than anyone else, the Lebanese must know that they are from Lebanon-Phoenicia
and not from anywhere else: no other nation in the world has raised such
commotion about its origins as the Lebanese nation. As a matter of fact,
it was claimed that our roots were from nearby or far away regions, but not
from within our country. Some said that we came originally from Asia, others
from Africa. Still others went even further away, suggesting America, Australia
or the islands of the Pacific Ocean! Are there solid bases upon which we
can rely to sieve the various theories and determine where we originally
Tens of locations were said to be the cradle of the Lebanese-Phoenician
scholars have collected tens of sources on the subject in important studies.
Most exhaustive is that of Father Pierre-Marie Martin in his giant work entitled: "L'Histoire
du Liban"1 in
which he mentions several locations considered by certain ancient, and in
their wake some modern authors, as the cradle of our ancestors, including:
the shores of the Red Sea beyond Eritrea2 .
Others make their origin Persian or Assyrian: Strabo (XVI, 3 and 4) spoke
of the "isles of Tyros and Arados in the Persian Gulf" and of their
temples that "resemble Phoenician temples." Pliny (VI, 43) called
the isle of Tylos, Tyros. Martin adds (HL, p. 413-415): "The inhabitants
of these islands claim that the Phoenician Arados and Tyre on the East Mediterranean
Coast are colonies of their emigrants. But it must be stressed that when
the Persians found Phoenicians established in the isles of the Persian Gulf,
they understood that immigrants had established these colonies to facilitate
their trade with India."
original homeland for the Phoenicians was mentioned on the shores of the
Black Sea (Strabo, XVI, 1, 2)3 .
Others, referring themselves to the description of their Spanish and Greek
colonies, by various authors, including Homer (Il, II, 499), gave them a
Spanish or a Greek origin (Martin, HL, p. 109). They were also given a French
or English origin, more precisely, from Brittany, or Great Britain4 ,
which bear the name of Beirut5 .
Many names in England and Brittany are certainly Phoenician, e.g. l'Île
D'Arz, off French Bretagne, Cornwall (From Cronos-El)... To others, our ancestors
came from Venice, Italy, - the name Venice is derived from Phoenicia (Mazel,
AP, pp. 154-155) - or from Etruscan stock6 .
It was also said that the Phoenicians descend from the Vikings whose name
is a deformation of Phoenician, giving as evidence, that their Saga (their
folk songs) are echoes of the songs of the Phoenician gods: Ea (El), Thor
(Hermes), Odin (Adon = lord in Phoenician) and others7.
the most famous historian who imposed the extraterritoriality of the Phoenicians
was Herodotus - falsely considered "Father of History"8 -
who said once that they came from the shores of the Indian Ocean9 and
another time from the shores of the Sea of Eritrea, i.e. the Red Sea (I,
1; IV, 37; VII, 89). He claimed that the Phoenicians themselves told him
that they first lived on the shores of the Sea of Eritrea, but migrated and
settled on the shores of the Sea of Syria (Sour = Tyre) adjoining the border
of Egypt, and that the stretch of land adjoining the border of Egypt is called
Herodotus, nobody called Lebanon-Phoenicia by another name. And although
the Greeks borrowed his appellations, which the Romans adopted, these names
were transitory and disappeared when the occupants left.
Herodotus' text, historians found many errors. The country he called Syria
never carried that name except by those who considered it the hinterland
of Tyre, as trustworthy scholars, e. g. St Jerome and others tell us10 .
The southern part of the Land of Canaan was not called Palestine at that
time, nor was it so called by its people - including Herod the Great (37
BC to 4 AD) (cf. Annex VI, map). The name Philistia remained that of the
territory south of Jaffa and north of Gaza. Historians11 are
aware that Herodotus was the first to give the names of Palestine and Syria
to southern and eastern Canaan respectively (cf. Annex I, Map of Phoenicia
by Rawlinson, 1889). He did so arbitrarily because of his ignorance
of the history and geography of our Region. The Greeks adopted his appellation
and the Romans followed them. But as soon as the Phoenician, Septimus
Severus (146-211 AD) became Emperor of Rome, he restored to the Region
the name Phoenicia.
never called his country Palestine, and the name also does not appear in
explains why Christ never pronounced the word Palestine, and why this name
does not appear in the New Testament. And if that was the name of His homeland,
wouldn't Christ have called it by this name? On the contrary, we can infer
from the Gospels (Mt 10:5-6; 15:24) that Jesus considered himself issued
from Israel, a word mentioned in the New Testament 70 times, and in
the Koran 52 times to affirm that Israel is the chosen people of God
with whom He made an Alliance that He will never repeal!
historians refuted the theory claiming that the Phoenicians came from the
for their coming from the shores of the Red Sea, it was refuted by the scholars
who are familiar with the data, e. g. Father Martin (HL, pp. 410-412), who,
after thoroughly analyzed the problem concluded: "It was impossible
that the Phoenicians would have told Herodotus this that they came from
the Red Sea or Erytrea, because they always insisted that they were autochthonous
in Phoenicia. This is well-known to everyone who is familiar with their history,
their narratives, their names and their inventions. We are consequently inclined
to think that Herodotus either made a gross mistake in giving this declaration
concerning the Phoenicians to assert his theory, or that it was one of his
numerous vilenesses about which Plutarch admonished him more than once. Nevertheless,
there is an expression in Herodotus' declaration that may exonerate him and
at the same time prove the veracity of certain ancient traditions, namely,
that the people of whom he speaks might have been Phoenicians from Sidonia
who returned with the Hebrews from Egypt and settled in the littoral of South
Canaan, in Herodotus' Palestine.
Father Martin's remark, we may add that many Tyrian and Sidonian colonies
were established in Egypt, alongside Jewish communities who followed there
Joseph, son of Jacob, appointed Minister by Pharaoh Putiphar. And when Moses
brought back the persecuted after the defeat of the Hyksos Kings (Pastors
or Foreign Kings) - the last of whom was Agenor12 ,
father of Cadmus and Europe -, there were, among them Phoenicians, mostly
from Sidonia (i. e. Tyre and Sidon). The Hyksos were, as it is well-known13 ,
from Canaan-Phoenicia and were called "Shepherds" of their people.
Later, Christ also called Himself the "Good Shepherd" (Jn 10: 1
let us return to Herodotus and say that this ignorant of our problems and
those of the Orient14 spoke
very lightly when he said that the Phoenicians came from the shores of the
Sea of Eritrea, meaning the present Red Sea, hence Arabia, and was followed
in this by some ancient and even modern historians, including misinformed
Lebanese. As a matter of fact, the Ancients, including Herodotus himself15 knew
many other Eritreas. The allegations of these historians naturally cause
surprise, since it is obvious that the Phoenicians, Antiquity's great mariners,
gave their name to all the Eritreas known by the Ancients (Martin, HL, p
109) : beside that of the Red Sea (Herodotus, I, 1; VII, 89), we know those
of the Atlantic Ocean (Herodotus, I, 202, 205; VII, 63, 69), of Qadesh (Spain),
mentioned by Pliny (IV, 37), Strabo (IX, 2, 12) and others16 ,
the Eritrea of Beotia (Homer, Il, 20, 499)17 ,
of Greece of whom many have spoken18 ,
of Ionia (Asia Minor)19 ,
of the Indian Ocean (Polybius, V, 46, 54; IX, 43)20 and
of the Eritrea of the Persian Gulf (Strabo, 16, 3, 4)21 .
As for the Red Sea, it was called in Antiquity, "Sea of Papyrus" -
as in ancient inscriptions, including the Phoenician inscription of Paraiba22 (Brazil)
- and also Red Sea? And because the Phoenicians discovered purple, they wrongly
concluded that the Phoenicians came from the Arabian Peninsula!23
the "Lebanese were always differentiated from the Arabs", wrote
Father Martin24 ,
adding: "and neither the Egyptians nor the Semites in general, ever
called the Phoenicians by that name".
No wonder, since the origin
of the Phoenicians is from the Mediterranean Basin and certainly not from
desert regions, because the people of the Mediterranean Basin differ drastically
in their mode of life, customs and civilization? from the people of the
desert. Eminent historians established this fact, and we follow in their
steps, not because we dislike the Arabs - and how could we who love everybody,
dislike them? - but because we wish them good25 ,
and are ready to afford them the benefit of our civilization to the utmost. But
we will not coax them by saying we are Arabs, because we would be stamping
upon Verity in view of obtaining material gains!
wrote, some years ago26 an
article in which we refute the allegations of a mercenary author who set
out to write books that go against all scientific, patriotic and religious
norms. In one of these books entitled: "The Bible comes from the Arabian
Peninsula (=BCAP) he affirms (p. 14) that he took in consideration toponymy
to the exclusion of all the other scientific disciplines. To justify himself,
he says that "the field surveys in the Arabic Peninsula are not complete".
He consequently listed the names of localities that bear names similar to
those found in our country, in particular: Lebanon, Eden, Phoenix, Thor,
Sidon, Tyr, Gebeil (Byblos), Arados... But, since he did not find cedars
in Arabia, he simply replaced the cedar with 'ar'ar (a tree found in Arabia).
He even made of Lebanon a hill between Hijaz, 'Assir and Yemen, and claimed
that the Arabs were the founders of the Lebanese cities, feigning27 to
ignore - because he couldn't have ignored it (cf. BCAP) - that the Lebanese
cities were much older than those of the Peninsula, and that there are almost
everywhere in the world cities whose names resemble those of our cities because
our ancestors founded them. Disregarding such nonsense, distinguished archeologists
and historians reversed the situation by assuring that the Phoenicians were
the only great mariners in Antiquity and that their fleet was the only one
capable of navigating the seas and oceans. It was therefore the Lebanese-Phoenicians
who founded cities in the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere. They sometimes
were accompanied by Hebrew sailors - especially during the reigns of Hiram
the Great and Solomon the Wise (1K 9:28, 10:11) - and/or other peoples whom
they civilized during their glorious periods and their successive conquests
of the earth. Opposite those whom V. Bérard28 called
Phénicophobes because they were set at disparaging the glories of
Lebanon and his true patrimony - and were unfortunately followed by sham
Lebanese such as the one we feel repugnance at naming him -, our country
counts Phenicophiles (friends of Phoenicia) who studied thoroughly our history
and discovered that, in reality, our civilization was "The Civilization", to
use the words of Pierre Hubac29 .
They also proved that "our people conquered the world in Peace and Goodwill" and
gave the names of our celebrities and cities to various regions and towns
in the world, including the Arabian Peninsula, and the opposite is not true!
Among these Phenicophiles, let us mention: Samul Bochart30 ,
François Lenormant31 ,
Stéphane Gsell32 ,
Father Pierre-Marie Martin33 ,
Victor Bérard34 ,
Pierre Hubac35 ,
Sabatino Moscati36 ...
and many other European scholars who, without being Phenicophiles, furnished
us with important information that enriched our patrimony, while depriving
our ancestors of part of the admiration they are entitled to. Moreover, famous
Lebanese writers broached the subject with great Devotion.
example among thousands and we are on the track of the Phoenician conquests
that astonished, and still do, the world's greatest minds.
his very precious work Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée, Victor
Bérard based himself at once on antique inscriptions as well as geographical,
topographical, nautical... data to prove that the Phoenicians were the great
conquerors of Antiquity and that the Odyssey of Homer - who studied in Tyre,
his parent's original homeland who probably emigrated to Greece37 -
is the poetic transposition of a Phoenician periplus. Bérard also
gave us a series of onomastic - names of localities - extensions that are
very rich, if not exhaustive. To examine the veracity of our assertion, we
shall choose, from this succinct survey an example, centered on the name
of Phoenix, the father and true Phoenician representative.
is in the second volume of his above-mentioned work that Bérard38 examines
the words Phoenicia, Phoenicians, Phoenix... and shows that "these names
could not be Greek since the Greek language does not form derivatives with
the letter 'x'"39 .
Let us follow the extensions of these names: Other than our Lebanon-Phoenicia,
comprising Syria and Palestine, Athenaeus (IV, 174), quoting Corinna and
Bacchylides, gave the name Phoenike to Caria. To this Phoenician Caria, the
Ancients annexed Lycia, Pamphylia, Pisidia, Cilicia, hence almost all of
maritime Asia Minor. The word Phoenike remained attached to a Carian mountain
peak according to Strabo, who mentions another mountain called Phoenix in
Rhodes40 . Cyprus
also was a Phoenike41 .
The same applies to Malta and its neighboring isles. "An onomastic extension
made the same Phoenike of the Aegean shores and countryside." Moreover,
the "names Phoenikous, Phoenike, Phoenix42 are
to be found on all the southern or western coasts of the Hellenic domain
on the Libyan coast, but a little to the east of Crete - just opposite Carpathos,
says Strabo43 -
the Hellenes had their port Phoenikous."
front of Malea and Tagyte is the same orientation as Phoenikous the port
in the Cythera island, of which Herodotus wanted to make a counter of the
Phoenician thalassocracy and one of the sanctuaries founded by the Phoenicians44 ."
the extreme southern point of Messina, in the region where Venitians and
Franks had, for many centuries, their famous ports of Colon and Modom, there
was also a Phoenikous port45."
Sicily, Ptolemy knew a Phoenikous port in the South of the eastern littoral
near the river Heloros."
the time when the early Hellenes could "barely catch a glimpse" of
the Southern world, the name was transported to the Phoenike of Libya which
was the territory of Carthage. As a matter of fact Polyen gives us the name
Phoenike to the Carthaginian country, just as Athenaeus did to the Carian
to Thucydides47 ,
the first Phoenician navigations should be carried back to a time anterior
to Minos of Crete (XVI-XVth century BC). The Phoenicians and the Carians
were then allies.
nothing prevents us considering that off the Italian and Ligurian coasts,
the Eolian island Phoenikodes, Ph?nikoussa or Ph?nike and the Stoechade island
Ph?nike, were other starting or final points of this onomastic."
could also find on the Epirean coast a port of this Phoenician-Libyan epoch
in the city of Phoenike, which is now connected to the continent by the alluvium48 .
can imagine the help the Ph?nikion and Ph?nikis of Béotia can afford
to replace the legend49 of
Cadmos in its true date in Carthaginian history.
It is all the Mediterranean sea, first called Yam El (Sea of God)50 by
the Phoenicians and then became a Phoenician Sea51.
of the most important stations to classify under the Phoenix vocable is the
city of Thor Phoenikon52 :
it is the Elim, city of the Gods, of which the Bible53 speaks
of its twelve sources and seventy palm gardens54 ...
onomastic extension of the word Phoenix is the least that can be said. No
wonder then that we wrote about 1000 pages on the Phoenicians, builders of
the World One.
of their countless vestiges discovered all over the world, many places
of origin for the Phoenicians were invented, some of which we already related.
And the greatest people of Antiquity sought the honor of belonging to the "superior,
Lebanese-Phoenician race, spread all over the globe, and the creator of
the first "World One"!
the past, every time we read about a new cradle for our ancestors, we were
surprised and sometimes angry. But then we understood that such a matter
is rather a source of pride, because it proves not only our presence in the
various parts of the world since prehistory, but also that we civilized the
world and ruled it by knowledge and friendship. Our innumerable vestiges
found in various countries establish this fact. In our manuscript entitled "" Les
Phéniciens bâtisseurs du premier Monde Un", we presented
many references affirming that we conquered and civilized the world, including
the Americas56 ,
at least since 3000 BC.
of Samuel Bochart (XXVIIth century), the author of Geographia Sacra, Victor
In his second book, Canaan, Bochart considers the Phoenician colonization
and the Phoenician and Punic languages... "Following the example of
the legends and the names of localities, and because of an admirable knowledge
of all the authors of classical Antiquity..., he was able to reconstitute
a Phoenician Mediterranean: in Egypt, in Cilicia, in Cyprus, in Pisidia,
in Caria, in Rhodes, in Samos (by the sole enumeration of the thirty six
first chapters, we could continue all the periplus of the Interior Sea),
everywhere, he found evidence of Sidonian or Tyrian colonization. No littoral
escaped his seizure on behalf of the Phoenicians. He even hesitated to deny
that America was beyond their practice. He knew that the Gallic language
had more than one resemblance with their language." It is said that
all the great cities of Europe were founded by the Phoenicians. Thus Paris58 is
none other than Faris, the Knight; London also was Phoenician; Denmark was
Dan Malek, the King Dan59 .
the cities of Iberia, about a thousand, says Strabo (III, II, 113-114) were
built by the Phoenicians, and in his time (1st century), two hundred were
still occupied by them. The same applies to the Greek cities founded by Cadmos
of Tyre and the Cadmeans60 ...
Cadmos also built 100 cities in Libya (Nonnos, II, XIII, 260-265) which he
called after his grandmother. Strabo (XVII, 3, 3 and 8), quoting Erastothenes,
also said that, before Carthage, the Phoenicians had built on the shores
of North Africa 300 emporions...
lack of space, we will not speak of all the other countries of Europe and
elsewhere. We broached the subject in other studies.
we ended by discovering that our past is unique in greatness and that our
country, once known as "Paradise, Eden" (Ez 31:16), the aim of
many covetous nations. And so the annalists set about to discover, or invent,
to their sponsors or any nation it commissioned them, the honor of being
related to our ancestors, or else to invent an origin for the Lebanese-Phoenicians
The scholars should have reversed the allegation by proclaiming that only
the Lebanese-Phoenicians, unrivalled navigators of Antiquity, could set out
from here to the far corners of the world62 ,
including towards the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Knowing all
this, we were no more surprised to learn that the peoples of Antiquity, especially
the great among them, proudly proclaimed their Phoenician origin, and sometimes
paid genealogists to draw up for them a "Certificate of Lebanese-Phoenician
descent," especially from great Phoenicians, in particular Thor-Hermes
of Byblos and his cousins and companions, Canaan-Phoenix, Asklepios-Eshmoun,
'Anat-Athena... our deified heroes, known as the gods"63 .
Among the gods of the second and third generations, let us mention Cadmos
and the Cadmeans, Homer, Thales, Pythagoras, Zeno, Hippocrates, Euclid...
Alexander called the Great (Arrian, II, 18, 1), Julius Caesar, and many others
were among those who procured a Phoenician ascent.
how can this false situation that makes of us Arabic be corrected?
is not the first time that the Lebanese are struck by the misfortune of having
their identity withdrawn to be replaced by that of an invader. At the time
of the Ottoman occupants, the gallows were the lot of whoever refused to
label Lebanon Ottoman. Recently, the Syrian Minister Khaddam called every
Lebanese who did not believe in an Arab Lebanon to leave Lebanon forever.
The Syrians are constantly making good on their threat. We hope to be rid of
them soon and pray God to keep us from newcomers who, in turn, will seek
to crush our identity.
we are in dire need to correct this situation that forces the Lebanese in
a state of falsehood with himself and with his country in perspicacity and
courage. But how can this be done? By reverting to the methodology that every
objective historian must follow when investigating the origin of a people:
to consult, in the first place, these people themselves and their historians.
He then may consult "what information other scholars, ancient and modern,
may have collected about this people, and seek inspiration from the archeology,
available written documents, inscriptions, traditions." Had Herodotus
and those like him done this, they would have solved many of the problems
pertaining to the origin of the Lebanese-Phoenicians. "But historians
were at that time ignorant and relied only upon unreliable yarns. Furthermore,
the Phoenicians from whom the Greeks should have learned history, did not
know what the Greeks had imputed to them64."
the truth was never stifled, and in every age there were noble messengers
to defend it and refute the falsehoods. The ancient Orientals put in doubt
the probity of the Greeks and Romans: "They accused and condemned their
ignorance." Furthermore, the Greeks and Romans attacked and contradicted
each other. Among the Orientals who exposed the ignorance of the Greeks,
we shall mention the commentator of Sanchoni Aton of Beirut, Philo of Byblos
(born in 42 AD). Philo, supported by Porphyry of Tyre, violently battered
the Greeks (SA, 1, 9, 27-28; 1, 10, 8; 1, 10, 40-41), and his antagonist,
Eusebius of Caesarea, the "Church's first historian", who reported
the extant passages of Sanchoni Aton and their comments, did not contradict
him on this point65 .
We shall also mention Josephus (Against Apion, chs. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6), the greatest
Jewish historian, who not only accused Greek authors, with Herodotus in the
lead, of fabricating yarns, but affirmed that the Greeks were indebted in
all their writings and knowledge to the Phoenicians, especially to Cadmus
and his kinsmen. And the reliable historians, basing themselves upon Sanchoni
Aton's passages (I, 10, 7), in which he quotes his antecedent historians
to assert that the first two humans "lived in Phoenicia" - as is
confirmed by Ezekiel (31:16), who declared that the Garden of Eden was situated
between the Cedars of Lebanon -, and on our soil they multiplied, invented
after the Greek authors, including Diodoros Siculus (I, 69), Roman authors,
e. g. Cicero (Defense of Flaccus), Tacitus (II, 88), Pliny (III, 6), Juvenal? vied
with each other in attacking the guile of the Greeks, especially Herodotus.
However, those who have sieved the histories of the Romans, realized that
they also were not trustworthy, especially because they relied for their
knowledge of the Orient on the Greeks. And, "aspiring to replace our
ancestors in the leadership of the world, they piled slander on them"66 .
Lebanese are from Lebanon and from nowhere else."
can conclude from our studies that the Ancients, refuted ahead of us with
or without premeditation, the allegations of Herodotus and his equals. As
for the modern scholars, of whom we mentioned the most eminent, in particular
Father Pierre-Marie Martin, who assured that the Phoenician historians have
always affirmed that "the Lebanese are from Lebanon and from nowhere
else", and that "they are trustworthy"67 .
names of the Lebanese-Phoenicians are derived from the names of their heroes.
Martin affirms68 in
his History of Lebanon, that the Phoenician historians proved that the Lebanese-Phoenicians
are "natives of their country" and that "since the beginning
they lived in Lebanon-Phoenicia and nowhere else". Farther Martin also
proved that their most recurrent names: Lebanese, Cananeans, Phoenicians
and other appellations, Beirutis, Giblites, Sidonians, Tyrians... "by
which they called themselves and of which they were proud", emanated
from themselves and not from the Greeks69 .
We are mentioning this because some people claim that it was the Greeks who
called our ancestors "Phoenicians"! Examining thoroughly this question,
Father Martin concluded: "The Greeks were never in the Orient at the
time when it is claimed that they named our ancestors Phoenicians".
He then adds: "Can we believe that when these foreign merchants came
to them, the Greeks immediately invented a name for them, without asking
them how they called themselves in their country?" Then, with reference
to Stephanus Byzantinus70 and
others, he affirms that the name of the Phoenicians is issued from their "father
and hero, Phoenix.
various other reasons it is necessary to differentiate between the Lebanese-Phoenicians
and the Arabs.
much more there is to say! We have discussed them in detail in our book carrying
the same title as this memorandum. We proved at length that between the Mediterranean
countries geographically similar to Lebanon and those, for example, of Saudi
Arabia, the center of Arabity, there is no similitude that can be signaled.
As far as race is concerned, nothing binds the Lebanese to the Somalians
other than the features inherent to all men. The mode of living of the Lebanese
and the other Mediterraneans are also very different from those of the people
of Arabia and other desert countries of the interior who have barely emerged
from the sand. The Arabic language also is drastically different from the
Lebanese language, daughter of Phoenician through Aramaean, the language
of Christ. The Koran owes to the Syriac language derived from Aramaean, a
third of its vocabulary71 ...
Arabic also differs from the languages spoken in North Africa whose people
demand that their languages be declared at least as official as Arabic.
this is what we also demand for our language. Anyway, Arabic is no more spoken
anywhere: it is arabo-script and not arabo-phone... Teaching it at the expense
of the other languages of culture, leads to a stagnation of culture, especially
since this language, like any other, carries with it its patrimony which
is meager and pertains to the desert that slowly destroys our own patrimony
and everything that is not itself...
religious question is even more arduous. Islam is a State religion in all
the Arab and Islamic countries except Lebanon. The Arabs have all sorts of
schemes to clean Lebanon of all those who oppose his arabization, including
slaughtering since close to a century.
scheme consists: 1- to impoverish us in order to force us to sell our land;
2- to drown Lebanon in the sands of foreign Arabs, generally uncultivated
and fanatical, who often carried arms against us in order to prevent anyone
from speaking of a Lebanese race, especially on the cultural level...
have examined all these points in other studies.
After sieving the most significant works of the modern, trustworthy and even
not so trustworthy, historians we believe that we can reverse the issue
and assert that it was the Lebanese, also called Cananeans and Phoenicians
- and say all the genealogy of Adam and Noah - who emigrated from their
land and settled all over the world which they divided among themselves
as is written in Genesis (ch. 10). This is confirmed by Josephus (Ant.
Jud., I, I-IV) and all those who wrote about these ancient epochs. We can
also assert that "they could not have come from the Arabian Peninsula";
and that "there was never a racial or cultural merger between them
and the Arabs". We can especially assert that the so-called "gods" ("Elohim")
and "Cabirim" ("Gibourim" or Giants) are Lebanese people
who were deified and that their land is Lebanon-Phoenicia and none other72 .
shall terminate with these words by Melkart-Hercules, the first God-King
of Tyre to his descendant Dionysios-Bacchus, the grandson of Cadmus, about
their ancestors, during his visit to Tyre: "From the beginning of
time, people lived here, a people of a divine progeny; their age is that
of the universe"73 .
words by Melkart are not the fruit of a fertile imagination. They are corroborated
by archeology, history and other disciplines, which enable us to say that
the "first man was born in Lebanon, and so was the homo sapiens and
the homo sapiens religiosus?" It also appears that most of the beginnings
of Civilization were inaugurated here. The continuous presence of people
on our land exclude the possibility that a broom swept away the original
inhabitants of this land in order to replace them with newcomers from Arabia
and produce in this land a new race that spontaneously created a civilization
and cities of unequalled greatness, either in the Arabian Peninsula or anywhere
from May Murr's book: Lebanon-Phoenicia, Land of God, seen through
its Prehistory and History, Giants of Prehistories and Histories.
Site Author's Note: Research by the Genographic Project on the origin of man that sampled genetic material from huge numbers of men from around the world proves that 1 in 17 persons from the countries around the Mediterranean are Phoenician -- carry Phoenician blood today.
MURR, translated by Alfred MURR
as is by kind permission of the author and
the © Great-Lebanon.org site.