Table of Contents
Ignatius Donnelly, in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, argues that the gods of the Phoenicians were, like the gods of the Greeks, the remembered kings of Atlantis. His main witness is Sanchoniathon, read through Lenormant and Chevallier’s “Ancient History of the East”. The full chapter is on https://drumsofatlantis.com/book/atlantis-the-antediluvian-world/the-gods-of-the-phoenician-also-kings-of-atlantis.
Ouranos and his sons
In Donnelly’s reading, the Phoenician cosmogony gives the Titans (Rephaim) an origin in the gods Agrus and Agrotus, which ties the Phoenicians to the island in the far west where the Greeks placed the Titans. Sanchoniathon makes Ouranos the son of Autochthon, and Plato names an Autochthon among the ten kings of Atlantis. Ouranos marries his sister Ge, and the Phoenician text Donnelly quotes gives their sons as “Ilus (El), who is called Chronos, and Betylus (Beth-El), and Dagon, which signifies bread-corn, and Atlas (Tammuz?)”. Donnelly takes the four sons to stand for four races.
Ouranos tries to kill his children by Ge, and Chronos rebels and dethrones him, the same pattern the Greeks told of Zeus and his father Chronos. Ouranos has daughters named Astarte (Ashtoreth) and Rhea, and Dagon, “after he had found out bread-corn and the plough, was called Zeus-Arotrius”. More on these figures is at https://drumsofatlantis.com/chronos, https://drumsofatlantis.com/dagon and https://drumsofatlantis.com/atlas.
Poseidon, Athena and Taaut
The Phoenician legends, Donnelly notes, also name Poseidon (see https://drumsofatlantis.com/poseidon), the founder and king of Atlantis. Chronos gives Attica to his daughter Athena, and in a time of plague he sacrifices his son to Ouranos and “circumcised himself, and compelled his allies to do the same thing.” Donnelly traces the rite back to Atlantis.
Chronos then travels the habitable world and gives Egypt to the god Taaut, the inventor of the alphabet, whom the Egyptians called Thoth (see https://drumsofatlantis.com/thoth), “the god of letters, the clerk of the under-world”. For Donnelly the names line up with Plato: Autochthon, Atlas and Poseidon appear in both, and Plato’s kings Mestor and Mneseus “are probably the gods Misor and Amynus of the Phoenicians”.
Sanchoniathon also says the Cabiri wrote down the records of the past at Taaut’s command and handed them to foreigners, among them Isiris (Osiris), “the brother of Chua, who is called the first Phoenician.” From this Donnelly infers that the inventions in Sanchoniathon came from an older race from whom the Phoenicians may have descended.
One older language
Donnelly quotes Max Müller’s “Outlines of Philosophy of History” (vol. i., p. 475) on a lost common source of the Semitic languages.
Müller holds that Hebrew and Sanskrit may both flow from one common source.
The Semitic languages also are all varieties of one form of speech. Though we do not know that primitive language from which the Semitic dialects diverged, yet we know that at one time such language must have existed.... We cannot derive Hebrew from Sanscrit, or Sanscrit from Hebrew; but we can well understand how both may have proceeded from one common source. They are both channels supplied from one river, and they carry, though not always on the surface, floating materials of language which challenge comparison, and have already yielded satisfactory results to careful analyzers.
Max Müller, quoted in Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Part IV, ch. III, "The Gods of the Phoenicians Also Kings of Atlantis", Project Gutenberg eBook #4032, public domain
From Erythia to Columbus
A Persian tradition had the Phoenicians come from the shores of the Erythraean Sea, usually taken to mean the Persian Gulf. Donnelly points instead to Erythia, an old city near Gades on the Atlantic coast of Spain, and to the island of Erythea beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where the Greeks set the tenth labor of Hercules.
Citing Bancroft, he lists customs the Phoenicians shared with the peoples of America, among them human sacrifice, the worship of fire and water, totems and signal fires. Their trade, in his account, ran from the Black Sea through the Mediterranean to West Africa, Spain, Ireland and England, and he takes that range as the area of the old Atlantean empire. Columbus, he adds, sailed from a Phoenician seaport and, at the mouth of the Orinoco, took the river for the Gihon that flowed out of Paradise. Donnelly ends the chapter with these lines:
The Phoenicians, in the poem Donnelly quotes, were the first founders of cities who opened the seas.
Upon the Syrian sea the people live Who style themselves Phoenicians.... These were the first great founders of the world-- Founders of cities and of mighty states-- Who showed a path through seas before unknown. In the first ages, when the sons of men Knew not which way to turn them, they assigned To each his first department; they bestowed Of land a portion and of sea a lot, And sent each wandering tribe far off to share A different soil and climate. Hence arose The great diversity, so plainly seen, 'Mid nations widely severed.
Dyonysius of Susiana, A.D. 3, as given in Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Part IV, ch. III, "The Gods of the Phoenicians Also Kings of Atlantis", Project Gutenberg eBook #4032, public domain
