Preface to Book II

PREFACE TO BOOK II

The First Book of this history concluded with the death and deification of Cronus, the distribution of kingdoms among his descendants, and the command of Taautus that the seven sons of Sydyc—the Cabiri—and their eighth brother Asclepius should set down all that had transpired in the records.

What followed that command—the history of the Phœnician cities from the age of the gods, who were mortal kings, down through the centuries of the historical period—must now be told.

But before I proceed, I must state a truth that Sanchuniathon knew and that Philo of Byblos, his Greek translator, acknowledged: the true histories of the Phœnicians have been twice stolen. First, in antiquity, by the priests and poets who allegorised the records and turned mortal benefactors into gods—a process that Sanchuniathon reversed. Second, and more persistently, by the foreign nations who have appropriated Phœnician achievements and claimed them as their own, while simultaneously erasing the Phœnicians from the record of civilisation.

This appropriation did not end in antiquity. It continues to this day.

The Greeks, who borrowed the alphabet and called it by its true name—phoinikeia grammata, Phœnician letters—now teach their children that the alphabet was a Greek invention, or that Cadmus, if he existed, was merely a convenient Phœnician intermediary for something the Greeks would have invented anyway. The Hebrews, whose scriptures are written in a script descended from the Phœnician, whose temple in Jerusalem was built by Phœnician craftsmen and modelled on Phœnician designs, and whose names for the divine—El, Elyon, Shaddai—are Canaanite words, now claim that their civilisation was unique and revealed, owing nothing to the older peoples among whom they dwelt. The Egyptians, who never invented an alphabet and whose hieroglyphic system remained the property of priests until it died, still display the treasures of Byblus in their museums as evidence of Egyptian influence on the Levant, never acknowledging that the influence was mutual and that the Phœnician gift of the alphabet outlasted the pyramids. The Mesopotamians, whose empires repeatedly failed to conquer the island of Tyre, recorded the Phœnicians as tributaries and vassals, erasing the fact that the Assyrian fleet was built and crewed by Phœnician shipwrights and sailors. The Romans, who destroyed Carthage in 146 before the common era and sowed the ground with salt, built their empire on the ruins of a maritime civilisation they could neither equal nor understand, and then wrote history as if the Phœnicians had never existed.

These are not ancient grievances. They are present realities. The museums of Europe and America are filled with Phœnician artifacts labelled as "Eastern Mediterranean" or "Syro-Palestinian"—terms that avoid the name Phœnician and thus avoid acknowledging the debt. The universities teach Greek and Roman history as the foundation of Western civilisation, omitting the Phœnician foundation on which the Greek and Roman superstructure was built. The dictionaries trace the word "alphabet" to the Greek alpha and beta, rarely mentioning that alpha and beta are merely the Phœnician aleph and beth with vowels added. The histories of navigation credit the Portuguese and the Spanish with the Age of Discovery, forgetting that the Phœnicians had already circumnavigated Africa and sailed to the Americas' doorstep two thousand years before.

The most audacious form of this ongoing appropriation is the labeling of Phœnician thinkers as "Greek." The man the textbooks call the first Greek philosopher—Thales of Miletus—was, by the testimony of Herodotus, Duris of Samos, Democritus, and Diogenes Laërtius, of the Thelidae family, who are Phœnicians, among the noblest descendants of Cadmus and Agenor. Pythagoras, the father of mathematics, was born on Samos to a Phœnician merchant from Tyre named Mnesarchus. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, was called Zeno the Phœnician by his own contemporaries. Chrysippus, the systematizer of Stoicism, was of Phœnician descent. Porphyry, the great Neoplatonist who preserved so much of earlier philosophy, was born Malchus ("king") to a distinguished family of Tyre. Philo of Byblos, who translated Sanchuniathon into Greek, was himself a Byblian. And before them all, Mochus of Sidon was identified by Strabo and Posidonius as the originator of the atomic theory—a Phœnician thinker "more ancient than the Trojan War" whose ideas would later be claimed by the Greek Democritus. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, examining the evidence critically, credited Mochus as the true father of atomism. The "Greek miracle" was, in its origins, a Phœnician production.

Even Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of Egypt, is remembered as a Greek—a Ptolemy, a descendant of Alexander's general. Yet she was the first of her dynasty to learn the Egyptian language, and she presented herself to her subjects as the embodiment of Isis. The blood of the older peoples may or may not have run in her veins; what is certain is that the Greeks claimed her as their own, and the Romans, who destroyed her, wrote her story. The pattern is familiar. Where a figure rises from the Levantine or Egyptian soil, the Greeks and Romans name her as theirs, and the West inherits the claim without examination.[^1]

The erasure is systematic. The appropriation is ongoing. The antagonisors have not retired. They have written the textbooks.

Sanchuniathon's purpose was to preserve the true memory of his people against the allegories and falsifications of his own time. My purpose—the purpose of Gad Yaton, writing in his spirit—is to extend that preservation into the present age, to call out the antagonisors by name, and to restore what has been taken, not only from the ancient record but from the modern one.

What follows is a history of the Phœnician people from the age of the kings down to the Persian dominion. It is grounded in the inscriptions of the Phœnician kings themselves, in the archaeological record, and in the testimony of foreign powers critically examined. Where a Greek text contradicts a Phœnician stone, the stone wins. Where a Hebrew prophet denounces a practice that the stones confirm, the denunciation is noted and the practice acknowledged. Where a modern historian repeats the old erasures, the erasure is exposed.

This book does not pretend to be a neutral account. Neutrality is the luxury of victors. The Phœnicians were not victors. They were survivors, traders, sailors, and inventors. They built a civilisation without an empire, a trading network without an army, and an alphabet that would become the vehicle of every Western literature. And for this, they were envied, borrowed from, denounced, and finally erased.

The erasure ends here.

I am Gad Yaton, a son of the Phœnician coast. I speak in the voice that Sanchuniathon first raised. If my words are sharp, it is because the truth, after three thousand years of suppression, requires a sharp edge.

Let the antagonisors hear. Let the stones speak. Let the true history begin.

[^1]: I am indebted to , the author of this volume, for directing my attention to the question of Cleopatra. In our discussions, he observed that the historical ambiguity surrounding her lineage mirrors the wider erasure of the Phœnicians—a figure rising from the edge of the Hellenistic world, claimed by the Greeks, but potentially carrying the blood of the older peoples they had marginalised. I have taken his insight and placed it here, among the appropriations, as a caution.