The worship of Venus must have been established in Cyprus long before the Greeks began to colonise the island, though it owed its great development, in part at least, to their plastic imagination. Here, too, the license which characterised the worship of Mylitta prevailed, and the ports of the island became celebrated for the number and beauty of their courtesans. Large bodies of hierodulæ, at once prostitutes and ministers of the goddess, were attached to the temples of Venus in Asia, and afterward in Greece. The origin of this custom, evil as it was, must originally have been religious in character, for the daughters of noble Armenian families passed without reproach from the service of the goddess to marriage with their equals in rank. We find traces of the same customs in remote Phœnician settlements.
Cronos or Saturn is mentioned by Greek and Latin writers among the principal deities of Phœnicia and Carthage, but it is by no means certain which particular Phœnician god answered to the Cronos of the Greeks. The most characteristic circumstance we learn concerning him is that human sacrifices were made in his honour. “The Phœnician history of Sanchoniathon,” says Porphyry, “is full of instances in which that people, when suffering under great calamity … chose, by public vote, one of those most dear to them, and sacrificed him to Saturn.” In the fragmentary history preserved to us, we find no mention of such sacrifices, but in the siege under Alexander it was proposed to revive a custom obsolete for ages, and sacrifice a boy to Saturn. That such a practice prevailed in earlier times is certain; we trace it in the Phœnician colonies, and above all in Carthage. On the occasion of any extraordinary calamity an unusual number of victims was sacrificed, but human sacrifice was also part of the established ritual, and every year a youthful victim was chosen by lot.
Infants were burnt alive, and the most acceptable of all sacrifices was that of an only child. The image of Saturn was of brass, the outstretched hands were hollowed so as to receive the body of the child, which slid thence to a fiery receptacle below. Mothers brought their infants in their arms, and quieted them by caresses till the moment they were thrown into the flames, since any manifestation of reluctance would have rendered the sacrifice unacceptable to the god. Human sacrifices were not made to one god only, or to one answering to the Saturn of the Greeks and Romans; but since Saturn was reputed to have devoured his own children it was natural that they should call any god to whom infants were offered by his name. Wherever human sacrifices prevailed they assumed that Saturn was worshipped; but, although Chiun (mentioned by the prophet Amos) was undoubtedly the planet Saturn, it does not appear that infants were offered to him.
The gods hitherto mentioned belonged to Phœnicia as a whole, but Melkarth, “king of the city” was the tutelary god of Tyre, and by Tyrian colonies his worship was spread far and wide throughout the ancient world. Under the name of Melicertes he appears in Greek mythology as a Sea-god, and bears the synonym of “the wrestler,” an epithet of Hercules. The Egyptians worshipped Hercules as one of their great gods, but Herodotus found no trace to show that his worship had been brought from Egypt to Tyre.
We should expect to find among a seafaring people the worship of a god corresponding to the Greek Poseidon, but though several marine deities are mentioned by Sanchoniathon, very few traces of any such god appear in the public worship of Phœnicia. This may perhaps be explained by the circumstance that they brought their religious system with them to the shores of the Mediterranean. The mythology of Semitic nations appears to have contained no god to correspond with Neptune. The divinities who really presided over navigation among the Phœnicians were the Cabiri, the reputed sons of Vulcan, who were represented in the garb of smiths, and whose images were placed on the prows of Phœnician vessels.
If idolatry be defined as the worship of false gods the Phœnicians were idolaters, but they were not image-worshippers in the same sense as the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Greeks. Their temples seem to have contained no representation of the deity, or at most, a rude symbol. What we know of their religion is merely external; to the more interesting question of what spiritual conceptions they attached to the names and attributes of their gods and the rites by which they were worshipped, we have no answer to give. The leading characteristic of the nation was practical activity, and the evidences of this were what foreigners saw and recorded. Our ignorance is the less to be regretted because the Phœnician religion had little influence in historic times on the beliefs of other nations or on the art and literature of the ancient world. Its genuine character survived at Carthage, and even after the fall of that colony it long retained its hold on such portions of northern Africa as had been subject to Carthaginian dominion.[b]
CULTURE; ART
That which gave the Phœnician culture of the period preceding the Egyptian supremacy its peculiar stamp, was the abundance of Babylonian elements, which had, however, been so thoroughly assimilated, that the civilisation of Phœnicia presented itself to the Egyptians as a perfected and independent one.
There was an astonishing number of cities and fortified places. Many branches of industry and a flourishing trade had increased the wealth of the inhabitants, and developed a considerable degree of luxury in their manners. At the same time, agriculture and stock-raising were extensively carried on. We know that the Egyptians imported great quantities of corn, wine, and oil from the land of Zahi, i.e., Syria and Phœnicia.