the attempt by certain roman personalities to erase carthage from history is well understood and i don't want to challenge it. it's not unique, either - they did the same thing to the celts, and failed to carry through with the greek, but at one point began to try before pulling back. every paving stone was removed from the city of corinth, which then ceased to exist.

however, the fact that we have literally nothing at all written in phoenician - that nothing survived. at all. - generates some questions in my mind about the centrality of the canaanites to writing. i understand that the idea that the lebanese invented writing is something that some greeks told us, but there's lots of things that some greeks told us that are incorrect. you'd think we'd have something. we have nothing.

it's the greeks themselves that have left us the most writing, and the evidence seems to suggest that that's really where the idea came from. i think that the story in herodotus is likely confused.

it's possible that the sea peoples, or the hyksos, brought the letters from greece to the levant, that it was transformed there and that it came back. the evidence seems to be that the greeks forgot how to write in the bronze age collapse and subsequent greek dark age, and then remembered again when the idea was imported back from the middle east. in fact, that's similar to what happened in our more recent dark age.

but if the idea was middle eastern in origin, the evidence - beyond herodotus - should uphold it, and it really doesn't. we have to trot out cato to explain it, and it seems like mythology. it seems far more complicated than it should be.

if all of the evidence of early writing is in the aegean and the balkans (despite the subsequent dark age that herodotus was on the renaissance end of), i'm willing to take the leap and dispense of the conspiratorial approach to history. occam's razor is enough for me.