You will not find the word Phoenician used here as the name of a people. It is a Greek exonym — phoinix, “purple” — that those it labels never used of themselves; they were Tyre and Sidon, and the wider Semitic world to which Israel belonged.

For twenty-six centuries the western trade network was filed under that borrowed word without question, while any Hebrew hand in it was held to a standard no evidence could satisfy — in part because the script the two shared is one and the same, and no one was looking.

This Atlas keeps one standard for both. Where the ground names an actor, we name it — Tyrian, or Hebrew. Where the ground is silent, we say so plainly, and we do not let a borrowed word stand in as the answer.