Sanchuniathon

Sanchuniathon (Greek: Σαγχουνιάθων; gen.: Σαγχουνιάθωνος) is the purported Phoenician author of three lost works originally in the Phoenician language, surviving only in partial paraphrase and summary of a Greek translation by Philo of Byblos, according to the Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. These few fragments comprise the most extended literary source concerning Phoenician religion in either Greek or Latin: Phoenician sources, along with all of Phoenician literature, were lost with the parchment on which they were habitually written. He is also known as Sancuniates.

The author

All our knowledge of Sanchuniathon and his work comes from Eusebius's Praeparatio Evangelica, (I. chs ix-x) which contains some information about him along with the only surviving excerpts from his writing, as summarized and quoted from his supposed translator, Philo of Byblos.

Eusebius also quotes the neo-Platonist writer Porphyry as stating that Sanchuniathon of Berytus (Beirut) wrote the truest history about the Jews because he obtained records from "Hierombalus" ("Jerubbaal"? or "Hiram'baal" ?) priest of the god Ieuo (Yahweh), that Sanchuniathon dedicated his history to Abibalus king of Berytus, and that it was approved by the king and other investigators, the date of this writing being before the Trojan war (around 1200 BC) approaching close to the time of Moses, "when Semiramis was queen of the Assyrians." Thus Sanchuniathon is placed firmly in the mythic context of the pre-Homeric heroic age, an antiquity from which no other Greek or Phoenician writings are known to have survived to the time of Philo. Curiously, however, he is made to refer disparagingly to Hesiod at one point, who lived in Greece ca. 700 BC.