Barry Cunliffe goes into slightly more detail about these various Phoenician and Carthaginian exploits in his more substantial tome, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000BC-AD1500 (2001, Oxford University Press). See especially pages 88-91, 297-302.

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For a little more on the Phoenicians, Egypt, and Necho II's commercial activities, there's this from Glenn E. Markoe's The Phoenicians (2000, The British Museum Press):

"[...] The Phoenicians clearly exploited their privileged position within the Achaemenid administrative hierarchy. Persian suzerainty and the empire's efficient communication network afforded them trade opportunities inland - with Mesopotamia and the Persian heartland itself. More importantly, Persian control allowed them to capitalize on maritime trade with Egypt and the Mediterranean.

"It was with such commercial objectives that the Phoenicians actively supported Persia's war efforts against Egypt and the western Greek realm. In the two preceding centuries, the PPhoenicians had faced increasing competition from Greek traders in the Mediterranean; by the late sixth and early fifth centuries, such rivalry had struck dangerously close to home in traditional Phoenician markets, such as Egypt, Rhodes, and Cyprus. Greek trade had even penetrated the northern Levantine mainland, where Aegean imports witnessed a dramatic increase in the early years of the fifth century. It comes as little surprise, then, that that the Phoenicians were, in Herodotus' words, 'the most zealous' of all Persia's naval allis in attacking the Ionian Greeks and the city of Miletus at the battle of Lade in 494 BC [...]. Miletus' subsequent destruction at the hands of the Persians thus eliminated a majjor commercial rival for the Phoenicians and opened up new avenues of trade in the Aegean. It was, no doubt, with the same hopes and expectations that the Phoenicians assisted Persia in its invasions of mainland Greece under Darius I and Xerxes (485-465BC) in the following decade.

"Similar commercial objectives fuelled [the Phoenician city-state of] Tyre's naval support of Cambyses in his advance upon Egypt in 525 BC. Here, too, during the previous 100 years, the Greeks had made serious inroads under the Saitic kings of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. Already in the seventh century, under Psammetichus I, they had established a military base - the first of several on the eastern, Pelusiac branch of the Nile Delta, the Phoenician point of entry for Egyptian trade. In the last quarter of the sixth century, as archaeological investigation has revealed, the Ionian Greeks had established a substantial port settlement in the Nile Delta at Naukratis, in the vicinity of Sais, Egypt's Twenty-sixth Dynasty capital. In the decades prior to the Persian attack, the Greek trading town had reached its commercial apogee under the patronage of Amasis, Egypt's philhellene king. The Persian conquest of Egypt brought about a dramatic alteration in Egyptian foreign trade, which now once again favoured the Levant. The loss of Greek initiative is reflected at Naukratis itself, which underwent a rapid decline in the years following the Persian conquest.

"The Tyrians were well positioned to benefit from trade with Persian-controlled Egypt, recouping momentum lost in the earlier years of the sixth century, when the Nile kingdom, under Necho II, assumed the initiative in foreign trade with a newly created fleet of triremes. Necho himself utilized Phoenician sailors in an exploratory expedition from the Red Sea aimed at circumnavigating Africa. Amasis' own political initiatives in the Mediterranean prior to the Persian conquest, which included alliances with Samos and perhaps Cyprus, must have raised some concern in Phoenician trade circles.

"Phoenician commercial activity in Egypt under the Persians is evidenced by the presence of a Tyrian commercial establishment at Memphis, known as the 'Camp of the Tyrians', which Herodotus himself visited. Egypt's administrative capital, site of the naval dockyards, had long been the centre of Phoenician trade in the Nile Delta. It was in the eastern hinterland of Memphis that Darius I, in the final decades of the sixth centry, completed construction of a canal begun by Necho, connecting the Nile with the Red Sea at the mouth of the Gulf of Suez. Its existence, noted in antiquity by Herodotus, has been confirmed by the discovery of a series of red granite commemorative stelae erected along its course by Darius.

"Long reputed as maritime engineers, the Phoenicians may well have been instrumental in the canal's construction, as they were two decades later on a Persian-made channel of corresponding width across the Mount Athos peninsula in northern Greece. At any rate, they must surely have benefited directly as intermediaries in the Egyptian Red Sea trade now facilitated by the canal. It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine that, in return for their naval services, the Tyrians were granted a commercial concession in such transit trade by the Persians themselves. Phoenician commercial involvement at this time in the trade betweeen the Mediterranean and the Red Sea is clearly attested by the presence of Phoenician inscriptions at Tell el-Kheleifeh at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqabah" (pp. 50-51).

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For more on Necho II, the reassertion of Egyptian strength at this time, the weakening of the Assyrian empire, the expansion of the Babylonians, and the death of Josiah, king of Judah, at Megiddo in 609 BCE at the hands of Necho (the year after he succeeded to the throne), it's intriguing to investigate the various interpretations of the following two contradictory accounts found in the Bible:

In his days Pharaoh Necho king of Egypt went up to the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates. King Josiah went to meet him; and Pharaoh Necho slew him at Megiddo, when he saw him (2 Kings 23:29).

Necho king of Egypt went up to fight at Carchemish on the Euphrates and Josiah went out against him. But he [Necho] sent envoys to him, saying, ‘What have we to do with each other, king of Judah? I am not coming against you this day’ … Nevertheless Josiah would not turn away from him … but joined battle in the plain of Megiddo. And the archers shot King Josiah; and the king said to his servants, ‘Take me away, for I am badly wounded’. So his servants took him out of the chariot and carried him in his second chariot and brought him to Jerusalem. And he died, and was buried in the tombs of his fathers'. (2 Chronicles 35:20-24)

Most contemporary interpretations tend to doubt the account in Chronicles of an actual battle at Mediggo (in keeping with Chronicles' tendency to embellish many of its narratives, or to assimilate elements from other narratives), and favour the less embellished account in Kings, which seems to suggest that Necho arranged to meet Josiah at Megiddo (perhaps so that Josiah could swear allegiance to him, as befitted a new pharaoh), but had Josiah murdered 'when he saw him'. As Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman write in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (2001): "What did Josiah do that infuriated the Egyptian monarch? Josiah's [expansionist] drive to the north, into the Samaria hill country, could have threatened the Egyptian interests in the Jezreel valley. Or perhaps an attempt by Josiah to expand to the west, beyond his territories in the Shephelah, could have endangered Egyptian interests in Philistia. No less plausible is Baruch Halpern's suggestion that Necho could have been angered by independent policies of Josiah in the south, along the sensitive routes of the Arabian trade" (pp. 292). This last suggestion, in particular, seems to tie in quite neatly with what's been said elsewhere about Necho II's attempts to assert Egyptian control over the various foreign trade networks. Speculation, admittedly, but not entirely implausible.

Damian