Phoenicia

Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic group of people who lived in the Phoenician city-states along a coastal strip in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily modern Lebanon and the Syrian coast.

• Had it not been for waves of continental invaders, Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians and the destruction of Phoenician libraries, we may have been talking more of our debt to Phoenicians and Greeks rather than Greeks only, but Greece was to survive due to its geography and tenacity of its people.
  • Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022)

• The Sidonians according to tradition, are skilled in many beautiful arts, as the poet [Homer] also points out, and besides this they are philosophers in the science of astronomy and arithmetic, having begun their studies with practical calculations and with night sailings, for each of these branches of knowledge concerns the merchant and the shipowner; as for example, geometry…is believed to have come to the Greeks from the Egyptians, astronomy and arithmetic from the Phoenicians; and at present by far the greatest store of knowledge in every other branch of philosophy is to be had from these cities. And if one believes Posidonius’, (c. 135–51 BC) the greatest polymath of his time whose vast body of work has been lost, ‘the ancient dogma about atoms originated with Mochus, a Sidonian, born before the Trojan times…In my time there have been famous philosophers from Sidon.
  • Strabo, Geography. Book XVI Chapter II paragraph 24