Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic people who lived in city-states along the Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily in present-day Lebanon and parts of coastal Syria. Their cultural core stretched from Arwad to Mount Carmel, and they emerged directly from the Bronze Age Canaanites.
The Phoenicians were long regarded as a lost civilization because almost no native historical accounts or literature survived, so most knowledge of them came from other civilizations. They became better understood only after inscriptions were discovered in the 17th and 18th centuries, and after archaeological research from the mid-20th century onward.
Around 1050 BC the Phoenicians developed an alphabet of 22 letters, all consonants, believed to continue the earlier Proto-Sinaitic script. It spread through their trade to Anatolia, North Africa, and Europe, and gave rise to the Greek alphabet, which in turn produced the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
Tyrian purple was a violet-purple dye the Phoenicians extracted from the hypobranchial gland of the Murex marine snail. Their exclusive command of the dye and its labor-intensive extraction made it very expensive, turning it into a status symbol, most notably among the Romans.
The leading Phoenician city-states were Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, each politically autonomous with no shared national identity. Byblos was the early leading city and a center for bronze-making, while Tyre rose to become the richest and most powerful city-state by the tenth century BC.
Carthage was founded by Phoenicians from Tyre, with modern historians generally accepting the date of 814 BC given by the Greek historian Timaeus. Its Punic name, Qart-Ḥadašt, means New City, and it grew into a major power by the seventh century BC before Rome destroyed it in the Punic Wars fought between 264 and 146 BC.