Tyre, Temple, and Trades: Social Imaginaries, Universal Infrastructure and the Emergence of an Archaic Maritime Identity

Alfred T. Mahan reflected back upon history in his search for the principles underlying the nature and role of sea power. This paper takes the same approach by looking at Tyre, a small Phoenician city on the coast of Lebanon that emerged from the collapse of the Bronze Age (1200-1000) to become a significant maritime power in the ancient world. Tyre sat at the geographic , economic, cultural, temporal, and cosmic pivot of the Mesopotamian and Nile river civilizations and, through trade and temple, spread a universal infrastructure of literacy, religion, and technology throughout the Mediterranean Seas. Tyre became a crucial link between the Ancient Near East and the the Greco-Roman world that would emerge through interaction with those civilizations. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach. It combines Mahanian strategic thought, social imaginaries, sources of social power, relevancy theory, and Biblical exegesis in the service of historiography. The question is why Tyre developed maritime identity. The answer is found in her cosmogony, sacred geography and belief and the contrast that drew with her neighbor, a regional power, of the tribes of Israel. Tyre was a maritime archetype, emerging from a world of mythos into a world of logos, or our contemporary world of logic and reason. An important link binding past to present, she bound her maritime world with her gods, and began the process of stitching together the modern western world. Threw was an early archetype of the Mahanian vision sea power.