Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [40]
We also read of major Phoenician archives, the earliest being in an Egyptian tale of the eleventh century BC, where an Egyptian agent, Wen-Amun, goes to Byblos to order timber, and has to bargain aggressively with King Zakar-baal, who reads out the precedents from deals in earlier generations, written on rolls of papyrus. The city of Tyre also kept records, since Josephus records that the Greek historian Menander of Ephesus had compiled his history of Tyre from them.
As it happens, the earliest inscription in Phoenician is the epitaph of Ahiram, king of Byblos. It is dated (by its language) to the eleventh century BC.
Coffin which Ittobaal, son of Ahiram, king of Byblos, made for Ahiram his father, when he placed him in the house of eternity.
Now if a king among kings or a governor among governors or a commander of an army should come up against Byblos and uncover this coffin, may the sceptre of his rule be torn away, may the throne of his kingdom be overturned, and may peace flee from Byblos! And as for him, may his inscription be effaced …
For all its thousand years of recorded history, there is no surviving artistic literature in Phoenician. However, a discovery in 1929 revealed an ancient literature in the neighbouring city directly to the north, Ugarit, dated to the fourteenth or thirteenth century BC* The central characters in the myths and epics recorded here are gods known to have loomed large in the cults in Phoenician cities, especially Hadad or Baal (which means simply ‘the Lord’), his father Dagon, a beautiful consort goddess who has various names, including Ashtoreth and Asherah, El, the benign high god, and Kothar, the divine craftsman and smith. Thirteen hundred years later, after Phoenician had largely died out as a language, one Philo of Byblos wrote in Greek a Phoenician History, claiming that it was derived from the work of Sanchuniathon of Beirut, who had himself read it on ammouneis, the pillars of Baal Ammon that stood in Phoenician temples. Since Philo, in typical ancient fashion, identifies many of the Phoenician gods by Greek names (of those of whom similar tales were told), his unsupported account of Phoenician mythology was received (for almost two thousand years) with some scepticism. But Philo does in fact mention El as the name of Kronos,† and makes Dagon his son. Dagon later fathers an unknown Dēmarūs, and after much action Demarus, Astartē (aka Asteria) and Adōdos end up as governors of the world, under El’s direction. Khusor is the craftsman god, important in the creation of the world and the origin of inventions. Since Astarte and Asteria are plausible Greek transliterations of Ashtoreth and Asherah, and Adōdos without its Greek ending -os would (with its long O) be a natural Phoenician pronunciation of Hadad, the basic cast of Phoenician gods is in place.
The Ugaritic texts also give us a hint of how close Hebrew literature comes to the missing Phoenician works. Remember that Hebrew is a close relative of Ugaritic, but not as close as Phoenician. Now consider how the goddess Anath of Ugarit decks herself out to meet the emissaries of Baal:
She draws some water and bathes;
Sky-dew of the fatness of earth,
Spray of the Rider of the Clouds;
Dew that the heavens do shed
Spray that is shed by the stars.35
The words for ‘Sky-dew of the fatness of earth’ are l šmm šmn ’r. This is precisely what Isaac promises to Jacob (and denies to Esau) in the blessing scene in Genesis:
May God give you of dew of heaven and of fatness of earth36
(Traditionally, of course, Hebrew spelling too marked only consonants, as well as some long vowels.)
Hebrew and Ugaritic were close enough,