Chronicle
The Phoenician History
Φοινικικὴ ἱστορία
Philo of Byblos · 120
Synopsis
The text opens on a dark, windy air and a muddy, boundless chaos; from the breath is born Desire, the principle of all creation, then Mot, and beings who watch the sky. The first men learn to feed on trees, and their descendants in turn invent fire, huts, skin clothing, navigation, hunting and fishing, iron, houses, herding, then writing. Then come the generations of the gods, from the Most High down to Ouranos and El, whom the Greeks call Kronos, and their struggles for power.
Context
The work has come down to us only through the long quotations that Eusebius of Caesarea gives of it, in the fourth century, in the first book of his Preparation for the Gospel, where he uses it in his polemic against the pagan gods. Philo claimed to translate a Phoenician priest earlier than the Trojan War, whom some consider an invented figure. The tablets unearthed at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, from 1929 onwards, have confirmed a good part of what he reports of Phoenician religion. The text can be read in French in the edition of book I published by Le Cerf in 1974 by Jean Sirinelli and Édouard des Places.
Who it is for
A text in fragments, to be read in the edition of Eusebius; it requires a taste for divine genealogies and origin myths.
Prizes and reception
Studied by historians of the cults of Phoenicia, from the memoir of 1858 that Renan devoted to it to recent work.
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