Preface

Preface

By Gad Yaton

The Phœnicians left us no continuous history of their own. What the world knows of them comes largely from competitors and enemies: Egyptians who traded with Byblus but claimed cultural superiority; Assyrians who extorted tribute and boasted of destruction; Greeks who borrowed the alphabet and then invented myths to hide the debt; Hebrews who adopted Canaanite names for God while denouncing Canaanite worship as idolatry; Romans who destroyed Carthage and sowed the ground with salt. The victors wrote the history.

But the stones speak. The inscriptions of the Phœnician kings — Ahiram of Byblus, Eshmunazar of Sidon, the long succession of Tyrian rulers preserved by Menander of Ephesus — have survived. The cities they built have been excavated. Their ships, their purple dye, their alphabet, their colonies from Cyprus to Carthage to Gadir are attested by archaeology and by the testimony of a dozen foreign cultures.

In 2017, a team of geneticists sequenced the DNA of five Canaanite skeletons buried at Sidon nearly four thousand years ago. They found that the modern Lebanese people derive approximately ninety-three percent of their ancestry from those Bronze Age inhabitants of this coast. The blood that built the ships, cut the cedar, cast the bronze, and wrote the alphabet still runs in the veins of the coast.

One man, a priest of Berytus named Sanchuniathon — Sakkun-yaton, “Sakkun gives” — compiled the ancient records of his people before the Trojan War. His work, translated into Greek by Philo of Byblos, was preserved in fragments by the Christian bishop Eusebius. Those fragments are the foundation of this restoration. They record the Phœnician understanding of the origin of the world and of civilisation — not as myth, but as the deification of mortal benefactors who discovered fire, built the first huts, forged iron, planted grain, and invented letters.

To those fragments is added a continuation — a second book — that traces the history of the Phœnician people from the age of the gods, who were mortal kings, down through the cities, the colonies, and the wars with Assyria and Persia. This continuation is not a translation of a lost manuscript. It is a reconstruction grounded in inscriptions, archaeology, and the critical examination of foreign sources. It claims no divine inspiration. It claims only honesty.

The voice of these pages is Gad Yaton — “Fortune gives” — a theophoric name in honour of Sakkun-yaton of Berytus. The fortune of the Phœnician people, to have given the world its alphabet, its purple, its ships, and its trade, was earned, not bestowed.

This is an attempt to restore what was taken: a history told in our own voice.

Gad Yaton