New Location of Ancient Phoenician City

Archaeologists think they found the real ancient location of the Phoenician city called Aüza, the earliest African city of the Phoenician civilization that existed 3,500 years ago.

Phoenicians were seafaring people that lived between 1,550 BC and 300 BC, very famous for their shipbuilding abilities and seamanship as well as for their alphabet.

As they explored the Mediterranean the same time that Greeks did, they spread their writing system through the Middle East , North Africa and Europe and it is believed that this is the foundation of all modern alphabets.

Ancient written records claim that Aüza existed by none specifies the exact location of the ancient city.

Emeritus classics professor Sir John Boardman of the Beazley Archive at Britain's University of Oxford, by studying many ancient maps and records, has been able to find a more probable site for th city, as he claims.

He told LiveScience that it “is simply a matter of making a suggestion of where the place is actually to be located on a map,” and that “too many people have wanted to put it much too far away.”

Previous historic studies have established that Aüza was probably far to the west, beyond Carthage and Tunisia, which is the northernmost country in Africa, but Boardman says that the city lies at a site called Aziris, nearer Egypt and Phoenicia – on today’s Israel and Lebanon.

In the paper that describes his findings published in the August issue of the Oxford Journal of Archeology, Boardman wrote that Aüza was a port city that gave Phoenicians a foothold on the African continent.

Aziris would have been the perfect location for a “good anchorage, with a defensible promontory and easy access inland.”

But because Aziris has had many names throughout history and due to the lack of precise information on where Aüza really was, there has always been a confusion about the exact location of the site of this ancient city.

Even if Boardman is not sure 100% that he has found the right location, he sustains that Aziris is the most likely location to have hosted Aüza.