* Most of the views put forth in this part of the chapter are based on posterior and not contemporary data.  The most ancient monuments which give evidence of it show it in such a complete state that we may fairly ascribe it to some centuries earlier; that is, to the time when Egypt still ruled in Syria, the period of the XIXth and even the XVIIIth dynasty.

Phoenicia especially assumed and retained this foreign exterior.  Its merchants, accustomed to establish themselves for lengthened periods in the principal trade-centres on the Nile, had become imbued therein with something of the religious ideas and customs of the land, and on returning to their own country had imported these with them and propagated them in their neighbourhood.  They were not content with other household utensils, furniture, and jewellery than those to which they had been accustomed on the Nile, and even the Phonician gods seemed to be subject to this appropriating mania, for they came to be recognised in the indigenous deities of the Said and the Delta.  There was, at the outset, no trait in the character of Baalat by which she could be assimilated to Isis or Hathor:  she was fierce, warlike, and licentious, and wept for her lover, while the Egyptian goddesses were accustomed to shed tears for their husbands only.  It was this element of a common grief, however, which served to associate the Phonician and Egyptian goddesses, and to produce at length a strange blending of their persons and the legends concerning them; the lady of Byblos ended in becoming an Isis or a Hathor,* and in playing the part assigned to the latter in the Osirian drama.

* The assimilation must have been ancient, since the Egyptians of the Theban dynasties already accepted Baalat as the Hathor of Byblos.

[Illustration:  101.jpg THE TREE GROWING ON THE TOMB OF OSIRIS]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Prisse d’Avennes

This may have been occasioned by her city having maintained closer relationships than the southern towns with Buto and Mendes, or by her priests having come to recognise a fundamental agreement between their theology and that of Egypt.  In any case, it was at Byblos that the most marked and numerous, as well as the most ancient, examples of borrowing from the religions of the Nile were to be found.  The theologians of Byblos imagined that the coffin of Osiris, after it had been thrown into the sea by Typhon, had been thrown up on the land somewhere near their city at the foot of a tamarisk, and that this tree, in its rapid growth, had gradually enfolded within its trunk the body and its case.  King Malkander cut it down in order to use it as a support for the roof of his palace:  a marvellous perfume rising from it filled the apartments, and it was not long before the prodigy was bruited abroad.  Isis, who was travelling through the world in quest of her husband, heard of it, and at once realised its meaning:  clad in rags and weeping, she sat down by the well whither the women of Byblos were accustomed to come every morning and evening to draw water, and, being interrogated by them, refused to reply; but when the maids of Queen Astarte* approached in their turn, they were received by the goddess in the most amiable manner—­Isis deigning even to plait their hair, and to communicate to them the odour of myrrh with which she herself was impregnated.