Before Phoenicians became a great civilization, they were just a bunch of cities in what today is Lebanon. These cities lived among empires for a long time, the Greeks to the West, the Persians to the East, and the Egyptians to the South-West, and they survived thanks to trade. The region in which they lived was in the middle of trading routes between these empires and other cultures and, since they lived in the coastline of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, they became great sailors. They combined their sailing abilities with their commerce abilities to trade different goods -wood, slaves, glass- throughout the Mediterranean and, slowly, became a great rich naval and trading power. They traveled as far as the Iberian peninsula in order to get silver and then sell it to the Egyptians. They traded so much and so many different goods that they needed to establish several colonies in strategical points around the Mediterranean Sea, so they could get raw materials and manufactured goods from the sources much faster. Therefore, they made colonies in North-Africa, in what today is Tunisia and called it Carthage -their most important colony-, in the Iberian peninsula, in Sicily, in Cyprus among many others. They were present in these sites for many centuries and gained a great political influence in the entire region. Thanks to their colonies and influence, their culture was spread around the Mediterranean, especially their alphabet, which was the first writing system to be disseminated in this region. The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of the Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic alphabets, among others.