456 PHCENICIA (
merly angular letters received a rounder shape, and the straight strokes were made thicker in the middle than at the ends. The Cartha- ginian writing of this period, as well as that of Marseilles and Sardinia, gives these strokes with a certain graceful curvature, and many letters have orna- ~ ~ mental appendages. A X. V 7; The third or Neo- Punic alphabet be-
A longs to the period
/ subsequent to the Roman conquest of northern Africa, and must be a derivative of the Carthaginian cursive writing rath- er than of the style found on the monu- ments. The letters V L| V -^ are simplified, and 1 L/ ^ some are given with a single stroke ; but
- A/ 31 I h and M form ex-
ceptions, being more complicated than be- fore. Gesenius fell into the error of con- T Al ^ f{j sidering the Neo-Pu- " ^ nic inscriptions of Y. ...'.. 3 / Numidian origin, but ""L - s it has since been es- tablished that Nu- rf midian and Punic are in no manner related to each other. The grammatical struc- ture of the Phoeni- cian language cannot be made out from the small number of literary monuments, and hence it is im- possible to define wherein it differed from the Hebrew. But it is certain that many words and ., forms of words used Q Y iP 4 only in the poetical and archaic portions </ of the Bible, or only 5 ..... VV yS 1T j n isolated instances, . are quite common T V / f in Phoenician ; that / /J / some words were employed by the Phoenician Alphabet. Phoenicians with a wider or narrower meaning than the Hebrews gave them ; and that certain relatives, pronominal suffixes, and other grammatical forms are peculiar to Phoe- nician. As in Hebrew, it is customary to ex- plain many peculiar forms in Phoenician as Aramaean, but it is probably more correct to regard many of them as remains of a primi-
- 1 >fs
/ / / /
- -
? I tive Semitic language, the parent alike of Phoe- nician, Hebrew, and Aramaean. The newly discovered monuments have shown the opinion formerly held, that Phoenician was a sort of mixed dialect, midway between Hebrew and Aramaean, to be erroneous. There are traces of Aramaean influence due to the movements of later times, for the whole of Palestine be- came Aramaic during the 7th and 6th centu- ries B. C. As at this time the emigration to northern Africa was strongest, it explains also the presence of Aramaean forms in the Cartha- ginian monuments. Punic inscriptions differ very little if at all from those of the eastern Phoenicians, and no essential differences ap- pear in the so-called Neo-Punic monuments till after the destruction of Carthage. The com-, mercial intercourse which the western Phoeni- cians maintained with the parent country, es- pecially while the Phoenicians ruled the Medi- terranean, contributed greatly to the main- tenance of the mother tongue in its original condition, even in the most distant and isolated colonies. What the ancients called Libyo- Phoenician, and what was its relation to Punic, is entirely unknown ; but as a matter of con- jecture it seems more probable that it was Libyan infused with Phoenician, than Phoeni- cian with Libyan, as Gesenius holds. The in- scriptions published by Gesenius in 1837 hardly represent one fourth part of the number of Phoenician monuments now collected, the most important texts having been discovered since. These are the inscription on the sarcophagus of the Sidonian king Eshmunazar, two on the sacrificial tablets of Marseilles and Carthage, several of Umm el-Awamid, various trilingual ones found in Sardinia, some from Cyprus, and numerous votive and funeral inscriptions of Carthage and Numidia. At Dhiban in Moab was discovered in 1868 a monument with 34 lines of Hebrew-Phoenician. (See MOAB.) The principal works on Phoenicia and the Phoenician language are : Heeren, " His- torical Eesearches into the Politics, Inter- course, and Trade of the principal Nations of Antiquity " (English translation, Oxford, 1833) ; Gesenius, Scriptures Linguceque Phoe- nicia Monumenta (Leipsic, 1837) ; Movers, Die Phonizier (Bonn, 1841) ; Ewald, Erlcla- rung der grossen plionizischen InscTirift von Si- don (Gottingen, 1856) ; A. Levy, Phonizische Studien (Breslau, 1857-'64), and Phonizisches Worterbuch (1864) ; Kenan, Memoir e sur Vori- gine et le caractere veritable de Vhistoire phe- nicienne qui porte le nom de Sanchoniathon (Paris, 1860), and Mission de Phenicie (1874); De Vogue, Inscriptions pheniciennes de Vile de CJiypre ; Lenormant and Chevallier, Manuel d'Tiistoire ancienne de V Orient (3 vols., Paris, 1868-'9 ; English ed., 2 vols., 1869-'70), and Les premieres civilisations (1 874) ; Schroder, Die phoniziscke SpracJie (Breslau, 1869); Hell- wald, Culturgeschichte (Augsburg, 1874); and Duncker, GescJiichte des AltertJiums (4th ed., Leipsic, 1874 et seq.}.
