The generations

THE GENERATIONS

Of the wind Colpias, and his wife Baau, which is interpreted Night, were begotten two mortal men, Æon and Protogonus so called: and Æon discovered food from trees.

Gad Yaton: The first human discovery recorded in this history is the gathering of wild fruits—Æon discovering food from trees. This is the earliest stage of human subsistence, confirmed by archaeology as the condition of all human beings before the Neolithic revolution. The Greeks have no equivalent to this. Their mythology begins with gods, not with men learning to feed themselves.

The immediate descendants of these were called Genus and Genea, and they dwelt in Phœnicia: and when there were great droughts they stretched forth their hands to heaven towards the Sun; for him they supposed to be God, the only lord of heaven, calling him Beelsamin, which in the Phœnician dialect signifies Lord of Heaven, but among the Greeks is equivalent to Zeus.

Gad Yaton: The worship of the Sun as Baal-Shamem—Lord of Heaven—is attested in Phœnician inscriptions throughout the first millennium before the common era. The Greeks, when they encountered this deity, equated him with their Zeus, an identification that conceals the far greater antiquity of the Phœnician worship. The sun was not a god who threw thunderbolts and seduced mortal women. He was the visible lord of the sky, from whom warmth and light proceeded, and whom any rational man might reverence without the intervention of priests or the invention of myths.

Afterwards by Genus the son of Æon and Protogonus were begotten mortal children, whose names were Phôs, Pûr, and Phlox. These found out the method of producing fire by rubbing pieces of wood against each other, and taught men the use thereof.

Gad Yaton: Fire by friction. All human civilisation proceeds from this discovery. The Greeks would later attribute the gift of fire to Prometheus—a Titan who defied Zeus and suffered eternal torment as punishment, his liver eaten daily by an eagle. That story is a transparent myth, and an immoral one, for it makes the gods into jealous tyrants who hoard the necessities of life and punish the benefactor who steals them. The Phœnician account is simpler and truer: Phôs, Pûr, and Phlox were men who learned a technique and taught it to their fellows. They were deified after death, not tortured. No eagle ate their livers.

These begat sons of vast bulk and height, whose names were conferred upon the mountains which they occupied: thus from them Cassius, and Libanus, and Antilibanus, and Brathu received their names.

Gad Yaton: The mountain names are genuine and still used today. Mount Cassius (Jebel Aqra) stands at the northern end of the Syrian coast. Mount Libanus (Lebanon) and Mount Antilibanus (Anti-Lebanon) run parallel to one another along the length of the Phœnician homeland. The "sons of vast bulk" may be a memory of the megalithic builders whose stone constructions still stand in the Lebanese highlands—structures that later peoples, unable to imagine their human origin, attributed to giants. The Greeks, who had no mountains comparable to these and who built nothing monumental until the Mycenaean age, never produced a comparable account of their own landscape.

Memrumus and Hypsuranius were the issue of these men by connexion with their mothers; the women of those times, without shame, having intercourse with any men whom they might chance to meet. Hypsuranius inhabited Tyre: and he invented huts constructed of reeds and rushes, and the papyrus. And he fell into enmity with his brother Usous, who was the inventor of clothing for the body which he made of the skins of the wild beasts which he could catch.

Gad Yaton: The reed hut and the leather garment. These are the earliest technologies of shelter and clothing, and the Phœnician record attributes them to named ancestors, not to gods. The archaeology of the Lebanese coast confirms that the earliest permanent structures at Byblus were indeed of wattle-and-daub and reed construction—a fact that excavation has proven but that no Greek or Hebrew text records. The Hebrews, whose Genesis describes Adam and Eve being clothed by God in garments of skin (Genesis 3:21), have transformed the human invention of clothing into a divine act—a familiar pattern. The Phœnician record is once again the more honest.

And when there were violent storms of rain and wind, the trees about Tyre being rubbed against each other, took fire, and all the forest in the neighbourhood was consumed. And Usous having taken a tree, and broken off its boughs, was the first who dared to venture on the sea. And he consecrated two pillars to Fire and Wind, and worshipped them, and poured out upon them the blood of the wild beasts he took in hunting: and when these men were dead, those that remained consecrated to them rods, and worshipped the pillars, and held anniversary feasts in honour of them.

Gad Yaton: Here it is—the first sea voyage, and it was a Phœnician who made it. Not an Egyptian, though the Egyptians sailed the Nile in reed boats. Not a Greek, though the Greeks would later claim that Jason and the Argonauts were the first to dare the open sea. Usous of Tyre took a cedar bough, lashed it into a raft, and trusted himself to the waves. From this single act, the entire maritime civilisation of the Phœnicians—the ships of Tarshish, the circumnavigation of Africa, the colonies from Cyprus to Cadiz—would eventually proceed.

The two pillars to Fire and Wind are the first recorded instance of the twin pillars that would become the emblem of Tyre. Herodotus (2.44), visiting the temple of Melqart at Tyre in the fifth century before the common era, describes two pillars: one of gold, one of emerald. The pillars that Usous consecrated were simpler—perhaps of wood or stone—but the idea remained constant. The Greeks, when they later built their temples, imitated this arrangement, placing two pillars at the entrance of their sanctuaries, a form that the Romans would inherit and that would pass into the architecture of the Western world. The debt is unacknowledged but unmistakable.

And in times long subsequent to these; were born of the race of Hypsuranius, Agreus and Halieus, the inventors of the arts of hunting and fishing, from whom huntsmen and fishermen derive their names.

Of these were begotten two brothers who discovered iron, and the forging thereof. One of these called Chrysor, who is the same with Hephæstus, exercised himself in words, and charms and divinations; and he invented the hook, and the bait, and the fishing-line, and boats of a light construction; he was the first of all men that sailed. Wherefore he was worshipped after his death as a God, under the name of Diamichius.

Gad Yaton: The discovery of iron, placed in this generation, corresponds to what archaeology calls the beginning of the Iron Age—approximately 1200 years before the common era. The Phœnician record thus preserves a correct sequence: fire, shelter, clothing, hunting and fishing, and only then the smelting of iron.

Chrysor—whose name means "Golden Worker," and whom the Greeks, in their appropriative manner, equated with Hephaestus—is credited with more than metalworking. He invented the hook, the bait, the fishing line, and boats of light construction. He was the first man to sail with intent—that is, to build a vessel and to navigate it for a purpose, not merely to be carried by the current. This is the beginning of seamanship, and it is a Phœnician beginning. The Greeks, who worshipped Hephaestus as a lame smith who worked a forge under Mount Etna, never acknowledged that their god of metalworking was a Phœnician mortal, deified centuries before the first Greek set foot on Sicily.

And it is said that his brothers invented the art of building walls with bricks.

Afterwards, of this race were born two youths, one of whom was called Technites, and the other was called Geïnus Autochthôn. These discovered the method of mingling stubble with the loam of bricks, and of baking them in the sun; they were also the inventors of tiling.

Gad Yaton: Brick-making with stubble temper and sun-baking is a technology attested in the Near East from the earliest periods. The addition of roof tiling is a more advanced innovation, associated with urban architecture. The names Technites ("Artisan") and Geïnus Autochthôn ("Earth-born Native") reflect their functions. This is the Phœnician way: a man's name describes his deed, and after death the name becomes a title of veneration.

By these were begotten others, of whom one was named Agrus, the other Agrouerus or Agrotes, of whom in Phœnicia there was a statue held in the highest veneration, and a temple drawn by yokes of oxen: and at Byblus he is called, by way of eminence, the greatest of the Gods. These added to the houses, courts and porticos and crypts: husbandmen, and such as hunt with dogs, derive their origin from these: they are called also Aletæ, and Titans.

Gad Yaton: Agrotes—"the Field-Worker"—is worshipped at Byblus as the greatest of the gods. This is the deified farmer, the man who first taught the systematic cultivation of the soil. His temple drawn by oxen is a striking image: the farmer's god is transported by the farmer's beast. No Greek or Egyptian deity was ever so intimately associated with the daily labour of the people. The Greeks, whose own gods feasted on ambrosia and never worked, could not have imagined such a deity. The Hebrews, whose first parents were expelled from a garden and condemned to till the soil in sorrow, made agriculture a curse. The Phœnicians made it a god.

From these were descended Amynus and Magus, who taught men to construct villages and tend flocks. By these men were begotten Misor and Sydyc, that is, Well-freed and Just: and they found out the use of salt.

From Misor descended Taautus, who invented the writing of the first letters: him the Egyptians called Thoor, the Alexandrians Thoyth, and the Greeks Hermes.

Gad Yaton: Now I must speak with particular care, for here the Phœnician record makes its most important and most contested claim.

Taautus invented letters. Not the Egyptians, with their hieroglyphs—a system so complex that only priests could use it. Not the Mesopotamians, with their cuneiform—a script born of accountancy, impressed on clay with a reed. Taautus, the Phœnician, devised an alphabet of twenty-two consonantal signs, each sign representing a single sound, so simple that any merchant's son could learn it in a week.

This invention transformed the human condition. Writing ceased to be the property of temples and palaces and became a tool of commerce, law, and literature. The Phœnician alphabet is the direct ancestor of the Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew scripts, and the indirect ancestor of all alphabetic writing systems in use today. This is not a Phœnician boast. It is the consensus of every competent scholar who has examined the evidence.

The earliest known alphabetic inscriptions—the Proto-Sinaitic texts from Serabit el-Khadim—were produced by Canaanite miners in the employ of the Egyptians, dated between 1850 and 1550 before the common era. These inscriptions adapt a handful of Egyptian hieroglyphs to represent consonantal sounds. They are the direct precursors of the Phœnician script. The earliest fully developed Phœnician inscription is on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblus (KAI 1), discovered in 1923 by the French archaeologist Pierre Montet and now housed in the National Museum of Beirut. It dates to approximately 1000 years before the common era, though some scholars, including the paleographer Edward Cook, have argued for a date as early as the thirteenth century.

The Greek claim that the alphabet was invented by Cadmus—a Phœnician prince who founded Thebes and taught the Greeks to write—is, ironically, an acknowledgment of Phœnician priority wrapped in a Greek myth. The Greeks themselves called their letters phoinikeia grammata—Phœnician letters. Herodotus (5.58) records this without embarrassment. Only later Greek chauvinists, unable to bear the thought that their greatest intellectual tool was a foreign invention, began to claim that the alphabet had been invented by Palamedes during the Trojan War, or by Prometheus, or by the Egyptians. These claims are contradictory and unsupported by any archaeological evidence. They are the nationalistic fables of a people who could not acknowledge their debts.

The Hebrews, for their part, have also obscured the truth. The Hebrew alphabet is a direct adaptation of the Phœnician script. The earliest Hebrew inscriptions—the Gezer Calendar, the Samaria Ostraca, the Siloam Inscription—are written in what scholars call the Paleo-Hebrew script, which is indistinguishable from Phœnician. Only after the Babylonian exile did the Hebrews adopt the Aramaic square script that is now called Hebrew. But the Hebrews had no Taautus. Their tradition ascribes the invention of writing to Moses, who received the law on tablets of stone—a claim that is theologically significant but historically late and unsupported. The Phœnician record is simpler and more credible: a man named Taautus devised the letters, and his invention spread from Byblus and Tyre to the Aegean, to Italy, to North Africa, and eventually to the entire world.

But from Sydyc descended the Dioscuri, or Cabiri, or Corybantes, or Samothraces: these (he says) first built a ship complete. From these descended others; who were the discoverers of medicinal herbs, and of the cure of poisons and of charms.

Contemporary with these was one Elioun, called Hypsistus, (the most high); and his wife named Beruth, and they dwelt about Byblus. By these was begotten Epigeus or Autochthon, whom they afterwards called Ouranus (Heaven); so that from him that element, which is over us, by reason of its excellent beauty is named heaven: and he had a sister of the same parents, and she was called Ge (Earth), and by reason of her beauty the earth was called by the same name. Hypsistus, the father of these, having been killed in a conflict with wild beasts, was consecrated, and his children offered libations and sacrifices unto him.

Gad Yaton: Elioun—"Most High"—and his wife Beruth, who gave her name to Berytus, are the ancestors of Ouranus and Ge, Heaven and Earth. I ask the reader to note two things.

First, the name "Elioun." This is the same word that appears in the Hebrew scriptures as El Elyon—"God Most High"—the title by which Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem, blessed Abraham (Genesis 14:18–20). The Hebrews did not invent this title. They borrowed it from the older Canaanite tradition, in which Elyon was a specific deity or, as Sanchuniathon presents him, a deified ancestor. The Hebrew appropriation of the title is a familiar pattern: what was originally a name or title in the older pantheon becomes an epithet of Yahweh.

Second, the death of Hypsistus. He was killed in a conflict with wild beasts and was thereafter consecrated. This is the origin of his divinity: a mortal man died a violent death, and his children began to offer sacrifices to his memory. Here, in a single sentence, is the entire Phœnician theory of religion. The gods were men. Death made them objects of worship.

But Ouranus, succeeding to the kingdom of his father, contracted a marriage with his sister Ge, and had by her four sons, Ilus who is called Cronus, and Betylus, and Dagon, which signifies Siton (Bread-corn), and Atlas.

Gad Yaton: Dagon is Bread-corn—the deified discovery of cultivated grain. The Hebrew scriptures mock Dagon (1 Samuel 5:2–7), whose statue fell before the Ark of the Covenant in the temple at Ashdod. But the Hebrews cannot deny his antiquity or his importance. Agriculture—not revelation—is the foundation of human civilisation. The very name "Beth-Dagon" ("House of Dagon") appears in the Hebrew scriptures as a place name (Joshua 15:41). The Hebrews, for all their denunciations, could not erase Dagon from the landscape.

But by other wives Ouranus had much issue; at which Ge, being vexed and jealous of Ouranus, reproached him so that they parted from each other: nevertheless Ouranus returned to her, again by force whenever he thought proper, and having laid with her, again departed: he attempted also to kill the children whom he had by her; but Ge often defended herself with the assistance of auxiliary powers.

But when Cronus arrived at man's estate, acting by the advice and with the assistance of Hermes Trismegistus, who was his secretary, he opposed himself to his father Ouranus, that he might avenge the indignities which had been offered to his mother. And to Cronus were born children, Persephone and Athena; the former of whom died a virgin; but, by the advice of Athena and Hermes, Cronus made a scimitar and a spear of iron.

Gad Yaton: Iron weapons are decisive. The historical Cronus—whatever king he represents—commanded iron technology, which gave him military advantage over his father Ouranus. The "scimitar" (a curved sword, the khopesh known from Near Eastern warfare) and the iron spear are described not as gifts of the gods but as manufactured implements, made on the advice of Athena (the deified patron of practical wisdom) and Hermes (the deified Taautus, the wise scribe). This is euhemerism in action: the weapons that won the throne were forged by human hands, in a real workshop, from a real metal.

Then Hermes addressed the allies of Cronus with magic words, and wrought in them a keen desire to make war against Ouranus in behalf of Ge. And Cronus having thus overcome Ouranus in battle, drove him from his kingdom, and succeeded him in the imperial power. In the battle was taken a well-beloved concubine of Ouranus who was pregnant; and Cronus bestowed her in marriage upon Dagon, and, whilst she was with him, she was delivered of the child which she had conceived by Ouranus, and called his name Demarous.

After these events Cronus surrounded his habitation with a wall, and founded Byblus, the first city of Phœnicia.

Gad Yaton: Byblus is identified by Sanchuniathon as the first Phœnician city. Archaeology does not contradict him. Excavations by Maurice Dunand over nearly fifty years revealed that Byblus was occupied from the Neolithic period—approximately 8800 to 7000 years before the common era—and developed into an extensive settlement by the fourth millennium. The Egyptian name for Byblus, kbnj, appears in hieroglyphic records dating to the reign of Pharaoh Sneferu of the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2600 BCE). The city walls that Sanchuniathon attributes to Cronus are not myth. They are among the earliest urban fortifications known to archaeology. The Greeks, whose own cities were rude villages at this time, have no claim to comparably ancient foundations.

Afterwards Cronus having conceived a suspicion of his own brother Atlas, by the advice of Hermes, threw him into a deep cavern in the earth, and buried him.

At this time the descendants of the Dioscuri, having built some light and other more complete ships, put to sea; and being cast away over against Mount Cassius, there consecrated a temple.

But the auxiliaries of Ilus, who is Cronus, were called Eloeim, as it were, the allies of Cronus; being so called after Cronus.

Gad Yaton: Let the reader attend carefully to the word "Eloeim." This is the plural of Eloah, meaning "god" or "mighty one." It appears, in precisely this form, in the Hebrew scriptures as Elohim—one of the principal names of God. But here, in the Phœnician record, it refers to the allies of Cronus—a group of powerful men, not a single deity. The Hebrews, descending from a branch of the Canaanite peoples, took this plural term for a council of gods or mighty ones and applied it, over time, to their single deity. The linguistic trajectory is clear: Phœnician Eloeim → Hebrew Elohim. The Hebrews did not invent the word. They inherited it from the older civilisation they claimed to supersede.

And Cronus, having a son called Sadidus, dispatched him with his own sword, because he held him in suspicion, and with his own hand deprived his child of life. And in like manner he cut off the head of his own daughter, so that all the gods were astonished at the disposition of Cronus.

But in process of time, whilst Ouranus was still in banishment, he sent his daughter Astarte, being a virgin, with two other of her sisters, Rhea and Dione, to cut off Cronus by treachery; but Cronus took the damsels, and married them notwithstanding they were his own sisters. When Ouranus understood this, he sent Eimarmene and Mora with other auxiliaries to make war against Cronus: but Cronus gained the affections of these also, and detained them with himself. Moreover, the god Ouranus devised Bætulia, contriving stones that moved as having life.

Gad Yaton: The bætulia—the sacred stones—were anointed with oil and worshipped as dwelling-places of the divine. The Hebrew patriarch Jacob, in Genesis 28:18–19, sets up a stone at Bethel ("House of El"), anoints it with oil, and calls it the house of God. This is a direct borrowing of the older Phœnician practice. The Hebrews did not originate stone-worship. They adopted it from the Canaanites among whom they dwelt. The later Hebrew prophets, who denounced the worship of "every smooth stone" (Isaiah 57:6), were denouncing a practice that their own ancestors had shared.

And by Astarte Cronus had seven daughters called Titanides, or Artemides; by Rhea also he had seven sons, the youngest of whom was consecrated from his birth; also by Dione he had daughters; and by Astarte again he had two other sons, Pothos and Eros.

And Dagon, after he had found out bread-corn, and the plough, was called Zeus Arotrius.

Gad Yaton: Dagon, the discoverer of grain, becomes Zeus Arotrius—"Zeus of the Plough." This is the Phœnician way of honouring the benefactors of humanity: a farmer becomes a god, and his function is preserved in his divine title. The Greeks, who later identified Dagon with their Zeus, erased his agricultural character and turned him into the thunder-hurling king of Olympus. The transformation is typical: a specific, local benefactor becomes a generic, universal deity. The truth is in the specifics.

To Sydyc, who was called the just, one of the Titanides bare Asclepius: and to Cronus there were born also in Peræa three sons, Cronus bearing the same name with his father, and Zeus Belus, and Apollo.

Gad Yaton: Apollo is here revealed as a son of Cronus, born in Peræa—the region "across the water." The Greek Apollo, worshipped at Delphi and Delos, is a Phœnician prince. I do not expect the Greeks to accept this. They have invested too much in their own myths—the son of Zeus and Leto, born on the floating island of Delos, the slayer of Python, the god of music and prophecy. But the name "Apollo" has no convincing Greek etymology. Scholars have debated its origin for centuries without reaching a consensus. The possibility that it derives from an eastern source—perhaps the Hittite Apaliunas or the Phœnician Ba'al—is at least as plausible as any Greek derivation. Sanchuniathon's claim deserves to be weighed, not dismissed merely because it offends Greek pride.

Contemporary with these were Pontus, and Typhon, and Nereus the father of Pontus: from Pontus descended Sidon, who by the excellence of her singing first invented the hymns of odes or praises: and Poseidon.

Gad Yaton: Sidon invented the hymn—the musical praise of the gods. The Greek claim that the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory, invented song is a late and transparent fiction. The city of Sidon was one of the great metropolises of the Phœnician coast, and its name is preserved both here and in the Hebrew scriptures. The Phœnicians were not only sailors and merchants; they were musicians and poets. Their hymns have not survived, but the memory of their invention has—preserved, ironically, in this fragment, which Eusebius quoted not to honour the Phœnicians but to demonstrate the human origin of pagan religion.

But to Demarous was born Melicarthus, who is also called Heracles.

Gad Yaton: Melicarthus—Melqart, "King of the City"—is the tutelary deity of Tyre. The Greeks, in their inveterate habit of appropriation, identified him with Heracles and invented a story in which Heracles visited Tyre. But the Tyrian Melqart was worshipped in that city long before the Greeks had a Heracles to speak of. Herodotus himself (2.44) records that he travelled to Tyre to investigate the matter and found a temple of Melqart that the priests dated to 2,300 years before his own time—that is, to approximately 2750 years before the common era. The temple of Melqart at Tyre was one of the most ancient sanctuaries in the Mediterranean world, and the cult spread with Phœnician colonisation to Carthage, Gadir, and every other settlement in the Phœnician network. The twelve labours of Heracles—the lion, the hydra, the cattle of Geryon—are Greek accretions attached to an older, Phœnician figure. The club, the lion-skin, the pillars at the end of the world—these are symbols of Melqart, not inventions of Greek poetry.

Ouranus then made war against Pontus, but afterwards relinquishing the attack he attached himself to Demarous, when Demarous invaded Pontus: but Pontus put him to flight, and Demarous vowed a sacrifice for his escape.

In the thirty-second year of his power and reign, Ilus, who is Cronus, having laid an ambuscade for his father Ouranus in a certain place situated in the middle of the earth, when he had got him into his hands dismembered him over against the fountains and rivers. There Ouranus was consecrated, and his spirit was separated, and the blood of his parts flowed into the fountains and the waters of the rivers; and the place, which was the scene of this transaction, is shewed even to this day.

Gad Yaton: The Greeks later transformed this historical assassination into the castration of Ouranos, a cosmic myth in which the severed genitals of the sky-god fall into the sea and produce Aphrodite (Hesiod, Theogony 159–200). But the original account, preserved by Sanchuniathon, describes a political murder at a specific location—a place "shewed even to this day." This is not mythology. It is the memory of a dynastic struggle, preserved with topographical precision and later allegorised beyond recognition by the Greek poets. The difference between the two accounts is the difference between history and fantasy. Sanchuniathon gives us the history.

(Then our historian, after some other things, goes on thus:)

But Astarte called the greatest, and Demarous named Zeus, and Adodus who is entitled the king of gods, reigned over the country by the consent of Cronus: and Astarte put upon her head, as the mark of her sovereignty, a bull's head: and travelling about the habitable world, she found a star falling through the air, which she took up, and consecrated in the holy island of Tyre: and the Phœnicians say that Astarte is the same as Aphrodite.

Gad Yaton: Astarte—Ashtart in Phœnician—was the principal goddess of Sidon and Tyre. The Greeks equated her with Aphrodite. The bull's head as a symbol of sovereignty is well-attested in Near Eastern iconography. The "star falling through the air" was a meteoritic stone, which Astarte found and consecrated. The veneration of meteorites as divine objects is a common feature of ancient religions—the black stone in the Kaaba at Mecca is the most famous surviving example—and the Phœnicians were among the earliest practitioners of this cult. The Greeks, whose own religion preferred anthropomorphic statues, never understood the meteorite cult and dismissed it as barbarous. But a stone fallen from heaven is, in its way, a more honest object of reverence than a statue carved by human hands to represent an imaginary being.

Moreover, Cronus visiting the different regions of habitable world, gave to his daughter Athena the kingdom of Attica.

Gad Yaton: The Athenians, who prided themselves on being autochthones—sprung from the soil—will resist this claim. But the record is clear: Athena was a Phœnician princess, the daughter of Cronus, and she was given dominion over Attica. The Greek Athena—the grey-eyed goddess who sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus—is a mythologised version of this historical figure. The city of Athens, which the Greeks claimed was named for their virgin goddess after she won a contest with Poseidon, may well have been named for a Phœnician queen. The Athenians will deny this. Let them produce archaeological evidence that their Athena predates the Phœnician princess. They cannot.

And when there happened a plague with a great mortality, Cronus offered up his only begotten son as a sacrifice to his father Ouranus, and circumcised himself, and compelled his allies to do the same: and not long afterwards he consecrated after his death another of his sons, called Muth, whom he had by Rhea; this (Muth) the Phœnicians esteem the same as Death and Pluto.

Gad Yaton: The practice of royal child sacrifice in times of extreme crisis is attested by multiple classical sources (Diodorus Siculus 20.14; Plutarch, De Superstitione 13) and by the archaeological evidence of the tophet precincts at Carthage, Motya, and other Phœnician-Punic sites. I shall discuss this evidence in greater detail in Book II, where I address the false accusations of the Greeks and Hebrews.

For now, let it suffice to note two things. First, the Phœnicians themselves, through Sanchuniathon, acknowledged this practice without apology. It was a custom of the ancients, performed only in times of extreme calamity, and it was understood as an offering of the most precious thing the ruler possessed. Second, the Hebrews, who later denounced this practice as an abomination, preserved in their own scriptures the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22) and of Jephthah sacrificing his daughter (Judges 11). The parallels are not coincidental. The Hebrews shared the cultural world of the Canaanites, including the rite of royal sacrifice, and only later, under the influence of their prophets, repudiated it. To condemn the Phœnicians while excusing the Hebrews is hypocrisy.

After these things, Cronus gave the city of Byblus to the goddess Baaltis, which is Dione, and Berytus to Poseidon, and to the Caberi who were husbandmen and fishermen: and they consecrated the remains of Pontus at Berytus.

But before these things the god Taautus, having pourtrayed Ouranus, represented also the countenances of the gods Cronus, and Dagon, and the sacred characters of the elements. He contrived also for Cronus the ensign of his royal power, having four eyes in the parts before and in the parts behind, two of them closing as in sleep; and upon the shoulders four wings, two in the act of flying, and two reposing as at rest. And the symbol was, that Cronus whilst he slept was watching, and reposed whilst he was awake. And in like manner with respect to the wings, that he was flying whilst he rested, yet rested whilst he flew. But for the other gods there were two wings only to each upon his shoulders, to intimate that they flew under the controul of Cronus; and there were also two wings upon the head, the one as a symbol of the intellectual part, the mind, and the other for the senses.

Gad Yaton: This four-eyed, four-winged iconography is unmistakably Near Eastern. Neo-Assyrian palace reliefs from the eighth and seventh centuries before the common era depict winged genii and protective deities with multiple wings and eyes. The symbol of Cronus—the king who watches while he sleeps, who acts while he rests—is a sophisticated political emblem that embodies the ideal of royal vigilance. The Greeks, who reduced Cronus to a crude child-eater, never produced a comparable symbol of kingship. The Hebrews, whose concept of divine omniscience ("he who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep," Psalm 121:4) is theologically similar, probably borrowed the imagery from this older source.

And Cronus visiting the country of the south, gave all Egypt to the god Taautus, that it might be his kingdom.

Gad Yaton: Egypt is given to Taautus—the inventor of letters—as his domain. The meaning is clear: writing, not pyramids, is the true legacy of the land of the Nile. The Egyptians will dispute this endlessly. Let them. Their hieroglyphs are silent. The alphabet of Taautus speaks.

These things, says he, the Caberi, the seven sons of Sydyc, and their eighth brother Asclepius, first of all set down in the records in obedience to the commands of the god Taautus. All these things the son of Thabion, the first Hierophant of all among the Phœnicians, allegorized and mixed up with the occurrences and accidents of nature and the world, and delivered to the priests and prophets, the superintendants of the mysteries: and they, perceiving the rage for these allegories increase, delivered them to their successors, and to foreigners: of whom one was Isiris, the inventor of the three letters, the brother of Chna who is called the first Phœnician.

Gad Yaton: The corruption of the true history began early—with the son of Thabion, the first Hierophant, who allegorised the records and mixed them with cosmic phenomena. From him, the priests inherited a corrupted tradition, and they passed it on to foreigners, who corrupted it further. Isiris, the brother of Chna (the first Phœnician), invented "three letters"—perhaps an additional development of the alphabet, or perhaps a different script altogether. The details are obscure, but the principle is clear: the original, true history was written down by the Cabiri and Asclepius at the command of Taautus. Everything that followed was alteration, allegory, and mystification.