* The menhir of Bethel was the identical one whereon Jacob rested his head on the night in which Jehovah appeared to him in a dream.  In Phoenicia there was a legend which told how Usoos set up two stellae to the elements of wind and fire, and how he offered the blood of the animals he had killed in the chase as a libation.

Men and beasts were supposed to be animated, during their lifetime, by a breath or soul which ran in their veins along with their blood, and served to move their limbs; the man, therefore, who drank blood or ate bleeding flesh assimilated thereby the soul which inhered in it.  After death the fate of this soul was similar to that ascribed to the spirits of the departed in Egypt and Chaldaea.  The inhabitants of the ancient world were always accustomed to regard the surviving element in man as something restless and unhappy—­a weak and pitiable double, doomed to hopeless destruction if deprived of the succour of the living.  They imagined it as taking up its abode near the body wrapped in a half-conscious lethargy; or else as dwelling with the other rephaim (departed spirits) in some dismal and gloomy kingdom, hidden in the bowels of the earth, like the region ruled by the Chaldaean Allat, its doors gaping wide to engulf new arrivals, but allowing none to escape who had once passed the threshold.*

     * The expression rephaim means “the feeble”; it was the
     epithet applied by the Hebrews to a part of the primitive
     races of Palestine.

There it wasted away, a prey to sullen melancholy, under the sway of inexorable deities, chief amongst whom, according to the Phoenician idea, was Mout (Death),* the grandson of El; there the slave became the equal of his former master, the rich man no longer possessed anything which could raise him above the poor, and dreaded monarchs were greeted on their entrance by the jeers of kings who had gone down into the night before them.

Among the Hebrews his name was Maweth, who feeds the departed like sheep, and himself feeds on them in hell.  Some writers have sought to identify this or some analogous god with the lion represented on a stele of Piraeus which threatens to devour the body of a dead man.

[Illustration:  240.jpg A CORNER OF THE PHOENICIAN NECKROPOLIS AT ADLUN]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph in Lortet.

The corpse, after it had been anointed with perfumes and enveloped in linen, and impregnated with substances which retarded its decomposition, was placed in some natural grotto or in a cave hollowed out of the solid rock:  sometimes it was simply laid on the bare earth, sometimes in a sarcophagus or coffin, and on it, or around it, were piled amulets, jewels, objects of daily use, vessels filled with perfume, or household utensils, together with meat and drink.  The entrance was then closed, and on the spot a cippus was erected—­in