Author | Samuel Bochart |
---|---|
Country | Caen, France |
Language | Latin |
Genre | Biblical criticism |
Publication date | 1646 |
Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan (in English: "Sacred Geography or Peleg and Canaan") was a work of biblical criticism and world history by French author Samuel Bochart, first published in 1646. It was originally written in two books, combined in later editions. The first of these books, entitled Phaleg, seu de Dispersione Gentium et Terrarum Divisione Facta in Aedificatione Turris Babel ("Peleg or the Dispersion of Nations and the Division of Lands Made in the Building of the Tower of Babel"), was devoted to the Generations of Noah and the modern names of the tribes lists in Genesis 10. The second book, originally entitled Chanaan seu de Coloniis Et Sermone Phoenicum ("Canaan or On the Colonies and the Phoenician Language"), studied the history of Phoenician colonization and the Phoenician and Punic languages. [1] [2] The work was highly influential in seventeenth-century Biblical exegesis and modern Phoenician historiography.
Peleg was the first detailed analysis of the Generations of Noah since classical times, becoming – and remaining – the locus classicus for such scholarship. [3]
Canaan was the first full-length book devoted to the Phoenicians, creating a framework narrative for future scholars of a maritime-based trading society with linguistic and philological influence across the region. [4] By doing this, the work also established the foundations for the comparative science of Semitic antiquities. [5] [6]
Bochart's goal was to reconstruct the historical geography of the ancient world by studying biblical philology. [7] The name Phaleg / Peleg refers to Genesis 10:25 and 1 Chronicles 1:19, which state that it was during the time of Peleg that the earth was divided.
The book is split into four parts:
The prologue is split into 16 chapters. The first two compare the Genesis story with Roman gods: Noah with Saturn, Canaan with Mercury, Nimrod with Bacchus, and Magog with Prometheus. Chapters 3–14 provide detailed commentary on the Genesis flood narrative and the Tower of Babel. Chapter 15 comments on the confusion of languages, and chapter 16 on the dispersion of nations.
In the three following sections, Bochart dedicated a chapter each for every name mentioned in Genesis 10: [8] 30 chapters for Shem's descendants, 15 chapters for Japheth's descendants, and 38 chapters for Ham's descendants.
Bochart’s analysis of the Generations of Noah in Genesis 10 became very popular, and provided the inspiration for numerous works on the same topic in the following centuries. It was one of the earliest attempts to build a single historical narrative from Biblical and classical sources. [9]
The book is split into two parts:
According to Victor Bérard, Bochart's work reconstituted a "Phoenician Mediterranean": in Cyprus, Egypt, Cilicia, Pisidia, Caria, Rhodes and Samos among others - Bochart even went as far as suggesting the Phoenician influence had reached Britain and possibly America. [10] He reached these conclusions by examining historical legends and contemporary place names; often he would extrapolate conclusions from single facts resulting in a "less admirable habit of finding a Semitic language etymology for all the names of Greek or Roman places." [10] [11]
Phoenician is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon. Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean during the Iron Age. The Phoenician alphabet spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern European scripts.
Samuel Bochart was a French Protestant biblical scholar, a student of Thomas Erpenius and the teacher of Pierre Daniel Huet. His two-volume Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan exerted a profound influence on seventeenth-century Biblical exegesis.
François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d'Arnaud was a French writer, playwright, poet and novelist. His series of novellas Les Épreuves du sentiment inspired Bellini's opera Adelson e Salvini.
Marc Vulson de la Colombière (†1658) or Sieur de la Colombière was a French heraldist, historian, poet, minion of the royal court. His name is sometimes spelt as Wulson and also as Volson.
Nasr was apparently a pre-Islamic Arabian deity of the Himyarites. Reliefs depicting vultures have been found in Himyar, including at Maṣna'at Māriya and Haddat Gulays, and Nasr appears in theophoric names. Nasr has been identified by some scholars with Maren-Shamash, who is often flanked by vultures in depictions at Hatra. Hisham ibn Al-Kalbi's Book of Idols describes a temple to Nasr at Balkha, an otherwise unknown location. Some sources attribute the deity to "the dhū-l-Khila tribe of Himyar". Himyaritic inscriptions were thought to describe "the vulture of the east" and "the vulture of the west", which Augustus Henry Keane interpreted as solstitial worship; however these are now thought to read "eastward" and "westward" with n-s-r as a preposition. J. Spencer Trimingham believed Nasr was "a symbol of the sun".
Jacques Datin was a French composer.
Count Robert du Mesnil du Buisson was a French historian, soldier, and archeologist. He was noted for his early use of geophysical survey for archaeology. He was son of Auguste, comte du Mesnil du Buisson and Berthe Roussel de Courcy, and married Jeanne Leclerc de Pulligny on 26 June 1923.
M'hamed Hassine Fantar is a professor of Ancient History of Archeology and History of Religion at Tunis University.
The Assyrian lion weights are a group of bronze statues of lions, discovered in archaeological excavations in or adjacent to ancient Assyria.
Matthieu Bochart was a French Protestant minister at Alençon from 1635-1662.
Since early modern times, a number of biblical ethnonyms from the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 have been used as a basis for classifying human racial and national identities. The connection between Genesis 10 and contemporary ethnic groups began during classical antiquity, when authors such as Josephus, Hippolytus and Jerome analyzed the biblical list.
The Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum is a collection of ancient inscriptions in Semitic languages produced since the end of 2nd millennium BC until the rise of Islam. It was published in Latin. In a note recovered after his death, Ernest Renan stated that: "Of all I have done, it is the Corpus I like the most."
The Bodashtart inscriptions are a well-known group of between 22 and 24 Phoenician inscriptions from the 6th century BC referring to King Bodashtart.
The Yehawmilk stele, de Clercq stele, or Byblos stele, also known as KAI 10 and CIS I 1, is a Phoenician inscription from c.450 BC found in Byblos at the end of Ernest Renan's Mission de Phénicie. Yehawmilk, king of Byblos, dedicated the stele to the city’s protective goddess Ba'alat Gebal.
The Carpentras Stele is a stele found at Carpentras in southern France in 1704 that contains the first published inscription written in the Phoenician alphabet, and the first ever identified as Aramaic. It remains in Carpentras, at the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, in a "dark corner" on the first floor. Older Aramaic texts were found since the 9th century BC, but this one is the first Aramaic text to be published in Europe. It is known as KAI 269, CIS II 141 and TAD C20.5.
The Neirab steles are two 8th-century BC steles with Aramaic inscriptions found in 1891 in Al-Nayrab near Aleppo, Syria. They are currently in the Louvre. They were discovered in 1891 and acquired by Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau for the Louvre on behalf of the Commission of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. The steles are made of black basalt, and the inscriptions note that they were funerary steles. The inscriptions are known as KAI 225 and KAI 226.
The Punic Tabella Defixionis is a Punic language curse tablet, inscribed on a lead scroll, found in Carthage by Paul Gauckler in 1899. It is currently held at the Carthage National Museum. It is known as KAI 89.
Sarafand is a village in southern Lebanon located 10 km south of Sidon overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
The Phoenician Adoration steles are a number of Phoenician and Punic steles depicting the adoration gesture (orans).
The Tripolitania Punic inscriptions are a number of Punic language inscriptions found in the region of Tripolitania – specifically its three classical cities of Leptis Magna, Sabratha and Oea (Tripoli), with the vast majority being found in Leptis Magna. The inscriptions have been found in various periods over the last two centuries, and were catalogued by Giorgio Levi Della Vida. A subset of the inscriptions feature in all the major corpuses of Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, notably as KAI 119-132.
The first full-length work devoted to the Phoenicians was Samuel Bochart's Geographia Sacra (1646)... In many ways, the Geographia Sacra sets the pattern for the predominant modes of engagement with the Phoenicians to this day: focus on their maritime voyages and impact on the classical world on the one hand; the Phoenician language's linguistic and philological relationship with Greek and Hebrew on the other.
Bochart's history of nations and languages was widely known in the late seventeenth century, and provided the inspiration for many similar works by other authors. It was a notable attempt to construct a single historical narrative from the available Semitic and classical sources, which, like others of its kind, tended at times to accept interpolated or forged material at face value. Phaleg began from the premise that the account of the settlement of the world given in chapter 10 of Genesis was an accurate one. The evidence for this could be deduced from a study of pagan religions, which demonstrated that Noah (or a figure who could be identified as Noah) was worshipped as a common ancestor in all ancient traditions. The work continued with an account of the history of the Flood, explaining that paradise, and the first human settlement, had been in Babylonia; that the Ark had come to rest on the highest peaks of Assyria, the Gordiaei, which were to the east of the Taurus mountains; and that the original language, Hebrew, had decayed in various ways since the time of the dispersion of peoples. It continued with the story of the travels of each of Noah's three sons and their first descendants.