Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/327

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GODS OF THE PHŒNICIANS KINGS OF ATLANTIS.
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tarte (Ashtoreth), another called Rhea. "And Dagon, after he had found out bread-corn and the plough, was called Zeus-Arotrius."

We find also, in the Phœnician legends, mention made of Poseidon, founder and king of Atlantis.

Chronos gave Attica to his daughter Athena, as in the Greek legends. In a time of plague he sacrificed his son to Ouranos, and "circumcised himself, and compelled his allies to do the same thing." It would thus appear that this singular rite, practised as we have seen by the Atlantidæ of the Old and New Worlds, the Egyptians, the Phœnicians, the Hebrews, the Ethiopians, the Mexicans, and the red men of America, dates back, as we might have expected, to Atlantis.

"Chronos visits the different regions of the habitable world."

He gave Egypt as a kingdom to the god Taaut, who had invented the alphabet. The Egyptians called him Thoth, and he was represented among them as "the god of letters, the clerk of the under-world," bearing a tablet, pen, and palm-branch.

This not only connects the Phœnicians with Atlantis, but shows the relations of Egyptian civilization to both Atlantis and the Phœnicians.

There can be no doubt that the royal personages who formed the gods of Greece were also the gods of the Phœnicians. We have seen the Autochthon of Plato reappearing in the Autochthon of the Phœnicians; the Atlas of Plato in the Atlas of the Phœnicians; the Poseidon of Plato in the Poseidon of the Phœnicians; while the kings Mestor and Mneseus of Plato are probably the gods Misor and Amynus of the Phœnicians.

Sanchoniathon tells us, after narrating all the discoveries by which the people advanced to civilization, that the Cabiri set down their records of the past by the command of the god Taaut, "and they delivered them to their successors and to foreigners, of whom one was Isiris (Osiris), the inventor of the three letters, the brother of Chua, who is called the first Phœ-