Think of the Phoenicians and you picture movement — ships sliding across the Mediterranean like knives, sailors who spoke half the world’s languages, traders who knew every port tavern between Tyre and Cádiz. They gave the world letters, colonies, and a maritime empire stitched together by cedar ships and sheer nerve. But beneath all that swagger was something far simpler and far more human: the food that fueled them.

Their homeland was a thin ribbon of coastline, but it punched way above its weight. Behind rocky harbors and fortified cities were valleys like the Bekaa — quiet, fertile, impossibly green — where vines twisted in the sun and olive trees dropped fruit like clockwork. This was the engine room of Phoenician cuisine: oil, wine, bread. The holy trinity of the Mediterranean long before anyone wrote it down.

Bread came in every form the ancient world could imagine — flat, puffy, crisp from a clay oven or blistered on a hot stone. Olive oil was everywhere: poured over vegetables, mixed with herbs, rubbed into meat. Wine flowed like river water, sweet or sharp or spiced depending on which port the amphora had sailed from. They lived off the land, but they also lived off the sea — grilled fish at dawn, dried fish for the road, salted fish for the ship, and garum, that funky fermented sauce they helped spread across half the world.

We don’t have their cookbooks. They didn’t leave us poetic odes to dinner like the Greeks, or elaborate manuals like the Romans. What we have is the debris — charred barley in hearths that went cold three thousand years ago, amphorae that once held wine or oil, fishing hooks dropped between stones, spice jars that somehow survived the long fall of cities.

And what we can piece together is a people who cooked the way they sailed: by instinct, by curiosity, by borrowing whatever worked. Lamb and goat stewed with thyme and coriander. Pickled vegetables that could survive a storm. Honey-dipped pastries that tasted like luxury in a world without sugar. Fish cured until it could carry a sailor from Sidon to Sicily.

Trade was their real recipe book. Every voyage added another flavor — Egyptian preservation tricks, Mesopotamian spice blends, Arabian aromatics, Cypriot cheeses. The Mediterranean wasn’t just a sea to them. It was a pantry.

And the echoes are still here. In a platter of mezze in Beirut. In olives slick with oil. In figs dried to the color of mahogany. In the sharp, briny hit of preserved fish. The Phoenicians may be long gone, their cities crumbled or buried, but bite into the food of the Levant and you can still taste them — sailors leaning against a ship’s rail, tearing bread with their hands as the horizon tilts and the wind fills their sails.