of fire, we arrived at a bay, called ‘the Southern Horn;’ at the bottom of which lay an island like the former one, having a lake, and in the lake another island full of savage people, far the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and whom our interpreters called ‘gorillae.’  Though we pursued the men, we could not catch any of them; but all escaped us, climbing over the precipices, and defending themselves with stones.  Three women were, however, taken; but they attacked their conductors with their teeth and nails, and could not be prevailed upon to accompany us.  So we killed them, and flayed them, and brought their skins with us to Carthage.  We did not sail further on, our provisions failing us.”

The style of this short work, though exceedingly simple and inartificial, is not without its merits.  It has the directness, the perspicuity, and the liveliness of Caesar’s Commentaries or of the Duke of Wellington’s Despatches.  Montesquieu[1317] says of it:—­“Hanno’s Voyage was written by the very man who performed it.  His recital is not mingled with ostentation.  Great commanders write their actions with simplicity, because they receive more honour from facts than words.”  If we may take the work as a specimen of the accounts which Phoenician explorers commonly gave of their travels in unknown regions, we must regard them as having set a pattern which modern travellers would do well to follow.  Hanno gives us facts, not speculations—­the things which he has observed, not those of which he has dreamt; and he delivers his facts in the fewest possible words, and in the plainest possible way.  He does not cultivate flowers of rhetoric; he does not unduly spin out his narrative.  It is plain that he is especially bent on making his meaning clear, and he succeeds in doing so.

The epigraphic literature of the Phoenicians, which M. Renan considers to supply fairly well the almost complete loss of their books,[1318] scarcely deserves to be so highly rated.  It consists at present of five or six moderately long, and some hundreds of exceedingly short, inscriptions; the longer ones being, all of them, inscribed on stones, the shorter on stones, vases, paterae, gems, coins, and the like.  The longest of all is that engraved on the sarcophagus of Esmunazar, king of Sidon, discovered near the modern Saida in the year 1855, and now in the museum of the Louvre.  This has a length of twenty-two long lines, and contains 298 words.[1319] It is fairly legible throughout; and the sense is, for the most part, fairly well ascertained, though the meaning of some passages remains still more or less doubtful.  The following is the translation of M. Renan:—­