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By Root 447 0

then, to share some fixed phrases. Combining the dramatis personae of the Ugaritic epics with the phraseology of the Old Testament, and the narratives of Philo’s Phoenician History of Sanchuniathon, we may be able to reconstruct something of the verbal culture of Byblos, Tyre and their sister cities.

There is a clear echo of what Tyrian poetry may have been like in a famous passage of Ezekiel. In the course of a series of prophecies of the downfall of Judah’s various neighbours, the prophet digresses on the past glories of one city for which he foresees destruction: You say, O Tyre, ‘I am perfect in beauty.’

Your domain was on the high seas;

your builders brought your beauty to perfection.

They made all your timbers of pine trees from Senir;

they took a cedar from Lebanon and made a mast for you.

Of oaks from Bashan they made your oars;

of cypress wood from the coasts of Cyprus

they made your deck, inlaid with ivory.

Fine embroidered linen from Egypt was your sail

and served as your banner;

your awnings were of blue and purple

with the coasts of Elishah.

Men of Sidon and Arwad were your oarsmen;

your skilled men, O Tyre, were aboard as your seamen.

Veteran craftsmen of Byblos were on board

as shipwrights to caulk your seams.

All the ships of the sea and their sailors

came alongside to trade for your wares.

Men of Persia, Lydia, and Put

served as soldiers in your army.

They hung their shields and helmets on your walls,

bringing you splendour.

Men of Arwad and Helech manned your walls on every side;

men of Gammad were in your towers.

They hung their shields around your walls;

they brought your beauty to perfection.

…*

The ships of Tarshish serve as carriers for your wares.

You are filled with heavy cargo

in the heart of the sea.

Your oarsmen will take you out to the high seas.

But the east wind will break you to pieces

in the heart of the sea.

…

As they wail and mourn over you

they will take up a lament concerning you:

’Who was ever silenced like Tyre,

surrounded by the sea?’37

The Carthaginians, like other Phoenicians, kept voluminous records. Those that would have been kept on papyrus are lost, but there are several thousand known inscriptions, assigning rights over sacrificial offerings, making dedications to the goddess Tank or the god Baal Hammon, or commemorating ceremonies. It is also clear that Carthage had passed on the administrative use of its language to the neighbouring states to the west, Massylia and Massaesylia: their coins bear inscriptions in Punic letters, as do boundary stones.38

Indeed, there is evidence for a whole literature in Punic. St Augustine remarked famously that ‘on the word of many scholars, there was a great deal of virtue and wisdom in the Punic books’.39 This view was shared by the Roman Senate, which even as the city of Carthage was being finally destroyed in 146 BC gave orders for a new translation and edition of one especially admired treatise on agriculture. ‘Our Senate presented the libraries of the city to African princes, with the sole exception of the 28 books of Mago, which they decreed should be translated into Latin … The text was entrusted to scholars learned in Punic.’40 Some forty fragments of it are quoted by later Latin authors, but the work as a whole is lost, even in Latin translation.

In fact, no Punic literary work has survived. The closest to it is a Greek translation, in about seven hundred words, of a Punic inscription engraved in the temple of Baal Hammon at Carthage, recording the voyage of exploration by a Carthaginian leader, Hanno, round the western coast of Africa (perhaps as far as Gabon). It ends:

… we came to the gulf named Horn of the South. In the corner was an island … and in it a lake with an island full of savage people. By far the majority of them were female, hairy in body, called by the interpreters ‘gorillas’. We could not catch the men because of their skill at climbing and defending themselves with stones, but we took three women,