It would he vain to try, with our scanty and adulterated sources, to gain fl deeper insight into the ideas attached to the names, attributes, and modes of worship of the deities mentioned, or to speculate upon their moral influence upon the people of Phenicia. That these were pre-eminently practical; that arts and manufactures flourished among them, more than among any other ancient nation; that they knew how to turn science into money; that they were, in fact, shrewd men of business—all this we know, but little more. Atheists'or pantheists, whichever they must be called in the modern sense of these words, it is extremely doubtful whether they, any more than the bulk of the Hebrews before the exile, believed, as a body, in immortality. . What was their influence upon Greece, Rome, the whole ancient and modern world, in the province of religious thought, we shall never have any means fully to ascertain. Comparative mythology has a vast field to explore in this direction.
Phenician Language and Literature.—With the exception of Greek and Latin, no lan guage was so widely known and spoken throughout antiquity as the Phenician; and monuments of it have been found, and continue to be found, almost all over the ancient world. We can only vaguely speculate on its early history and its various phases, long as our materials yield so little information on that point. Its decline seems to date from the 8th c. B.C., when Aramaisms crept in in overwhelming numbers. Finally, the close contact with, and the everywhere preponderating influence of the Greeks, super seded—chiefly after Alexander's time—the ancient language almost completely; and even coins with Phenician legends occur later than the 2d c. B.C.—An important Pheni clan literature seems to have been extant as late as the 1st c. A.D., but it has disappeared from the face of the earth. After the second half of the 3d c., the language had vanished entirely in the country itself, and Jerome, who lived in Palestine, mentions the Punic, but never the Phenician. In the west, it survived to a much later period In Mauritania and Nmnidia, it remained, in a corrupted form, the reigning tongue as late as the 4th c. A.D. ; and Augustine draws his explanations of Scripture from the Punic current in the 5th century. There was a translation of the whole Bible into Punic made for the use of the Punic churches; and in and near Tripolis and Bizanium, it was the language of the common people up to a late period. From the 6th c., however, it rapidly died out, chiefly in consequence of the Vandals, Goths, Moors. and other foreign tribes overrunning the country, and ingrafting their own idioms upon it.
As a branch of the so-called Semitic family of the Hebrews, Syrians, Arabs, etc., the Phenicians naturally are closely related to these also•with respect to language. The affinity of the "speech of Canaan," as the Hebrew is called sometimes, with the Pheni cian was indeed remarked at an early period. Augustine, Jerome, and Priscian pointed out already—and sometimes in order to back some very peculiar notions—how closely these two languages and their dialects were allied. Yet it must be obvious at first sight, that however near the two idioms may originally have stood to each other, the peculiar relations and fortunes of the two races who spoke theni must have produced substantial changes in their structures lu the course of time. While the ancient scriptural monu
ments of the and inwardly—exhibit a rare unity of idiom and form, the ancient hallowed utterance becoming a type and model for the later generations: the Phenecians, on the other band, not confined within the narrow limits of their home count ry, but mixing freely with all the nut4 ions of the earth, spreading their own colonies fur and near among them, opened a wide field for the " development of their language, or rather for its corruption, by its into alliance with Libyan in Africa, Sardinia, and Spain, and with Aramaic in northernPhenicia, Cilicia, and perhaps even in Cyprus. Thus it came to pass that the two languages which may have been identical in old Canaan became more and more widely divergent. To enter into a more detailed disquisition on this or other cognate points, we deem more hazardous now than we should have thought it only a very few years ago; for the more ample our discoveries in Phenician literature have become of late, the more it becomes evident that we are only at the commencement, as it were, of Phenician philology, What we said of the structure of the Hebrew language (q.v.), also holds good for Phenician to a certain extent; and we shall therefore simply point out the most palpable differences between them. In the first instance, we observe the very strange circutn• stance, that what is considered an archaism or an isolated dictum in Ilebrew, appears as a coMmon expression in Phenician. Certain grammatical terminations, obsolete in Hebrew, are in use in Phettician—so that it would appear as if the Phenician had retained more of the ancient Canaanite speech than the Heurew, which gradually transformed and relined it by grammatical niceties. Another feature is the preponderance of the Cheldee, Or rather Aramaic words and forms—although here we are on very dubious ground. It might further be questioned whether our Phenicem inscriptions— all belonging to a very late period—ate not rather a faithful reflection of the Hebrew of their period, which, since the 8th c. u.c., had more and more changed into Aramaic. So much is certain, that the original language of Canaan was perfectly free from Chal daisms, and that these are but a late corruption—such as we also rind in the later books of the Old Testament. Yet there are other features quite peculiar to the Phenician, which—although not of sufficient importance to warrant our separating the dialect entirely front the I lebrews—are of a nature not to be explained by any Semitic analogy; such as certain differences in the pronunciation of vowels, in the treatment of consonants, the formation of pronouns, some verbal forms, and certain words entirely foreign to the Semitic. Again, a distinction is to be made between the Phenician of Phenicia and that corrupted form of it spoken in the western colonies, called Punic, and further, that idiom peculiar to the inhabitants of Leptis, called Libyo-Phenician—a mixture of Pheni clan and Libyan, with a vast however, of the former clement.