n the night in which Jehovah appeared to
him in a dream. In Phoenicia there was a legend which told
how Usoos set up two stellae to the elements of wind and fire,
and how he offered the blood of the animals he had killed in
the chase as a libation.

Men and beasts were supposed to be animated, during their lifetime, by
a breath or soul which ran in their veins along with their blood, and
served to move their limbs; the man, therefore, who drank blood or ate
bleeding flesh assimilated thereby the soul which inhered in it. After
death the fate of this soul was similar to that ascribed to the spirits
of the departed in Egypt and Chaldaea. The inhabitants of the ancient
world were always accustomed to regard the surviving element in man as
something restless and unhappy--a weak and pitiable double, doomed to
hopeless destruction if deprived of the succour of the living.
They imagined it as taking up its abode near the body wrapped in a
half-conscious lethargy; or else as dwelling with the other _rephaim_
(departed spirits) in some dismal and gloomy kingdom, hidden in the
bowels of the earth, like the region ruled by the Chaldaean Allat, its
doors gaping wide to engulf new arrivals, but allowing none to escape
who had once passed the threshold.*

* The expression _rephaim_ means "the feeble"; it was the
epithet applied by the Hebrews to a part of the primitive
races of Palestine.

There it wasted away, a prey to sullen melancholy, under the sway of
inexorable deities, chief amongst whom, according to the Phoenician
idea, was Mout (Death),* the grandson of El; there the slave became the
equal of his former master, the rich man no longer possessed anything
which could raise him above the poor, and dreaded monarchs were greeted
on their entrance by the jeers of kings who had gone down into the night
before them.

*Among the Hebrews his name was Maweth, who feeds the
departed like sheep, and himself feeds on them in hell. Some
writers have sought to identify this or some analogous god
with the lion represented on a stele of Piraeus which
threatens to devour the body of a dead man.

[Illustration: 240.jpg A CORNER OF THE PHOENICIAN NECKROPOLIS AT ADLUN]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph in Lortet.

The corpse, after it had been anointed with perfumes and enveloped in
linen, and impregnated with substances which retarded its decomposition,
was place