Page:The Periplus of Hanno.djvu/22

 Plan of Harbors at Carthage—after Bosworth Smith

"But the most important factor in the history of a people—especially if it be a Semitic people—is its religion. The religion of the Carthaginians was what their race, their language, and their history would lead us to expect. It was, with slight modification, the religion of the Canaanites, the religion, that is, which, in spite of the purer Monotheism of the Hebrews and the higher teaching of their prophets, so long exercised a fatal fascination over the great bulk of the Hebrew race. The Phœnician religion has been defined to be 'a deification of the powers of Nature, which naturally developed into an adoration of the objects in which those powers seemed most active.' Of this adoration the Sun and Moon were the primary objects. The Sun can either create or destroy, he can give life or take it away. The Moon is his consort; she can neither create nor destroy, but she can receive and develop, and, as the queen of night, she presides alike over its stillness and its orgies. Each of these ruling deities, Baal-Moloch or the Sun-god, and the horned Astarte or the crescent Moon worshipped at Carthage, it would seem, under the name of Tanith, would thus have an ennobling as well as a degrading, a more cheerful as well as a more gloomy aspect.