100
RELIGION OF THK EARLY SAXSKH1TW INUIANS.
CHAPTER
V.
THE RELIGION OF THE PHOENICIANS AND CARTHAGINIANS. "
Le dieu des Phc'niciens, comuie de tous les pantheismes asiatiques, etait a la fois un et plusieurs." LENORMANT, Manuel d'Histoire Ancienne, vol. iii. p. 127.
IN discussing the religion of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, we have to deal with a pi*oblem far more diffiNo " sacred cult than any which has yet occupied us. " book," like the Rig- Veda the Zendavesta or the Ritual of the Dead," here spreads before us its stores of knowledge, requiring little more than patient study to yield up to us the secret which it is the object of our inquiry to discover. No extensive range of sculptures or paintings exhibits to our eyes, as in Assyria, Greece, and Egypt, the outward aspect of the worship, the forms of the gods, the modes of approaching them, the general character of the ceremonial. Nor has even any ancient author, excepting one, treated expressly of the subject in question, or left us anything that can be called in any sense an account of the religion. It is " true that we do possess, in the " Evangelical Preparation of Eusebius, a number of extracts from a Greek writer of the first or second century after Christ bearing on the * ns matter, and regarded by some moderns containing an authentic exposition of the Phoenician teaching on a number of points, which, if not exactly religion, are at any rate connected with religion. But the work of Philo Byblius, from which Eusebius quotes, is so wild, so confused, so unintelligible, that it is scarcely possible to gather from it, unless by a purely arbitrary method of interpretation, t any distinct views whatsoever. Moreover, the work is confined entirely to cosmogony and mythology, two subjects which " Especially Baron Bnnscn. (See Egypt's Place in Universal vol. iii. pp. 102-287.) I Bunftttti assumes that Philo's work contains three cosmogonies, quite distinct, of which the second and third contradict the first.
History,"