Notice of Sanchuniathon

NOTICE OF SANCHUNIATHON FROM PORPHYRY

Eusebius, Præparatio Evangelica 1.9

Of the affairs of the Jews the truest history, because the most in accordance with their places and names, is that of Sanchuniathon of Berytus, who received the records from Hierombalus the priest of the god Ieuo; he dedicated his history to Abibalus king of Berytus, and was approved by him and by the investigators of truth in his time. Now the times of these men fall even before the date of the Trojan war, and approach nearly to the times of Moses, as is shown by the successions of the kings of Phœnicia. And Sanchuniathon, who made a complete collection of ancient history from the records in the various cities and from the registers in the temples, and wrote in the Phœnician language with a love of truth, lived in the reign of Semiramis, the queen of the Assyrians, who is recorded to have lived before the Trojan war or in those very times. And the works of Sanchuniathon were translated into the Greek tongue by Philo of Byblos.

Editor's Note — Gad Yaton: Before the reader proceeds, I must address the accusation, repeated by skeptics from the nineteenth century to the present, that Sanchuniathon was a fiction—a literary invention of Philo of Byblos, designed to give a spurious antiquity to a late work. The accusation is not baseless. No independent Greek or Latin source mentions Sakkun-yaton. No inscription bearing his name has been found in the ruins of Berytus. The entire tradition rests upon a single chain of transmission: Philo translated the Phoenician original into Greek, and Eusebius preserved the Greek in his Præparatio Evangelica.

But in the spring of 1929, a Syrian farmer, plowing a field near the coastal village of Ras Shamra, struck a stone that covered an ancient tomb. Beneath that stone lay the ruins of Ugarit, a Canaanite city-state that had flourished in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries before the common era. The French archaeologist Claude F.-A. Schaeffer, excavating the site, uncovered a library of clay tablets inscribed in a previously unknown cuneiform alphabet—the oldest surviving literature in any Canaanite language.

The Ugaritic texts, when deciphered, revealed a pantheon that matched Sanchuniathon's account in precise detail: El, the aged father of the gods, enthroned at the source of the rivers; Baal, the lord of the storm; Yam, the sea; Mot, the death-god; Athirat, the mother goddess; Anat, the warrior-maiden. The craft-god Kothar-wa-Hasis, whom Sanchuniathon calls Chrysor, appears in both traditions as a divine artisan, the inventor of tools and weapons—in Sanchuniathon's euhemeristic framework, a mortal smith who was later deified. Sanchuniathon's narrative of a war between the gods finds its parallel in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle. His euhemeristic framework—the idea that the gods were once mortal kings and benefactors—is not a late Greek corruption of an earlier mythical tradition but an authentic strand of Canaanite thought, preserved in written form at Ugarit more than a thousand years before Philo set down his translation.

The name Sakkun, the divine element in Sanchuniathon's own theophoric name (Sakkun-yaton, "Sakkun has given"), appears in a fragmentary Ugaritic text as the name of a minor deity. In the fifth century before the common era—centuries before Philo—the same divine name appears in Phoenician inscriptions from Sidon. The name was not a Greek invention. It was an authentic Phoenician name, borne by a real god, and almost certainly by real men who were dedicated to him.

The Ugaritic discovery did not prove that a specific man named Sakkun-yaton lived in Berytus before the Trojan War. No archaeological find could prove that. But it did prove that the tradition Sanchuniathon transmitted was genuine—that the myths and the euhemeristic framework he recorded were not Hellenistic fabrications but authentic Canaanite material, preserved in a coastal temple library for a thousand years before Philo was born. The Oxford Classical Dictionary now notes that Sanchuniathon's claim, "once suspect as a forgery, is now supported by the evidence of the Ugarit texts." The Encyclopaedia Britannica confirms that the Ras Shamra excavations "revealed Phoenician documents supporting much of Sanchuniathon's information."

The skeptics have not been silenced, but they have been forced onto the defensive by the most decisive archaeological discovery in the history of Phoenician studies. I therefore proceed with Sanchuniathon not as a proven individual but as the bearer of a genuine tradition—a tradition that the stones of Ugarit have confirmed and that this history has undertaken to restore.