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Phoenicians are handed down through the Hebrews, in Psalm cvi, 23 to 30:


"They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters:
These see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.
For He commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to the Heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.
Then are they glad because they be quiet: so he bringeth them into their desired haven."


Only a sailor could have written this beautiful description of a storm at sea, and no shepherd could ever have even conceived it. Again, we have, through Rome, in the works of Terence, a Phoenician slave, that immortal passage which, on being first spoken in the theatre at Rome, brought the entire audience to their feet in thunders of applause: "Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto". As Max Müller says: "As far as we can tell, the barbarians seem to have possessed a greater facility for acquiring languages than either Greeks or Romans. Soon after the Macedonian conquest we find Berosus in Babylon, Menander in Tyre, and Manetho in Egypt compiling, from original sources, the annals of their countries. Their works were written in Greek, and for the Greeks. The native language of Berosus was Babylonian; of Menander, Phoenician; of Manetho. Egyptian. Berosus was able to read the cuneiform documents of Babylonia with the same ease with which Manetho read the papyri of Egypt. The almost contemporaneous appearance of three such men—barbarians by birth and language—who were anxious to save the histories of their countries from total oblivion by entrusting them to the keeping of their conquerors, the Greeks, is highly significant. But what is likewise significant and by no means creditable to the Greek or Macedonian conquerors is the small value which they seem to have set on these works. They have all been lost, and are known to us by fragments only, though there can be little doubt that the work of Berosus would have