After Osiris, the Ibis Thot was the most important among the deities who had emigrated to Asia. He was too closely connected with the Osirian cycle to be forgotten by the Phoenicians after they had adopted his companions. We are ignorant of the particular divinity with whom he was identified, or would be the more readily associated from some similarity in the pronunciation of his name: we know only that he still preserved in his new country all the power of his voice and all the subtilty of his mind. He occupied there also the position of scribe and enchanter, as he had done at Thebes, Memphis, Thinis, and before the chief of each Heliopolitan Ennead. He became the usual adviser of El-Kronos at Byblos, as he had been of Osiris and Horus; he composed charms for him, and formulae which increased the warlike zeal of his partisans; he prescribed the form and insignia of the god and of his attendant deities, and came finally to be considered as the inventor of letters.*
* The part of counsellor which Thot played in connexion with
the god of Byblos was described at some length in the
writings attributed to Sankhoniathon.
The epoch, indeed, in which he became a naturalised Phoenician coincides approximately with a fundamental revolution in the art of writing—that in which a simple and rapid stenography was substituted for the complicated and tedious systems with which the empires of the ancient world had been content from their origin. Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Arvad, had employed up to this period the most intricate of these systems. Like most of the civilized nations of Western Asia, they had conducted their diplomatic and commercial correspondence in the cuneiform character impressed upon clay tablets. Their kings had had recourse to a Babylonian model for communicating to the Amenôthes Pharaohs the expression of their wishes or their loyalty; we now behold them, after an interval of four hundred years and more*—during which we have no examples of their monuments—possessed of a short and commodious script, without the encumbrance of ideograms, determinatives, polyphony and syllabic sounds, such as had fettered the Egyptian and Chaldæan scribes, in spite of their cleverness in dealing with them. Phonetic articulations were ultimately resolved into twenty-two sounds, to each of which a special sign was attached, which collectively took the place of the hundreds or thousands of signs formerly required.
* The inscription on the bronze cup dedicated to the Baal of
the Lebanon, goes back probably to the time of Hiram I., say
the Xth century before our era; the reasons advanced by
Winckler for dating it in the time of Hiram II. have not
been fully accepted up to the present. By placing the
introduction of the alphabet somewhere between Amenôthes IV.
in the XVth and Hiram I. in the Xth century before our era,
and by taking the middle date between them, say the
accession of the XXIs’dynasty towards the year 1100 B.C. for
its invention or adoption, we cannot go far wrong one way or
the other.
Drawn by Paucher-Gudin, from a heliogravure. This is the cup
of the Baal of the Lebanon.
This was an alphabet, the first in point of time, but so ingenious and so pliable that the majority of ancient and modern nations have found it able to supply all their needs—Greeks and Europeans of the western Mediterranean on the one hand, and Semites of all kinds, Persians and Hindus on the other.
