“ In the month of Bui, in the fourteenth year of the reign of me, Eshmunazar, king of the
Sidonians, son of king Thebunath, king of the Sidonians, the king Eshmunazar spake and
said :
“ Amidst my feasts and my perfumed wines, I am ravished from the assembly of men to
pronounce a lamentation and to die, and to remain lying in this coffin, in this tomb, in the
place of sepulture which I have constructed.
By this lamentation I conjure any royal race and any man, not to open this funeral
bed, not to search the asylum of the faithful (for there are effigies of gods among them,)
not to remove the cover of this coffin, not to build upon the elevation of this funeral bed,
the elevation of the bed of my sleep, even should some one say : I Listen not to those who
are humiliated, (in death) : for any royal race, or, any man who should defile the elevation
of this funeral bed, whether he removes the cover of this coffin, or builds upon the monument
which covers it, may they have no funeral bed reserved for themselves among the
Rephaim (shadows) : may they be deprived of sepulture, leaving behind them neither sons
nor posterity: and may the great Gods (Alonim) keep them confined in hell.
“ If it be a royal race, may its accursed crime fall back upon their children up to the
extinction of their posterity.
“ If it is a (private) man who opens the elevation of this funeral bed, or who removes the
cover of my coffin, and the corpses of the royal family, this man is sacrilegious.
“ May his stem not grow up from the roots, and not bring forth fruits ; may he be marked
by the reprobation among the living under the sun.
“ For, worthy to be pitied,,I have been ravished amidst my banquets and my perfumed
wines, to leave the assembly of men, and to pronounce my lamentation, then to die.
“ I rest here, in truth, I, Eshmunazarj king of the Sidonians, son of king Thebunath,
king of Sidonians, son of the son of king Eshmunazar, king of the Sidonians, and with me,
my mother Amestoreth, who was priestess of Astarte, in the palace of the queen, daughter
of king Eshmunazar, king of the Sidonians, who built the temple of the great Gods, the
temple of Astarte at Sidon, the maritime town, and we both have consecrated magnificent
offerings to the goddess Astarte. With me rests also Onchanha, who, in honor of Eshmun,
the sacred God, built Enedalila in the mountain, and made me magnificent presents; and
Onckanna, who built temples to the great Gods of the Sidonians, at Sidon, the maritime
town, the temple of Baal-Sidon, and the temple of Astarte, glory of Baal, so that in recompense
of his piety, the Lord Adon Milchon granted us the towns of Dora and Japhia, with
their extensive territories for wheat, which are above Dan, a pledge of the possession of the
strong places which I have founded, and which he has finished as bulwarks of our boundaries
endowed for the Sidonians forever.
“ By this lamentation I adjure every royal race and every man, that they will not open
nor overthrow the elevation of my tomb, that they will not build upon the construction
which covers this funeral bed, that they will not remove my coffin from my funeral bed, in
. fear lest the great God should imprison them* Otherwise may that royal race, those sacrilegious
men end their posterity, be destroyed for ever !”
The inscription leaves no possible doubt that we have the coffin of
a king of Sidon before us ; and still, if it had been found without an
inscription, nobody would have doubted its Egyptian origin.105 The
mummy-shaped form of the coffin is identical with the basalt-sarco-
phaguses of the XlXth dynasty; and the peculiar conventional
beard, the head-dress, the necklace, and the hawk-beads of Horus on
disquisitions connected with it.—(Mémoire sur le Sarcophage et l’inscription funéraire d’Nsmu-
nazar, roi de Sidon, par H. d ’A lb e r t d e L u yn e s, Paris, 1856, p. 8, 9. [Equally Shemitic
in spirit, is the Punic “ sacrificial ritual” of Marseilles, as rendered by De S a u l c y (Mén.
de VAcad. R. des Inscrip., 1847, XVII., Ie partie.—G. R. G.]
105 [See “ Inscription Phénicienne sur une Pierre à libation du Séraphéum de Memphis,”
by theDno de Luynes, But. Archive de VA thenoeum Français, August-SeDt.. 1855 —G R G 1
the shoulders of the king, all completely correspond with the three
coffins of the family of king Amasis, sent by Abbas Pasha as a
present to the Prince of Leuchtenberg. We are, therefore, author-
Fig. 19.
ized to infer with the Due de Luynes that Esmunazar was a contemporary
of Amasis. And indeed, we find that Apries of Egypt, about
b . c. 5 7 4 , invaded Phoenicia, captured Sidon, and probably reduced
this very king to a state of dependency on Egypt; which might
account for the Egyptian style of king Esmunazar’s coffin, unless
we can prove that Phoenician sculpture was always a daughter of
Egyptian art. Such an assumption might be maintained by the Pharaonic
style of the type of some brass coins of the island of Malta,
undoubtedly a Phoenician colony. But although the dress of the
female head which we distinguish on those coins, is evidently Egyptian
and its ornament is the royal “Atf,”—the crown of Osiris and
other deities, composed of a conical cap, flanked by two ostrich
feathers with a disk in front, placed on the horns of a goat, — still,
the reverse of the medal presents an entirely different style, v iz : an
imitation of Assyrian art. It is a kneeling man with four wings.
But the coin of Malta is not the only- instance of Assyrian style on
Phoenician monuments. Dr. Layard has published several cylinder
seals with the Phoenician name of the proprietor, engraved in Phoenician
characters.106 The lion-shaped weights in the Br. Museum, found
m the palace of Nnnrood,107 bear, likewise, Phoenician inscriptions;
but they cannot fairly be taken for works of Shemitic artists. They
prove only, by their bilingual inscription, that there were two different
nationalities in the empire, and that the system of weights and
measures must have been peculiarly important to the Shemitic portion
pf its inhabitants—no other instances of bilingual official inscriptions
10fl Layard’s Nineveh and Babylon, p. 606 :— Lttynes, Sarcophage, p. 59.
07 Bayard’s Monuments of Nineveh, 1st seríes, pi. 9 6 : —Nineveh and Babylon, p. 605.