Well, "Phoenician" itself is said to mean "purple" ("blood reddish"), although some of us prefer the idea that it means "carpenters" (coming from Egyptian "pheneku") - it makes more sense in terms of an expression "the Canaanite carpenters [of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos]" (all Canaanites, some of them in city states of that "special" region and culture).
Or: "Phoenicia" is a culturally sound area (the producers of lumber, dye etc., colonizers etc., in the Levantine coast) - not a Statal entity. The term is thought to have meant "those of the purple" or "those of the lumbers" within the Canaanites.
Take into account that you had * populations, * statal organizations, * empires. Chunks of populations could be organized into statal organizations, which could easily simply be city states. Their governments could be independent or subjected to other powers. An empire is the acquired power of an entity over statal organizations of different populations - the first empire being that of Sargon the Great of Akkad, ruling from -2334: he was ruler of the Akkadians but also conquered the Sumerian city states.
The whole history from Jericho (the first city, -10000) to, say, the "classical" period of the Graeco-Persian conflict (-490, -480) and Pericles in Athens (-461) is quite interesting, showing "history-in-the-making", the emergence of the patterns that will continue in later history and that will have prepared it. But I cannot indicate a single especially good source: I can only recommend the scattered material you will find around - and which will already show many inconsistencies, gaps, attempts, clashing of different proposals.
