was perhaps on the flagship of Cleopatra's fleet, which is said to have sported a mainsail of Tyrrhian Purple.) Some authorities attribute the name Phoenicia to the Greeks, and a word of theirs meaning "Purple". One of their high-value, small-volume, ground-breaking products was glass for containers for liquids. This could well have been discovered as a by-product of the casting of bronze in the desert, a process described in Kings 1 in connection with the construction of the first temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. In order to provide these products and services they built their own port at the Nile Delta near to what was to become Alexandria.

As Egypt grew more powerful, and united its North and South Kingdoms it expanded its land frontiers, and in 1800 BC Egypt invaded, and occupied all the Canaanite settlements on the Eastern Mediterranean coast including their Nile port.

The occupation did not appear to change the commercial relationship, and throughout the period of occupation and after it, about 1100 BC, trading with Egypt continued.

2. Phoenician Geographical Expansion

What had started as a group of three independent defensible coastal towns, Tyre, Byblos, and Sidon, was by now a string of hundreds settlements and trading posts which had gone beyond the Nile delta and inexorably grew, in some stretches of coast by the pact of "blind bargaining" with the peoples there, and in other areas, devoid of resistance, by settlement along the North African Coast and the Eastern Mediterranean Islands, Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Sicily, Malta, reaching the Atlantic Coast as far south as Mogador on the Atlantic coast of what is now Morocco, and including the entire Iberian Coast from Huelva in the West to beyond Valencia in the East. The Eastern Mediterranean is not a windy sea and the Phoenicians' principal means of propulsion was the oar. The settlements were laid out a day's rowing from one to the next, about every 30 to 60 miles. The purpose of this continued expansion was to obtain more raw material for the trade with Egypt and with the tribes to the east.

3. Metallurgy and Military Power

In 2500 B.C. the peoples around the Mediterranean basin were still in the New Stone Age or Neolithic, having Copper as the only available metal. On arrival on the Atlantic coast of France the Phoenicians came for the first time upon tin, and either devised or learned the technology necessary to convert it to Bronze by combining it with Copper, which was freely available in the Middle East. Bronze is a far superior material to Copper for practically all purposes, it is stronger to use for weapons and as armour for men and fixings and cladding for ships, and is less prone to rusting. This would be the equivalent today, if such a parallel is wise or possible, of one country coming secretly on the only source of Uranium for Nuclear weapons. So important was this to them that they named North-western France "Barra Tannica" the land of Tin, from which the names Brittany and consequently Britain come. Some specialists claim the Druids, the Celtic religious hierarchy, controlled the trade in tin at all its sources, from Cornwall in the North through Western France and Galicia, to Huelva in the South, and it was therefore perhaps natural that the Phoenicians should decide to try to prevent any other Mediterranean sea-going people from reaching the source of their security and the military power, which gave them complete control of their world for over 1000 years.

This is my hypothesis on how they set about doing so.