The Phoenicians or Canaanites are linguistically regarded as a Semitic people, who among their many achievements are credited with giving us our alphabet. The descendants of the Phoenicians are to be found in great numbers in modern Lebanon.

The Phoenicians have been frequently identified as the Atlanteans of Plato’s narrative. The supporters of a Bronze Age date for the invasion of the Atlanteans see in the Phoenicians the powerful far flung maritime civilisation described by Plato. However, this identification is in conflict with Plato’s statement that Atlantis, or its influence, extended as far as Tyrrhenia and Libya, whereas the Phoenicians had their original base further east in the region of modern Lebanon and Israel.

It is worth noting that the Phoenician commercial empire began with the three cities of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. They expanded with the establishment of trading settlements along the Mediterranean coast usually separated by a day’s rowing – somewhere between 30 to 60 miles.

Jonas Bergman recently presented a paper on the subject of the Phoenician association with the Atlantis story to the 2005 Melos Atlantis conference. He outlined how Plato’s description of Atlantis was similar to the western colonies of the Phoenicians.

Some writers such as the German Robert Prutz have advocated the idea that Phoenicians had discovered America, where he also placed Atlantis. However, in spite of the fact that there is widespread support for this concept and the even more extreme claims of Phoenicians in Australia, a Lebanese website^(d), in the  original home of Phoenicia, discounts all such claims for lack of evidence.

The late Sabatino Moscati, a renowned linguist and archaeologist, wrote a highly regarded work^[505] on the subject of the Phoenicians. Additionally, there is an invaluable website^(a) available that covers all aspects of Phoenician culture. This same site^(b), drawing on the work of Ignatius Donnelly, identifies the kings of Atlantis with the Phoenician pantheon and claims that the gods of the Greeks were also the deified Atlantean kings.

Jacques Hébert, who places Atlantis in the Indian Ocean on the island of Socotra, suggests that the Atlanteans had a colony in the eastern Mediterranean whose inhabitants developed into the Phoenicians!

^(a) http://phoenicia.org/index.shtml

^(b) http://phoenicia.org/atlantisplato.html