FROM THE PHOENICIANS TO THE MAMELUKES -- the Jerusalem Post has a Tourism piece on the ancient city of Apollonia (Arshuf):

In the blink of an eye...
By CARL HOFFMAN

Silently overlooking the Mediterranean, a mere 15 kilometers north of bustling Tel Aviv, stand the ruins of an ancient city. The broken fragments of centuries-old walls seem to hang almost desperately to the tops of fossilized sandstone cliffs in what is now an empty, windblown stretch of the coast in Herzliya.

Known as Apollonia, the name it was given early in its history by the ancient Greeks, this lonely spot perched high above the pounding ocean waves is little known and seldom visited. The place is nonetheless a national treasure.

Archaeological excavations revealing the remains of more than 1,800 years of continuous occupation were begun by Tel Aviv University (TAU) in 1996, and a national archaeological park was established by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority in 2002. According to what we know so far - archaeological work continues periodically - the first people to call this starkly beautiful place home were the Phoenicians, who established a settlement in the sixth century B.C.E.

Who were these Phoenicians? Related culturally and linguistically to the ancient Canaanites, these maritime people built boats and took to the sea from the coast of Lebanon, sailing and trading throughout the Mediterranean, and even establishing a colony on the coast of North Africa which they called, in their Hebrew-related West Semitic language, Karta Hadasht ("New City"), or Carthage. This was the Carthage that later challenged Rome for supremacy of the Mediterranean, and whose great general Hannibal led a mighty army equipped with elephants across the Alps.

Back here, meanwhile, the Phoenicians named their settlement on the coast of today's Herzliya Arshuf, in honor of Resheph, the Canaanite god of war, plague and the underworld. The Phoenician town grew rich, fishing for murex mollusks in the nearby coastal waters and producing from those aquatic snails a rare purple dye. This dye, which could be produced in only very small quantities, was prized by royalty throughout the Aegean and mentioned in both the Bible and the Talmud. Superior to plant-based dyes which were then most common, the purple mollusk dye was permanent. It was also precious: As one mollusk secreted only a few drops of the dye, thousands were thus needed to dye one single garment - or Tabernacle cloth.

[...]