Great Explorers The Phoenicians are fabled for their role in the gathering, improvement, and dissemination of goods and ideas in the Mediterranean. It is a part that suited them well since their career calling in trade brought them in contact with so many people. Over the more than 3000 years of their tumultuous existence, they established vital communities all along the Levantine coast, in Cyprus, Malta, Sardinia, Sicily, along the North African coast, the Balearic Islands and the southern Spanish coast, and even as far away as the Atlantic Coast of Morocco. The Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II (610-595 BC) is recorded as having supported a Phoenician-led circumnavigation of Africa... 2100 years before Portugal's Bartolomeu Dias first rounded the Cape of Good Hope! Hannon, a Phoenician from the city of Carthage, repeated this feat in the mid-5th century BC. There is evidence today that these same Carthaginians may have pushed as far afield as the Azores and Britain.