Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic people who inhabited city-states in Canaan along the Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily in present-day Lebanon and parts of coastal Syria. Their maritime civilization expanded and contracted over time, with its cultural core stretching from Arwad to Mount Carmel. Through trade and colonization, the Phoenicians extended their influence across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula, leaving behind thousands of inscriptions.

The Phoenicians emerged directly from the Bronze Age Canaanites, continuing their cultural traditions after the Late Bronze Age collapse into the Iron Age with little disruption. They referred to themselves as Canaanites and their land as Canaan, though the territory they occupied was smaller than that of earlier Bronze Age Canaan. The name Phoenicia is a Greek exonym that did not correspond to a unified native identity. Modern scholarship generally views the distinction between Canaanites and Phoenicians after c. 1200 BC as artificial.

Renowned for seafaring and trade, the Phoenicians established one of antiquity's most extensive maritime networks, active for over a millennium. This network facilitated exchanges among cradles of civilization such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. They founded colonies and trading posts throughout the Mediterranean; among these, Carthage in North Africa developed into a major power by the seventh century BC.

Phoenician society was organized into independent city-states, notably Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. Each retained political autonomy, and there is no evidence of a shared national identity. While kingship was common, powerful merchant families likely exercised influence through oligarchies. The Phoenician cities flourished most in the ninth century BC, but subsequently declined under the expansion of empires such as the Neo-Assyrian and Achaemenid. Their influence nevertheless endured in the western Mediterranean until the Roman destruction of Carthage in the mid-second century BC.

Long regarded as a "lost" civilization due to the absence of native historical accounts, the Phoenicians became better understood only after the discovery of inscriptions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Since the mid-twentieth century, archaeological research has revealed their significance in the ancient world. Their most enduring legacy is the development of the earliest verified alphabet, derived from Proto-Sinaitic script, which spread across the Mediterranean gave rise to the Greek alphabet and in turn the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, as well as influencing Syriac and Arabic writing systems. They also contributed innovations in shipbuilding, navigation, industry, agriculture, and governance. Their commercial networks are considered foundational to the economic and cultural development of classical Mediterranean civilization.

Being a society of independent city-states, the Phoenicians apparently did not have a term to denote the land of Phoenicia as a whole; instead, demonyms were often derived from the name of the city a person hailed from (e.g., Sidonian for Sidon, Tyrian for Tyre, etc.) There is no evidence that the peoples living in the area denoted as Phoenicia identified as "Phoenicians" or shared a common identity, although they may have referred to themselves as "Canaanites". Krahmalkov reconstructs the Honeyman inscription (dated to c. 900 BC by William F. Albright) as containing a reference to the Phoenician homeland, calling it Pūt (Phoenician: 𐤐𐤕).

Furthermore, as late as the first century BC, a distinction appears to have been made between 'Syrian' and 'Phoenician' people, as evidenced by the epitaph of Meleager of Gadara: 'If you are a Syrian, Salam! If you are a Phoenician, Naidius! If you are a Greek, Chaire! (Hail), and say the same yourself.'

Obelisks at Karnak contain references to a "land of fnḫw", fnḫw being the plural form of fnḫ, the Ancient Egyptian word for 'carpenter'. This "land of carpenters" is generally identified as Phoenicia, given that Phoenicia played a central role in the lumber trade of the Levant. As an exonym, fnḫw was evidently loaned into Greek as φοῖνιξ, phoînix, which meant variably 'Phoenician person', 'Tyrian purple, crimson' or 'date palm'. Homer used it with each of these meanings. The word is already attested in Linear B script of Mycenaean Greek from the 2nd millennium BC, as po-ni-ki-jo. In those records, it means 'crimson' or 'palm tree' and does not denote a group of people. The name Phoenicians, like Latin Poenī (adj. poenicus, later pūnicus), comes from Greek Φοινίκη, Phoiníkē. According to Krahmalkov, Poenulus, a Latin comedic play written in the early 2nd century BC, appears to preserve a Punic term for the Phoenician/Punic language which may be reconstructed as Pōnnīm, a point disputed by Joseph Naveh, a professor of West Semitic epigraphy and palaeography at the Hebrew University.