“It is strange,” says M. Renan, “that the people to which all antiquity attributes the invention of writing, and which has, beyond all doubted, transmitted it to the entire civilised world, has scarcely left us any literature."[1312] Certainly it is difficult to give the name of literature either to the fragments of so-called Phoenician works preserved to us in Greek translations, or to the epigraphic remains of actual Phoenician writing which have come down to our day.  The works are two, and two only, viz. the pretended “Phoenician History” of Sanchoniathon, and the “Periplus” of Hanno.  Of the former, it is perhaps sufficient to say that we have no evidence of its genuineness.  Philo of Byblus, who pretends that he translated it from a Phoenician original, though possibly he had Phoenician blood in his veins, was a Greek in language, in temperament, and in tone of thought, and belonged to the Greece which is characterised by Juvenal as “Graecia mendax.”  It is impossible to believe that the Euemerism in which he indulges, and which was evidently the motive of his work, sprang from the brain of Sanchoniathon nine hundred years before Euemerus existed.  One is tempted to suspect that Sanchoniathan himself was a myth—­an “idol of the cave,” evolved out of the inner consciousness of Philo.  Philo had a certain knowledge of the Phoenician language, and of the Phoenician religious system, but not more than he might have gained by personal communication with the priests of Byblus and Aphaca, who maintained the old worship in, and long after, his day.  It is not clear that he drew his statements from any ancient authorities, or from books at all.  So far as the extant fragments go, a smattering of the language, a very moderate acquaintance with the religion, and a little imagination might readily have produced them.

A few extracts from the remains must be given to justify this judgement:—­“The beginning of all things,” Philo says,[1313] “was a dark and stormy air, or a dark air and a turbid chaos, resembling Erebus; and these were at first unbounded, and for a long series of ages had no limit.  But after a time this wind became enamoured of its own first principles, and an intimate union took place between them, a connection which was called Desire {pothos}:  and this was the beginning of the creation of all things.  But it (i.e. the Desire) had no consciousness of its own creation:  however, from its embrace with the wind was generated Mot, which some call watery slime, and others putrescence of watery secretion.  And from this sprang all the seed of creation, and the generation of the universe.  And first there were certain animals without sensation, from which intelligent animals were produced, and these were called ‘Zopher-Semin,’ i.e. ‘beholders of the heavens;’ and they were made in the shape of an egg, and from Mot shone forth the sun, and the moon, and the lesser and the greater stars.  And when the air began to send forth light, by the conflagration