The genius of our Phoenician ancestors…
The genius of our Phoenician ancestors showed itself in a number of fields. With the alphabet joined to their capacities of abstraction, they had the idea of a sign for each vocal sound. They were the first to notice that the phonetic sounds are only about twenty in number, while with the Egyptian hieroglyphs or Sumerian and Babylonian pictograms the signs including those for numbers, in fact, simplified drawings, exceeded the hundreds and even thousands, which made written communication and exchange difficult, complicated and long. The alphabet, on the other hand, is simple, easy, approachable and intelligent. The alphabet is a handy tool for civilization, history, culture, exchange of ideas and intellectual life. Land of peace-loving genius, of humanism and of love, over eight thousand years Lebanon produced philosophers, thinkers, mathematicians, magistrates, soldiers, atomists, navigators, historians, scholars and pioneers in research and discovery, with metallurgy, industry, and agriculture destined to serve the whole of humanity, past, present and future. All this deserves that we should stop to reflect a while when confronted with this living temple where the flame of knowledge and values still burns brightly as a beacon guiding the nations of the world.
May I mention just a few of the illustrious names borne by our fellow-countrymen: Thales, Euclid, Pythagoras, Sunkonyatun, Mokhos, Cadmus and Zeno.
As for our mysticism, I can do no more than stand in front of the god Il or El, a living god both divine and human existing well before the Greek Zeus or the Roman Jupiter… He was indeed the precursor of our “Emmanuel”.
In this region of Phoenicia, where alone in ancient times there came the idea of Resurrection, some thousands of years passed before there came the announcement of our Redemption through the death and resurrection of the Messiah, the Christ.
The handsome Phoenician god Adonis was killed by a wild boar representing the forces of evil in the world. He rose again in the springtime and his spirit with his blood spread throughout Nature in a mythology that was alive and deeply human.
On this Phoenician soil, mankind saw the building of the first house, made of hewn stone and held up by seven pillars, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
The Pole Star, discovered by a Lebanese and called by the Greeks “the Phoenician”, is the sole fixed astral body in all the wheeling heavens, while the idea of the compass from our shores was transmitted to China.
Noah’s Ark was built in Lebanon with the wood of our cedars, was it not?
Think of the building of temples and the discovery of the peoples around Africa and of America, voyages around the Mediterranean and touching the Baltic, Polynesia, New Zealand, the Red Sea and Suez … and let us stand with our contemporaries and consider those who ruled from Rome as emperors, Aurelius and Alexander Severus, our legendary Europa daughter of Agenor and sister of Cadmus, and Dido, our Helissa, of whom Virgil sang in his Æneiad…
Joseph Matar
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Translated from French: K. J. Mortimer
