Whatever happened to the Phoenicians?

 It have wondered for some time why one of the greatest empires in world history, the Phoenician Empire, is nearly scrubbed from western history.  These were also the smart people who also invented the alphabet.  Instead, we learn a lot of made up details about a nearby backwater tribe of no such grand distinctions who made themselves famous for male genital mutilation and recasting religious stories largely invented elsewhere.  That the pseudo-history of this tribe (regarded as God's Truth by many) barely mentions the concurrent activities of the adjacent Phoenician Empire has always made me very suspicious.

The grand conspiracy theorist Miles Mathis has written a grand essay on this.  First he notices that the era of the Phoencians greatest success, 1200-800 BCE, which is called a "Dark Age" in western history, wasn't so dark after all.  Mathis shows that it was deliberately blacked out, to hide the success of the Phoenicians.

In our academic (as opposed to biblical) history, the Phoenicians were first defeated by the Persians.  But Mathis shows that this supposed defeat never happened.  Instead, what seems to have happened is that Phoenicians married into the royal lines of Persia, and eventually took them over.  So Persia and Phoenicia became the same thing.  And then this happened again with Greece, with Alexander (who was probably more Phoenician than Greek).  And through Alexander, the next was Egypt.

And then Mathis shows the Pheoenicians followed that model the world over.  All the royal European lines are basically Phoenicians who wormed their way in.

In Mathis' telling, once the Phoenicians had mastered trade, they decided that wasn't good enough.  They wanted to directly ingest the wealth of their partners with a straight pipe, and this is how they did it.  Largely with marriage, secrets, and clandestine activities.  We are still ruled by Phoenicians today (and we wish they'd do a better job).

Then what about the Jews?  They are of course Phoenicians too.  Both are semitic (despite some attempt by Victorian scholars to recast Phoenicians as Aryan).  Possibly one in the same.  They have a folk history in the Holy Bible to confuse people, conveniently owning all "Abrahamic Religion" sides.

I'm not saying this far out conspiracy theory that Phoenicians still run the world is true.  But after reading Mathis, it's clear that most of what we think we know is lies, lies meant to hide inconvenient truths about our past so we don't fully understand the present.

And it also underlines a point I keep trying to make against racial supremacists: We are all more closely related than you think.

So I can state with very high probability than indeed I am descended from both Cyrus and Darian, and yes Abraham and David (if they even existed) and James the Brother of Jesus (if not Jesus himself, if he existed and has surviving ancestors).  Over 2000 years, the probability of any descent you could think of is over 80% and over 3000 years it's over 90%.

So, basically, we are all Phoenicians now.  (They REALLY got around, too.)

Though it's possible there's an inner Phoenician elite most of us are not part of.  Well, that may be at least partly the elite we know.  Not many who could choose would choose to live in ordinary circumstances (or worse) as disguise.