Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/82

 62 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKMCIA AND ITS L)KPKNI>ENCIKS. the black stone of Emcsus, of which Heliogabalus was priest before he was raised to the purple. 1 It was, then, not only on the coast, it was over all Syria that these stones were worshipped, and that down to the last hours of paganism. It is a form of worship as old as the religious senti- ment, and never, it would appear, has it flourished more than during the decline of the antique civilization. Societies, like individuals, have their periods of dotage, and this was one. In the centuries to which we are transported by the oldest known monuments of Phoenician art and fragments of o writing, the Phoenicians were no longer in the stage when the sole divinities are rocks, trees, and stones. Towards the close of the Sidonian period, when the ships of Tyre and Sidon were ploughing the Mediterranean in every direction, the rites and beliefs of Phoenicia, taking them as a whole, represented a con- dition of religious thought in advance of that we have studied in Egypt. There were no sacred animals ; men were less pre- occupied with the worship of the dead. Their adoration was chiefly addressed to the stars and to those great phenomena of nature which seemed to them to be the results of deliberate action on the part of some powerful and mysterious god. Their polytheism was more abstract, more advanced, even than that of Chaldaea ; it was farther removed from the phase to which we give the name of polydemonism ; their pantheon was less numerous, and its members were more concrete. Already, perhaps, the idea of a single supreme being was beginning to disengage itself from the conception of a crowd of distinct divini- ties, and the latter to sink into the condition of mere embodiments of the different moods and phases of a god in whom they were all summed up. It has been sometimes thought that this supreme god should be recognized in the Baal-Samdim or " Baal of the skies," to whom the great inscription of Oum-el-Awamid is dedicated ; - but when we meet him elsewhere, in the island of Sardinia, for instance, it is 1 " In the temple there is a large stone, rounded at the base, pointed at the top. conical in form, and black in colour; they say it fell from heaven." HERODIAN, v- 5- 2 MERGER, La I'hcniiie, p. 19; Corpus Inscriptwnum Scmiticarum, part i. No." 7.