Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/839

PHOENICIA 803 lord of the town, and therefore of course had the pre-emi nence in religion; and so the Byblian Philo makes El to be the highest god and the other elim or eluhim sub ordinate to him. In the other towns also the numen patrium was a form of the sun-god, or else his wife, and enjoyed somewhat exclusive honour a step in the direction of monotheism similar to the Moabite worship of Chemosh (cp. the Mesha stone). El is represented as the first to introduce circumcision and the first who sacrificed an only son or a virgin daughter to the supreme god. He wanders over all the earth, westward towards the setting sun, and leaves Byblus to -his spouse Baaltis this is meant to explain why she had the chief place in the cult of Byblus ; her male companion Eliun, Shadld (or yueywrros $eos), is conceived as her youthful lover, and El is transformed into a hostile god, who slays Shadld with the sword. Accord ing to another legend the youthful god is killed by a boar while hunting, and the mourning for him with the finding of him again make up a chief part of Byblian worship, which at an early date was enriched with elements borrowed from Egypt and the myth of Osiris. In other places we find as spouse of the highest god the moon- goddess Astarte with the cow s horns, who in Tyre was worshipped under the symbol of a star as queen of heaven. With her worship as with that of Baaltis were associated wild orgies ; and traces of the like are not lacking even at Cartilage (Aug., Civ. Dei, ii. 4), where theology had given a more earnest and gloomy character to the goddess. Astarte was viewed as the mother of the Tyrian sun- god Melkarth (Eudoxus, in Athen., ix. p. 392 D), or, as his full title runs, "our lord Melkarth the Baal of Tyre" (C.I.S., No. 122). On account of his regular daily course the Sun is viewed as the god who works and reveals himself in the world, as son of the god who is above the world, and as protector of civil order. But, again, as the Sun engenders the fruitfulness of the earth, he becomes the object of a sensual nature -worship, one feature of which is that men and women interchange garments. A chief feast to his honour in Tyre was the "awaking of Heracles" in the month Peritius (February / March ; Menander of Eph., in Jos., Ant., viii. 5, 3), a festival of the returning power of the sun in spring, probably alluded to in the sarcasm of Elijah (1 Kings xviii. 27). Peculiar to Berytus is the worship of Poseidon and other sea-gods, who are connected genealogically with Zeus Belus, a son of El, born beyond the Euphrates, and perhaps therefore connected with the Babylonian fish-gods. Berytus was also a chief seat of the worship of the Cablri, the seven nameless sons of Sydek, with their brother Eshmun, who is the eighth and greatest of the Cablri. Philo supplies for them a genealogy which is an attempt to present the growth of man from rude to higher civilization, and pre sents analogies, long since observed, to the genealogy of the sons of Cain in Genesis. Not only their half-divine ancestors but the Cablri themselves belong to a compara tively recent stage of religious development. They are the patron deities of manual arts and civil industry, and as such are the great gods of the Phoenician land, specially worshipped in the federal centre Tripolis. On coins of this town they are called Syrian (i.e., perhaps Assyrian) gods, 1 which seems to imply that the Phoenicians them selves regarded as not primitive the many Egyptian elements which were quite early introduced into the religion of the Cablri, and especially of Eshmun. On the other hand, a figure allied to Eshmun, Taaut, the inventor of the alphabet, is certainly borrowed from the Egyptian Tehuti. So, too, Onka (Steph., s.v. " Oy/ouou ") is prob ably the Anuke of Sais, and it is possible that the whole 1 Eckhel, D.X.V., iii. 374. cycle of gods who revealed and interpreted the sacred books is Egyptian ; some of the latter have the form of a serpent. The Phoenicians did not set up anthropomorphic statues of the gods, but symbolic pillars of stone, or, in the case of the queen of heaven, of wood (asherah). If an actual image was used, likeness to man was avoided by fantastic details : the god had two heads or wings, or some animal emblem, or was dwarfish or hermaphrodite, and so on. The sacrifices were of oxen and other male domestic animals as expiatory offerings also stags 2 and for minor offerings birds. Human sacrifices were exceptionally offered by the state to avert great disasters ; the victim was chosen from among the citizens and must be innocent, wherefore children were chosen, and by preference firstborn or only sons. The same idea that the godhead demanded the holiest and most costly gift explains the prostitution . of virgins at certain feasts in the sacred groves of the queen of heaven, and the temporary consecration of maidens or matrons as ktdeshoth (tepoSoiAot). For this custom, as for that of human sacrifice, substitutes were by and by introduced in many places ; thus at Byblus it was held sufficient that the women cut off their hair at the feast of Adonis (De Dea Syr., c. 6). Origin of the Phoenicians.- The oldest towns were held to have been founded by the gods themselves, who pre sumably also placed the Phoenicians in them. Imitating the Egyptians, the race claimed an antiquity of 30,000 years (Africanus, in Syncellus, p. 31), yet they retained some memory of having migrated from older seats on an Eastern sea. Herodotus (vii. 89) understood this of the Persian Gulf ; the companions of Alexander sought to prove by learned etymologies that they had actually found here the old seats of the Phoenicians. But all this rested on a mere blunder, and the true form of the tradition is pre served by Trogus (Just., xviii. 3, 3), who places the oldest seats of the Phoenicians on the Syrium stagnum or Dead Sea with which the Greeks before the time of the Dia- dochi had no acquaintance and says that, driven thence by an earthquake, they reached the coast, and founded Sidon. This earthquake Bunsen has ingeniously identified with that which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrha, and with which Genesis itself connects the migrations of Lot. Perhaps it played much such a part in the mythic history of the peoples of Canaan as the breach of the dam of Marib does in the history of the Arabs. In historical times the Phoenicians called themselves Canaanites and their land Canaan (Kena an, Kuna ; Xva in Hecateus, fr. 254), the latter applying equally to the coast which they tnemselves helol and the inland highlands which the Israelites occupied. The Greeks call people and land ^otVtKes, ^otvtVi/ ; the former is the older word, which in itself disposes of the idea that Phoenicia means the lanol of the date-palm, which the Greeks called </>oti/i, i.e., Phoenician. 3 In truth, ^otW/ces, with an antique termination used in forming other names of nations (At $i/<es, 0p-//6Kes), is derived from <ou os, "blood-red," probably in allusion to the olark complexion of the race. When the southern part of the coast of Canaan was occupied by the Philistines the region of Ekron became the boundary of Phoenicia to the south (Josh. xiii. 3) ; the northern boundary in the time of the Persians was the town of Posidium and the mouth of the Orontes (Herod., iii. 91 ; Pseudo-Scylax, 104). Under the Seleucids these limits contracted, the southern boundary being the Chorseus (Ptol., Codd.B.E., Pa). 1), which falls into the sea north of the tower of Straton, auol the northern the river 2 For stags offered to Tanit see Clermont-Ganueau, Journ. As., ser. 7, vol. xi. p. 232 sq., 444 sq. 3 In reality the date-palm is not aboriginal in these regions, Helm, Kulturpflanzen, &c., 3d ed., p. 233.