Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/168

 1 48 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. abominations borrowed by the Jews from their neighbours on the East, West, and North. The constant endeavour of the Hebrew prophets was to compel their countrymen to leave off thinking, feeling, or acting like the Canaanitish tribes among whom they found themselves placed ; it is obvious, therefore, that from the rites and beliefs they forbade, we may form some idea of the common characteristics of the Syrian religions ; we may sup- plement the meagre evidence of Phoenician inscriptions by the testimony of the Hebrew writers. Of all the western Semites the Jews alone had a literature, or, to speak more correctly, the Jewish literature alone has come down to our own time. Thanks to its extent and variety, this work has the merit of telling us a great deal more than the history of the Jewish mind ; it makes us familiar with many of the thoughts and customs of other nations belonging to the same family. By the latter, few monuments have been sent down to posterity in which we can recognise the real tones of their voice and the sense of their words. > But happily we have the Bible the Bible of the Jews from which we may gather so much authentic information upon a world from which they only emerged under their later kings and after they had returned from the captivity. It is, then, from the sacred writings that we shall draw the most valuable testimony as to the ideas of the men of Tyre and Siclon on death and the life after death ideas which must be understood before we can explain the usual methods of sepulture and the common forms of funerary architecture among these people. The ideas in question do not differ greatly from those we have already encountered in Egypt and Chaldaea. Like the Egyptians, the Phoenicians called the tomb the eternal dwelling, 1 and the most important documents they have left us are the cemeteries of Marath and Sidon. 1 This expression is to be found in a sepulchral inscription at Malta (Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticaruni, pars i. No. 124).