Phoenician Literature

the literature of the Phoenicians. Phoenician literature is related to Ugaritic literature, together with which it constitutes Canaanite literature.

At the turn of the first millennium B.C, the Phoenicians, as disseminators of alphabetic writing and as intermediaries between cultures, played a unique role in the history of Mediterranean literatures, having provided an important impetus to the emergence of classical Greek literature. However, the texts of Phoenician literature have been almost entirely lost. Gravestone and dedicatory inscriptions from the second and first millennia B.C, sometimes written in a graphic, rhythmic prose, have been preserved on the territory of Phoenicia and its colonies. The mythological plots of Phoenician literature, which center on such divinities as Astarte, the goddess of love and fertility, and the chief god, Baal, are well known through adaptations by Hellenistic scholars. The myth of the sufferings and resurrection of Adonis, for example, was retold by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.