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Updated: June 6, 2025
It is here that the tendency to speculative exaltation of the deity appears in Phenicia; but there is little of it, and neither in this direction nor in that of morals was the religion destined to have any remarkable growth.
Since the Hermes of Praxiteles was brought to light at Olympia there has been no discovery of Greek sculpture so dazzling in its splendor as that made in 1887 on the site of the necropolis of Sidon in Phenicia.
Egypt and Mesopotamia are, of all the countries around the Mediterranean the only seats of an important, indigenous art, antedating that of Greece. Other countries of Western Asia Syria, Phrygia, Phenicia, Persia, and so on seem to have been rather recipients and transmitters than originators of artistic influences.
Tiele's Egyptische en Mesopotamische Godsdiensten. The Histories of Israel, especially Kuenen, The Religion of Israel. F. Jeremias, in De la Saussaye, vol. i. pp. 348-383. E. Meyer, "Phenicia," in Encyclopædia Biblica. It is a circumstance of the greatest value for the science of religion that the Old Testament is so well known.
In a later period the tread of Babylonian soldiery was heard in Palestine many a time before the great captivity, in which Israel sat down and wept remembering Zion by the waters of Babylon. In Greece also we find that ideas which came from Babylon had become known, by way of Phenicia, at a very early period.
Among the Phenicians however, though we have good reasons to think that they learned their arts and crafts from the Egyptians, there is convincing evidence of a high development of dentistry. M. Ernest Renan, during an exploring expedition in Phenicia, found in the old necropolis at Sidon a set of teeth wired together, two of which were artificial.
Sorrowing most of all for the words which he spake, that they should see his face no more. And they accompanied him unto the ship. And it came to pass, that after we were gotten from them, and had launched, we came with a straight course unto Coos, and the day following unto Rhodes, and from thence unto Patara: And finding a ship sailing over unto Phenicia, we went aboard, and set forth.
In Mesopotamia and elsewhere, as in Phenicia, Semitic people had attained to a social organisation as advanced as that of the Egyptians; Semites had conquered and occupied Lower Egypt for centuries.
In this character she attracted in Babylonia a worship noted for impurity, which under the name of Ashtoreth is found also in Phenicia and in Syria. There is also, however, a warlike Istar, a strict goddess served by Amazons, and capable of identification with the Greek Artemis, as the Istar of love is identified with Aphrodite.
What of the religion of Egypt lived on in other lands which felt her influence, it is hard to say. The religious art of Egypt, and with it no doubt some tincture of the ideas it embodied, undoubtedly went northwards to Phenicia; and Greece owed to Phenicia, as we shall see, many a suggestion in religious matters.
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