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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