Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/111

 THE PHOENICIAN WRITING. 91 The Phoenicians were very far from exhausting the uses of the admirable instrument they had invented. They used it for " keeping their books," but not for expressing their higher thoughts ; they had no literature in the true sense of the word. They seem to have written by preference on precious stones, where there was room only for very short texts, and upon bronze, most of which has long ago disappeared. " Before the discovery of Mesa's inscription, one might have doubted whether epigraphy was made use of by any Canaanitish people. Steles like those of Mesa must have been rare, and as for the habit of putting inscriptions on monumental buildings, on tombs, on coins, it cannot have dated back beyond the day when imitation of the Greeks began. It is so with the Phoenician coinage. There is no Phoenician money anterior to the coinage of Greece and Persia. The inscription of Esmounazar is equally modern ; and the awkward, laboured way in which it is turned differs widely enough from the firm and simple style of men who have written much upon stone. In place of the grand manner of Greece and Rome, the only considerable inscription that has yet been found in Phoenicia is nothing but the long-winded verbiage of a narrow-souled individual oppressed by terrors as to the fate of his own bones. 1. . . The very execution of the inscription betrays a little-practised hand. The carver has begun twice over, and the second time he has altered his process. There is, too, something very strange in the monotony of the Carthaginian epigraphy. Of two thousand five hundred known inscriptions from Carthage, all but three or four are practically identical. 2 In short, the inventors of writing do not seem to have written much, "and we may at least affirm that the public monuments of Phoenicia were without inscriptions down to the Greek period." Since attention was turned to this question by the action of the Acadtmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the number of Phoenician texts has increased with great rapidity ; and yet, in the whole of 1 When M. Renan wrote these lines, in 1874, the stele of Jehawmelek had not been published. There is nothing in it, however, to modify the judgment we have quoted. 2 We may now be permitted to modify the figures given by M. Renan twenty years ago. When he wrote the page we have quoted, M. de Sain te- Marie had not yet collected and despatched to France those hundreds of steles on all of which homage to " Tanit, face of Baal," is rendered in identical terms. 3 RENAN, Mission de P/ienicie, pp. 832, 833.