The most visible traces of Phoenician culture that remain are its art; and alphabet.

In comparison with the extent of its power and influence, the artistic and intellectual achievements of the Phoenecians and Carthage were small.

As concerns the glass, its invention is often attributed to the Phoenicians, which effectively are at the origin of its speading in all the Mediterranean Sea. But this mistake dates from Pliny the Elder, who wrote about a group of Phoenician merchants that discovered it by chance lighting a fire on a beach while using pieces of nitro that they transported on their ship. They realized in that moment that the fused sand, mixed to this material, transformed itself in a liquid and transparent substance. In reality the glass was discovered by the Egyptians in the III millennium BC, and it was intensely used by the Phoenicians because it permitted to make many luxury objects (such as perfume bottles) at a low cost.

Their long voyages through the Mediterranean Sea equally permitted them to get rough materials which were manufactured and transformed before being sold in the different ports. Between these objects the most characteristic were the amulets and the ivory ciboriums, the drop-earrings and other luxury objects adorned with precious stones, and at last the jewels. The jeweller's craft reached a very refined level with the elaboration of new technics such as laminated and granulated gold. Glass paste necklace from Noa Fontana necropolis nearby Olbia. IV-III c. BC. National Archaeological Museum - Cagliari. If in the Eastern World or in Carthage the most utilised material was gold, in the Punic necropolis of Palermo the silver and the bronze were in majority (necklaces, bracelets, earrings...). All the same magnificent gold rings were found there.

What limited remains of buildings survive--mostly in North Africa and Sardinia--are utilitarian and uninspired. In the minor arts--pottery, jewelry, metalwork, objects in terra-cotta, and the thousands of carvings on stelae--a similar lack of inspiration may be felt. The influence of Phoenician, Egyptian, and Greek artistic traditions can be observed, but they failed to stimulate as they did, for example, in Etruria.

There is no evidence that Greek philosophy and literature made much impact, though certainly many Carthaginians in the city's later history knew Greek and there were libraries in the city. One written work is known, a treatise on agriculture by a certain Mago, but this may have been based on Hellenistic models. 

Gold earring from the necropolis of Palermo. A.Salinas Archaeological Museum Palermo 
On the whole, the Carthaginians adhered to traditional modes of thought, which no doubt gave them a sense of solidarity amid more numerous and hostile peoples. Their fanatical patriotism enabled them to offer a more prolonged resistance to Rome than any other power. Their influence on North African history was, in the first place, to bring it into the mainstream of the advancing civilization of the Mediterranean world; more particularly, it introduced into North Africa advanced techniques leading to agricultural progress, which implied in turn a change by many Libyans from a seminomadic to a stable way of life, and the possibilities of urbanization, which were fully realized in the Roman period.

Gold earring from the necropolis of Palermo. A.Salinas Archaeological Museum Palermo