Phoenician Myths by Zeljko Prodanovic (great reads .txt) 📕

which meant ‘the princess with the purple voice’.
A year later we left Baalbek and sailed to the west, but misfortune befell us on the voyage. The strong winds smashed our ship against a rock and my mistress Europa was drowned. I returned to Byblos, but never recovered from the loss of my princess with the purple voice.
And then, one day, the Phoenicians brought me miraculous news. In Phoenicia, there was a belief that the soul of a girl drowned at sea turns into a birch. And some bedouins had told them that on a hill, in a distant land, they had seen a birch singing with a purple voice. As you may guess, I immediately went to seek her.
I wandered for years from harbour to harbour and from hill to hill, but I did not find the birch with the purple voice. Yet beside every birch I came across, I erected a tombstone with the name of my mistress on it. In the course of time it so happened that the bedouins began to call all the lands I had travelled by one name – Europa, that is, the princess with the purple voice.
And in this I found at least some consolation for my misfortune.

The Beauty with a Tear in her Eye

If the Phoenicians considered my continual rebirth as a natural thing, didn’t envy me or feel sorry for me, it was not so with the bedouins from the surrounding countries. And so, people from all four corners of the world began arriving in Baalbek with the desire to discover the secret of eternal life.
Among the first to arrive were the bedouins from Egypt, emissaries of a pharaoh whose name I cannot recall. They said they had heard of a man from Byblos with the exceptional power to be reborn and that their ruler was asking the Phoenicians to reveal to him the secret of eternal life.
The Phoenicians told them that it was true such a man existed, but from what they knew, nobody else under the sun could outwit death and stop time, and suggested to the Egyptians that they should go to the oracle of Baalbek.
‘It is true,’ said the prophetess whose name was Nefertiti, that is, ‘the beauty with a tear in her eye’. ‘Phoenix is the only man who is being reborn and nobody else can ask Baal for the same gift. But I believe,’ she added, ‘that we could also do something for your ruler.’
The Phoenicians, apparently, knew of the miraculous power of balsam (Baal-sam or the sun’s tears), the fragrant resin obtained from trees on the slopes near Baalbek. They discovered that the bodies of the dead, when sunken into balsam, would be preserved in their shape for a long time. ‘So will we,’ Nefertiti said, ‘preserve the body of your ruler forever.’
‘And what about the soul?’ the Egyptians asked.
‘The body has to be stored in a coffin made from cedar wood,’ Nefertiti told them. ‘And it is then to be buried in a sepulchre built in the shape of a pyramid. By doing so you will enable the soul to easily return to the body from which she escaped – once she decides to do so. The peak of the pyramid will be the best sign-post to her,’ she said and added, ‘It stands quite to reason that the higher the pyramid, the easier it will be for the soul to find.’
And so the Phoenicians – by selling the secret of eternal life, the balsam and the cedars – made a fortune, and the Egyptians applied themselves to building an eternal home for their pharaoh. And so the first of the great sepulchres of civilisation was built.

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One of those who came to Baalbek in search for the secret of eternal life was Gilgamesh, the famous king of Erech, whose exploits are described on the tablets from the Assur-baal-nipal’s library.
‘When my friend Enkidu died,’ Gilgamesh said to the prophetess, ‘it was a frightful sight. Poor Enkidu could no longer see the sun nor the moon, he could not hear the cricket’s song nor could he speak. When I saw this, my heart trembled with sadness. ‘Am I also going to die some day like Enkidu?’ I thought. And would it not be terrible, my girl, if I, the most powerful man under the sun, died and never saw the sun again?’
‘It certainly would,’ the prophetess answered. ‘That is why, Gilgamesh, you must go to Byblos and ask the Phoenicians to take you, with their galleys, to an island at the end of the world, where you will find a purple plant that has the power to give one eternal life.’
And so Gilgamesh went to Byblos. There he took a galley and after several weeks of sailing he reached the island at the end of the world, that is, the Ballearic islands (Baal-el-yar or the horizon of the sun’s disc). There the Phoenicians gave him a stalk of sweet basil, saying that it was the miraculous plant he was looking for. ‘It’s enough to smell it only once,’ they said, ‘and you will live forever.’ Gilgamesh gave them a handful of gold and returned to Erech.
He spent the rest of his life convinced that he was immortal, so when Death knocked at his door one morning, he was very surprised. ‘Why are you staring at me so, Gilgamesh?’ Death asked. ‘Did you really believe that anyone else but Phoenix could outwit me? Come with me, my boy, it’s time to caress my bosom.’
Sad Gilgamesh went up to a hill near Erech and looked at the young sun. ‘Oh sun,’ he said, ‘for whom will you now shine?’ And then, Death embraced him with her gentle arms.

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One day pharaoh Amenhotep IV came to the oracle of Baalbek intending to discover the secret of eternal life. He was fascinated with the beauty of the Phoenician cult dedicated to Baal’s tear, but even more fascinated with the beauty of the prophetess with a tear in her eye.
And when he realized that he could not get eternal life, he didn’t despair but found a reasonable solution: he asked the Phoenicians to give him the beautiful prophetess for a wife. They agreed and so Nefertiti became an Egyptian queen.
The Egyptians welcomed the new queen with delight. They said that Egypt had never seen such beauty. But the priests of the god Amon, the supreme Egyptian deity, did not think so. They could not accept the fact that the priestess from a Phoenician temple had become an Egyptian queen. And they began to conspire.
When the pharaoh learnt of this, he got furious with the priests. He ordered all the temples dedicated to Egyptian gods to be destroyed and proclaimed the sun – Baal’s tear – the only divinity. In the middle of Thebes he raised a huge temple and named it ‘the temple of the invincible sun-god’, and he himself became the high priest of the temple. Eventually, he renounced his own name and became Baal-Aton, ‘the son of Baal’s tear’.
So, it was out of immense love for Nefertiti that Amenhotep did what he did. When he, one day, suddenly died (some say that he was poisoned), Amon’s priests came out of the shadows and immediately took their revenge. And according to them, Nefertiti was to blame for everything.
We will not expose the details of her death here, we will only say that she died in terrible pains. But that was not all. So big was the hatred of Amon’s priests that they destroy- ed every monument that bore her name, except for a beautiful statue made from alabaster.
They took the left eye out of the statue (Phoenicians believed that the prophetess wept out of her left eye) and put the desecrated monument in the centre of Thebes as a warning for future pharaohs. On the monument they engraved the inscription: the beauty with no tear in her eye.
I don’t know what happened to the soul of Amenhotep IV. As for Nefertiti, her soul went back to Baalbek and turned into a palm tree. Since then, centuries have passed by, but she’s still standing on the hill above Baalbek, reminding travelers of the fate of the beautiful prophetess with a tear in her eye.
Only sometimes, in the summer evenings, when the young wind descends from the cedar forests, one can see her slender body trembling tenderly, and a tear dropping out of her crown.

Thee Great Inventor

And now we shall learn how the alphabet was made.
According to one story, the alphabet was invented by no other than the Phoenician god Baal. They say that Baal, day after day, looked upon the Phoenicians as they went about bravely sailing the seas, wisely trading and building beautiful cities. And one day he said, ‘It would be a shame if such a nice people passed through time, leaving no trace behind them. Therefore, I will give them the alphabet and let them write the story of themselves, on the soft papyrus from Byblos.’
But, as I said, this is only a story. The real truth is that the alphabet was invented by a certain Elagabalus from Byblos, the same one who invented the imagination and the wheel and stated that time was round.
One day Elagabalus (Ela-ga-Baal or the shadow of the sun’s disc) was sitting on the shore, drawing peculiar signs in the sand. When the Phoenicians asked him what he was doing, he replied that he wanted to make an alphabet.
‘I want to create a sign for every sound,’ he said. ‘When I do that, we will be able to move them around as we like and write in the sand any word. That way we will be able to write the story of ourselves and leave a trail behind us. And so we will not remain an accidental and vague flash in the universe, like a remote lightning.’
Of course, the Phoenicians didn’t understand him. ‘But Elagabalus,’ they said, ‘that would mean that we want to outwit death and stop time. And who else but Phoenix has succeeded in doing that? Eternal is only Baal and the sun that he has given us! Moreover, Elagabalus,’ they added, ‘even if we did write it all in the sand, wouldn’t the sea wipe it out overnight?’
‘Oh, heavenly eye,’ Elagabalus thought, ‘it is in vain that your shadow shines upon them!’
However that may be, Elagabalus continued to draw in the sand and, after a certain time, he invented the entire alphabet. But, as I said, the Phoenicians didn’t know what they would need it for and sold it to a Greek from Thebes.
One day I was lucky enough to meet this extraordinary man. I found him on a hill above Byblos where he sat under a cypress tree, looking out to the sea.
‘First I invented imagination,’ he said. ‘When they asked me what imagination was, I told them it was the greatest of all gifts. ‘We will now finally be able to escape reality,’