Phoenicians, City of Sidon, Silver Sixteenth Shekel

These silver one-sixteenth shekel coins were struck in the Phoenician city of Sidon. Each shows a war galley on the obverse and a king slaying a lion on the reverse.

The Phoenicians were an ancient seafaring people who lived in a network of independent city-states along the eastern Mediterranean coast, especially in what is now Lebanon. Major centers like Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre operated as politically separate communities rather than a single unified nation, and much of what we know about them comes from outside sources, since very few Phoenician historical writings survived.

For a long time, the Phoenicians were treated as a “missing” civilization in the historical record, but discoveries of Phoenician inscriptions beginning in the early modern era helped scholars understand them more clearly. Their greatest long-term contribution was the creation of one of the earliest confirmed alphabets, adapted from earlier scripts and later spread widely through Mediterranean trade, influencing Greek writing and eventually the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Phoenician merchants also established colonies across the sea, including Carthage—founded by settlers from Tyre as a strategic hub for trade and resupply—whose Punic name meant “New City.”

Phoenician power peaked around the 9th century BCE and later weakened under rising empires like the Assyrians and Persians. Their cultural and commercial impact ended with the Roman conquest of Carthage in the mid-2nd century BCE.

Each includes a Certificate of Authenticity.