* This is confirmed by one of the names inscribed on the Tel el-Amarna tablets as being that of a governor of Byblos under Amenothes IV.  This name was read Rabimur, Anrabimur, or Ilrabimur, and finally Ilurabihur:  the meaning of it is, “Muru is the great god,” or “Horus is the great god.”  Muru is the name which we find in an appellation of a Hittite king, Maurusaru, “Mauru is king.”  On an Aramoan cylinder in the British Museum, representing a god in Assyrian dress fighting with two griffins, there is the inscription “Horkhu,” Harmakhis.

[Illustration:  104.jpg THE PHOENICIAN HORUS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an intaglio engraved in Cesnola.  The Phoenician figures of Horus and Thot which I have reproduced were pointed out to me by my friend Clermont-Ganneau.

After Osiris, the Ibis Thot was the most important among the deities who had emigrated to Asia.  He was too closely connected with the Osirian cycle to be forgotten by the Phoenicians after they had adopted his companions.  We are ignorant of the particular divinity with whom he was identified, or would be the more readily associated from some similarity in the pronunciation of his name:  we know only that he still preserved in his new country all the power of his voice and all the subtilty of his mind.  He occupied there also the position of scribe and enchanter, as he had done at Thebes, Memphis, Thinis, and before the chief of each Heliopolitan Ennead.  He became the usual adviser of El-Kronos at Byblos, as he had been of Osiris and Horus; he composed charms for him, and formulae which increased the warlike zeal of his partisans; he prescribed the form and insignia of the god and of his attendant deities, and came finally to be considered as the inventor of letters.*

     * The part of counsellor which Thot played in connexion with
     the god of Byblos was described at some length in the
     writings attributed to Sankhoniathon.

[Illustration:  105.jpg THE PHOENICIAN THOT]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after an intaglio engraved in M. de
     Vogue.

The epoch, indeed, in which he became a naturalised Phoenician coincides approximately with a fundamental revolution in the art of writing—­that in which a simple and rapid stenography was substituted for the complicated and tedious systems with which the empires of the ancient world had been content from their origin.  Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Arvad, had employed up to this period the most intricate of these systems.  Like most of the civilized nations of Western Asia, they had conducted their diplomatic and commercial correspondence in the cuneiform character impressed upon clay tablets.  Their kings had had recourse to a Babylonian model for communicating to the Amenothes Pharaohs the expression of their wishes or their loyalty; we now behold them, after an interval of four hundred years and more*—­during which we have no examples of their monuments—­possessed