Words which in Hebrew are confined to poetry pass among the Phoenicians into ordinary use, as _pha'al_ ({...}, Heb.
{...}), "to make," which replaces the Hebrew {...}.[1311] "It is strange," says M.Renan, "that the people to which all antiquity attributes the invention of writing, and which has, beyond all doubted, transmitted it to the entire civilised world, has scarcely left us any literature."[1312] Certainly it is difficult to give the name of literature either to the fragments of so-called Phoenician works preserved to us in Greek translations, or to the epigraphic remains of actual Phoenician writing which have come down to our day.

The works are two, and two only, viz.

the pretended "Phoenician History" of Sanchoniathon, and the "Periplus" of Hanno.

Of the former, it is perhaps sufficient to say that we have no evidence of its genuineness.

Philo of Byblus, who pretends that he translated it from a Phoenician original, though possibly he had Phoenician blood in his veins, was a Greek in language, in temperament, and in tone of thought, and belonged to the Greece which is characterised by Juvenal as "Graecia mendax." It is impossible to believe that the Euemerism in which he indulges, and which was evidently the motive of his work, sprang from the brain of Sanchoniathon nine hundred years before Euemerus existed.