XIII

OF THE PHOENICIANS AND SANCHONIATON

THE PHOENICIANS were probably united as a body of people, as early as the other inhabitants of Syria. They may not be so ancient as the Chaldeans, because their country is not so fertile: Sidon, Tyre, Joppa, Berith, and Ascalon, are barren lands. Maritime trade has constantly been the last resource of every people. They began by cultivating their land before they built ships to go in search of other countries beyond the sea. But those who are compelled to yield to maritime trade are soon possessed of that industry, the daughter of necessity, which does not animate other nations. There is no mention made of any maritime expeditions, either among the Chaldeans or the Indians. Even the Egyptians looked with horror upon the sea; the sea was their Typhon, an evil-disposed being; and this makes the four hundred ships that were fitted out by Sesostris for the conquest of India, very questionable; but the enterprises of the Phoenicians are real. Carthage and Cadiz founded by them, the discovery of England, their trade to India conducted by Eziongaber, their manufactures of valuable stuffs, their art of dying purple, testify their abilities, and those abilities caused their grandeur.

The Phoenicians were with respect to antiquity, what the Venetians were in the fifteenth century, and what the Dutch have since been, compelled to enrich themselves by industry.

Commerce necessarily required registers, which supplied the place of our account books, with easy and lasting signs to fix those registers. The opinion which supposes that the Phoenicians were the authors of the written alphabet, is therefore very probable. I shall not aver that they invented such characters before the Chaldeans; but their alphabet was certainly the most complete and useful, as they expressed the vowels, which the Chaldeans did not. The word Alphabet itself, composed of their two first characters, is an evidence in favor of the Phoenicians.

I do not find that the Egyptians ever communicated their letters or their language to any other people: on the other hand, the Phoenicians imparted their language and their alphabet to the Carthaginians, who afterwards changed them. Their letters were transformed into those of the Greeks; what a prejudice in favor of the antiquity of the Phoenicians!

Sanchoniaton, the Phoenician, who wrote long before the Tuscan war, the history of the first ages, some of whose fragments, translated by Eusebius, have been handed down to us by Philo de Biblos; Sanchoniaton, I say, informs us that the Phoenicians had sacrificed from time immemorial to the elements and the winds; this indeed agrees with the dispositions of a maritime people. He was desirous in his history to trace things to their origin, like all the primitive writers: he was animated with the same ambition as the authors of the Zend and the Vedam, the same ambition as Manethian in Egypt, and Hesiod in Greece.

What proves the prodigious antiquity of the book of Sanchoniaton is, that the first lines of it were read in the celebration of the mysteries of Isis and Ceres, a homage which the Egyptians and Greeks would not have paid to a foreign author, if he had not been considered as one of the first sources of human knowledge.

Sanchoniaton wrote nothing of himself, he consulted all the ancient archives, and particularly the priest Jerombal. The name of Sanchoniaton signifies, in the ancient Phenician, A lover of truth. Porphyrus, Theodoret, and Eusebius, acknowledge it. Phenicia was called the country of the Archives, Kirjath Sepher. When the Hebrews settled in a part of this country, they gave him his testimony, as we find in Joshua and the book of Judges.

Jerombal, whom Sanchoniaton consulted, was a priest of the supreme God, whom the Phenicians named Jaho, Jehovah, a reputed sacred name, adopted by the Egyptians, and afterwards by the Jews. We find by the fragments of this monument, which is of such antiquity, that Tyre had for a great length of time existed, though it was not yet become a powerful city.

The word El, which signified god among the first Phenicians, has some analogy to the Alla of the Arabians; and it is probable, that the Greeks composed their Elios from this monosyllable El. But what is most observable, is, that we find the ancient Phenicians had the word Eloa, Eloim, which the Hebrews for a very long time afterwards retained, when they settled in Canaan.

The Jews derived all the names they gave to God, Eloa, Iaho, Adonaï, from Phenicia: this cannot be otherwise, as the Jews in Canaan did not for a great while speak any thing but the Phenician tongue.

The word Iaho, that ineffable word with the Jews, and which they never pronounced, was so common in the east, that Diodorus in his second book, speaking of those who feigned conversations with the gods, says, that “Minos boasted of having communed with the god Zeus, Zamolxis with the goddess Vesta, and the Jew Moses with the god Iaho,” etc.

What deserves particular observation, is that Sanchoniaton, in relating the ancient cosmology of his country, speaks at first of the chaos enveloped in dark air, chaut ereb. Erebus, Hesiod’s night, is derived from the Phenician word, which the Greeks preserved. From chaos came Muth or Moth, which signified matter; now who discovered this matter? It was Colpi Jaho, the spirit of God, the wind of God, or rather the mouth of God, the voice of God. By the voice of God animals and men were created.

We may easily be convinced that this cosmogony, is the origin of almost all the others. The more ancient people are always imitated by those who succeed them; they acquire their language, they follow part of their rites, and they adopt their antiquities and fables. I am sensible how obscure are all the origins of the Chaldeans, the Syrians, the Phenicians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks. What origin is not so? We can know nothing certain concerning the formation of the world, but what the Creator of the world has deigned to teach us himself. We walk with security, till we reach certain limits; we know that Babylon existed before Rome; that the cities of Syria were powerful before Jerusalem was known; that there were kings of Egypt before Jacob or Abraham: we know what societies have been the last established; but to know with precision which was the first people, a revelation is absolutely necessary.

We are at least allowed to weigh probabilities, and to make use of our reason in what does not relate to our sacred dogmas, which are superior to all reason.

It is very strongly attested that the Phenicians inhabited for a long time their country, before the Hebrews made their appearance there. Could the Hebrews learn the Phenician tongue when they were wandering at a distance from Phenicia, in the desert, in the midst of some Arabian bands?

Could the Phenician tongue have become the common language of the Hebrews, and could they have written in that language in the time of Joshua, amidst continual devastations and massacres? Did not the Hebrews after Joshua, when they had been for a long while in a state of bondage, in the very country they had sacked and burnt; did they not then acquire some small knowledge of the language of their masters, as they did a little of the Chaldean, when they were slaves at Babylon?

Is it not highly probable that a trading, industrious, and learned people, settled from time immemorial, and who were the reputed inventors of letters, should write long before a wandering people, newly settled in their neighborhood, without any knowledge, without any industry, without any trade, subsisting solely by rapine?

Can the authenticity of Sanchoniaton preserved by Eusebius be seriously denied? or can it be imagined with the learned Hewit that Sanchoniaton borrowed from Moses? When all the remains of the monuments of antiquity intimate that Sanchoniaton lived about the time of Moses, nothing can be determined; the intelligent and judicious reader is to decide between Hewit and Vandale, who refuted him. We are in search of truth and not disputation.