The Phoenicians did not invent maritime trade, which had already existed in the Mediterranean and Near East long before, but from approximately the 12th-10th century BC onward they build, out of the city-states of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, the first systematic, large-scale trade network of the Mediterranean: a chain of trading posts and permanent colonies — Cyprus, Rhodes, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Ibiza, southern Iberia, North Africa (with Carthage, founded around 814 BC, the most prominent) — that economically connects the entire Mediterranean basin and extends beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic, reaching the coasts of Britain and West Africa. Through this network they systematically export manufactured and agricultural products they themselves did not invent but did standardize, transport, and popularize at unprecedented scale: the alphabet, Tyrian purple, glass, and viticulture/olive cultivation — introducing vineyards and olive groves in their colonies of Carthage, southern Iberia, and other points, with standardized amphorae imitated for more than two thousand years into the Byzantine period. This trade network was the main vehicle for cultural diffusion in Mediterranean antiquity, serving as a transmission channel between the Near East, Egypt, and the emerging Greek and Roman world.