Phoenician languages
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Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region of what is now Lebanon. Phoenician was a Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup, closely related to Hebrew. It is known only from inscriptions - such as Ahiram's coffin, Kilamuwa's tomb, Yehawmilk's at Byblos, etc. - and occasional glosses in books in other languages; Roman authors such as Sallust allude to books in Punic, but none have survived (except occasionally in translation; eg Mago's treatise.) The significantly divergent later form of the language that was spoken in the Phoenician colony Carthage is known as Punic; it remained in use for considerably longer than Phoenician did in Phoenicia itself, surviving certainly into Augustine's time and possibly as late as the Arab conquest, if an ambiguous comment of the geographer Byblos and date back to ca. 1000 BC. Phoenician and Punic inscriptions are found in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and other locations as late as the early centuries of the Christian Era.
Knowledge of Hebrew aided the reconstruction of Phoenician inscriptions. One of the earliest essays in Phoenician language studies was Wilhelm Gesenius (1786 - 1842), Scripturae linguaeque phoeniciae monumenta, 1837, analyzing texts from coins and monumental inscriptions. Nowadays one can study Phoenician in the U.S. at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan and University of Chicago (the only place to study advanced Phoenician).
(see also Phoenician alphabet.)
