Hanno gives us facts, not speculations--the things which he has observed, not those of which he has dreamt; and he delivers his facts in the fewest possible words, and in the plainest possible way.

He does not cultivate flowers of rhetoric; he does not unduly spin out his narrative.

It is plain that he is especially bent on making his meaning clear, and he succeeds in doing so.
The epigraphic literature of the Phoenicians, which M.Renan considers to supply fairly well the almost complete loss of their books,[1318] scarcely deserves to be so highly rated.

It consists at present of five or six moderately long, and some hundreds of exceedingly short, inscriptions; the longer ones being, all of them, inscribed on stones, the shorter on stones, vases, paterae, gems, coins, and the like.

The longest of all is that engraved on the sarcophagus of Esmunazar, king of Sidon, discovered near the modern Saida in the year 1855, and now in the museum of the Louvre.