Читать книгу A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set - Группа авторов - Страница 98

Josette Elayi

It is paradoxical that the Phoenicians who invented the alphabet have left relatively few inscriptions, compared with the Greeks for example. However, we know from the historian Flavius Josephus (see Chapter 14 Greek and Latin Sources) that Tyre used to write annals of the main events, as other cities probably did. In fact, hundreds of Phoenician inscriptions dated from the Persian period have been discovered, but most of them are very short. Monumental inscriptions are not frequent, on the one hand because many stones from ancient Lebanese sites have disappeared in lime‐kilns, on the other hand because the Phoenicians probably used to write on perishable supports, not preserved due to humid and salty soils. The main difficulty in consulting Phoenician inscriptions is the absence of a global corpus. Only partial corpuses exist for some categories of inscriptions and most Phoenician inscriptions are scattered in various publications or remain unpublished (Donner and Röllig 1973: pp. 10–62; Gibson 1982: pp. 93–141; Elayi and Sapin 2000: pp. 113–123, 363–366, 463–465, 609–611, 689–690; Pisano and Travaglini 2003: pp. 59–79).¹