of all things;
now Mot was like an egg in shape.--And the Sun, the Moon, the stars,
the great planets, shone forth.* There were living beings devoid of
intelligence, and from these living beings came intelligent beings,
who were called _Zophesamin_, or 'watchers of the heavens.'Now the
thunder-claps in the war of separating elements awoke these intelligent
beings as it were from a sleep, and then the males and the females began
to stir themselves and to seek one another on the land and in the sea."

* Mot, the clay formed by the corruption of earth and water,
is probably a Phoenician form of a word which means _water_
in the Semitic languages. Cf. the Egyptian theory, according
to which the clay, heated by the sun, was supposed to have
given birth to animated beings; this same clay modelled by
Khnumu into the form of an egg was supposed to have produced
the heavens and the earth.

A scholar of the Roman epoch, Philo of Byblos, using as a basis some
old documents hidden away in the sanctuaries, which had apparently been
classified by Sanchoniathon, a priest long before his time, has handed
these theories of the cosmogony down to us: after he has explained how
the world was brought out of Chaos, he gives a brief summary of the dawn
of civilization in Phoenicia and the legendary period in its history.
No doubt he interprets the writings from which he compiled his work in
accordance with the spirit of his time: he has none the less preserved
their substance more or less faithfully. Beneath the veneer of
abstraction with which the Greek tongue and mind have overlaid the
fragment thus quoted, we discern that groundwork of barbaric ideas
which is to be met with in most Oriental theologies, whether Egyptian
or Babylonian. At first we have a black mysterious Chaos, stagnating
in eternal waters, the primordial Nu or Apsu; then the slime which
precipitates in this chaos and clots into the form of an egg, like the
mud of the Nile under the hand? of Khnumu; then the hatching forth of
living organisms and indolent generations of barely conscious creatures,
such as the Lakhmu, the Anshar, and the Illinu of Chaldaean speculation;
finally the abrupt appearance of intelligent beings.

[Illustration: 246.jpg]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the original in the _Cabinet
des Medailles_.

The Phoenicians, however, accustomed as they were to the Mediterranean,
with its blind outbursts of fury,