An Older 'Version' of Genesis than the Bible | DOCUMENTARY

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Sanchuniathon was a Phoenician author. His three works, originally written in the Phoenician language, survive only in partial paraphrase and a summary of a Greek translation by Philo of Byblos recorded by the Christian bishop Eusebius. These few fragments comprise the most extended literary source concerning Phoenician religion in either Greek or Latin: Phoenician sources, along with all of Phoenician literature, were lost with the parchment on which they were written.

All knowledge of Sanchuniathon and his work comes from the Praeparatio Evangelica of Eusebius (I. chs ix-x),[3] which contains some information about him, along with the only surviving excerpts from his writing, as summarized and quoted from his purported translator, Philo of Byblos.

Eusebius quotes neo-Platonist writer Porphyry as stating that Sanchuniathon of Berytus (Beirut) wrote the truest history because he obtained records from Hierombalus priest of Ieuo (Ancient Greek: Ἰευώ), that Sanchuniathon dedicated his history to Abibalus (Abibaal) king of Berytus, and that it was approved by the king and other investigators, the date of this writing being before the Trojan War (around 1200 BC) approaching close to the time of Moses, "when Semiramis was queen of the Assyrians." Thus Sanchuniathon is placed firmly in the mythic context of the pre-Homeric Greek Heroic Age, an antiquity from which no other Greek or Phoenician writings are known to have survived to the time of Philo.

Sanchuniathon claims to have based his work on "collections of secret writings of the Ammouneis discovered in the shrines", sacred lore deciphered from mystic inscriptions on the pillars which stood in the Phoenician temples, lore which exposed the truth—later covered up by allegories and myths—that the gods were originally human beings who came to be worshipped after their deaths and that the Phoenicians had taken what were originally names of their kings and applied them to elements of the cosmos (compare euhemerism), worshipping forces of nature and the sun, moon, and stars. Eusebius cites Sanchuniathon in his attempt to discredit pagan religion based on such foundations.

This rationalizing euhemeristic slant and the emphasis on Beirut, a city of great importance in the late classical period but apparently of little importance in ancient times, suggests that the work itself is not nearly as old as it claims to be. Some have suggested it was forged by Philo himself or assembled from various traditions and presented within an authenticating pseudepigraphical format to give the material a patina of believability. Philo may have translated genuine Phoenician works ascribed to an ancient writer known as Sanchuniathon but in fact written in more recent times. This judgment is echoed by the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, which described Sanchuniathon as "belong more to legend than to history."

Not all readers have taken such a critical view:

The Humour which prevail'd with several learned Men to reject Sanchoniatho as a counterfeit because they knew not what to make of him, his Lordship always blam'd. Philo Byblius, Porphyry, and Eusebius, who were better able to judge than any Moderns, never call in question his being genuine.

— Squier Payne, in a preface to Richard Cumberland's Sanchoniatho's Phoenician History (1720)
However that may be, much of what has been preserved in this writing, despite the euhemeristic interpretation given it, turned out to be supported by the Ugaritic mythological texts excavated at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) in Syria since 1929; Otto Eissfeldt demonstrated in 1952 that it does incorporate genuine Phoenician elements that can now be related to the Ugaritic texts, some of which, as shown in extant versions of Sanchuniathon, remained unchanged since the second millennium BC. The modern consensus is that Philo's treatment of Sanchuniathon offered a Hellenistic view of Phoenician materials written between the time of Alexander the Great and the first century BC, if it was not a literary invention of Philo.

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