acts was variously defined according to time and place.  Some regarded him as the personification of Justice, Sydyk, who established the universe with the help of eight indefatigable Cabiri.  Others held the whole world to be the work of a divine family, whose successive generations gave birth to the various elements.  The storm-wind, Colpias, wedded to Chaos, had begotten two mortals, Ulom (Time) and Kadmon (the First-Born), and these in their turn engendered Qen and Qenath, who dwelt in Phoenicia:  then came a drought, and they lifted up their heads to the Sun, imploring him, as Lord of the Heavens (Baalsamin), to put an end to their woes.  At Tyre it was thought that Chaos existed at the beginning, but chaos of a dark and troubled nature, over which a Breath (ruakh) floated without affecting it; “and this Chaos had no ending, and it was thus for centuries and centuries.—­Then the Breath became enamoured of its own principles, and brought about a change in itself, and this change was called Desire:—­now Desire was the principle which created all things, and the Breath knew not its own creation.—­The Breath and Chaos, therefore, became united, and Mot the Clay was born, and from this clay sprang all the seed of creation, and Mot was the father of all things; now Mot was like an egg in shape.—­And the Sun, the Moon, the stars, the great planets, shone forth.* There were living beings devoid of intelligence, and from these living beings came intelligent beings, who were called Zophesamin, or ’watchers of the heavens.’Now the thunder-claps in the war of separating elements awoke these intelligent beings as it were from a sleep, and then the males and the females began to stir themselves and to seek one another on the land and in the sea.”

* Mot, the clay formed by the corruption of earth and water, is probably a Phoenician form of a word which means water in the Semitic languages.  Cf. the Egyptian theory, according to which the clay, heated by the sun, was supposed to have given birth to animated beings; this same clay modelled by Khnumu into the form of an egg was supposed to have produced the heavens and the earth.

A scholar of the Roman epoch, Philo of Byblos, using as a basis some old documents hidden away in the sanctuaries, which had apparently been classified by Sanchoniathon, a priest long before his time, has handed these theories of the cosmogony down to us:  after he has explained how the world was brought out of Chaos, he gives a brief summary of the dawn of civilization in Phoenicia and the legendary period in its history.  No doubt he interprets the writings from which he compiled his work in accordance with the spirit of his time:  he has none the less preserved their substance more or less faithfully.  Beneath the veneer of abstraction with which the Greek tongue and mind have overlaid the fragment thus quoted, we discern that groundwork of barbaric ideas which is to be met with in most