Phoenician Routes – A general overview.

The Phoenicians were among the greatest traders and sailors of their time and owed much of their prosperity to trade. Coming from the Lebanese area originally, they knew track routes and were able to navigate at night,  orientating themselves through the North Star. 
They practiced coastal navigation, in order to attack the enemy in case of difficulty, stock up with  fresh water and food, and trade with local people. They were able to produce, with the cedar wood, very sturdy ships, suitable for trade, which could contain large quantities of goods.

At first, they traded mainly with the Greeks, trading wood, slaves, glass and powdered Tyrian Purple. Tyrian Purple was a violet-purple dye used by the Greek elite to color garments. In fact, the word Phoenician derives from the Ancient Greek word phoínios meaning "purple". As trading and colonizing spread over the Mediterranean, Phoenicians and Greeks seemed to have unconsciously split that sea in two: the Phoenicians sailed along and eventually dominating the southern shore, while the Greeks were active along the northern shores. The two cultures clashed rarely, mainly in Sicily, which eventually settled into two spheres of influence, the Phoenician southwest and the Greek northeast.

In the centuries after 1200 BC, the Phoenicians were the major naval and trading power of the region. Phoenician trade was founded on the Tyrian Purple dye, a violet-purple dye derived from the shell of the Murex sea-snail, once profusely available in coastal waters of the eastern Mediterranean. Brilliant textiles were a part of Phoenician wealth, and Phoenician glass was another export ware. In Egypt, where grapevines would not grow, the 8th-century Phoenicians sold wine: the wine trade with Egypt is vividly documented by the shipwrecks located in 1997 in the open sea 30 miles west of Ascalon. From Egypt, they bought Nubian gold.

From elsewhere, they obtained other materials, perhaps the most important being silver from Iberian Peninsula and tin from Great Britain, the latter of which when smelted with copper (from Cyprus) created the durable metal alloy bronze. 
The Phoenicians established commercial outposts throughout the Mediterranean, in particular through  Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Italy, Greece and Malta.