Sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II

Sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II
The sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II is a 6th-century BC sarcophagus unearthed in 1855 in the grounds of an ancient necropolis southeast of the city of Sidon, in modern-day Lebanon, that contained the body of Eshmunazar II (Phoenician: ), Phoenician King of Sidon. One of only three Ancient Egyptian sarcophagi found outside Egypt, with the other two belonging to Eshmunazar's parents King Tabnit and Queen Amoashtart, it was likely carved in Egypt from local amphibolite, and captured as booty by the Sidonians during their participation in Cambyses II's conquest of Egypt in 525 BC. The sarcophagus has two sets of Phoenician inscriptions, one on its lid and a partial copy of it on the sarcophagus trough, around the curvature of the head. The lid inscription was of great significance upon its discovery as it was the first Phoenician language inscription to be discovered in Phoenicia proper, the most detailed Phoenician text ever found anywhere up to that point, and is today the second longest extant Phoenician inscription, after the Karatepe bilingual.
The sarcophagus was discovered by Alphonse Durighello, a diplomatic agent in Sidon engaged by Aimé Péretié, the chancellor of the French consulate in Beirut. The sarcophagus was sold to Honoré de Luynes, a wealthy French nobleman and scholar, and was subsequently removed to the Louvre after the resolution of a legal dispute over its ownership.
More than a dozen scholars across Europe and the United States rushed to translate the sarcophagus inscriptions after its discovery, many noting the similarities between the Phoenician language and Hebrew. The translation allowed scholars to identify the king buried inside, his lineage, and his construction feats. The inscriptions warn against disturbing Eshmunazar II's place of repose; it also recounts that the "Lord of Kings", the Achaemenid king, granted Eshmunazar II the territories of Dor, Joppa, and Dagon in recognition for his services.
The discovery led to great enthusiasm for archaeological research in the region and was the primary reason for Renan's 1860–1861 Mission de Phénicie, the first major archaeological mission to Lebanon and Syria. Today, it remains one of the highlights of the Louvre's Phoenician collection.
Eshmunazar II
Eshmunazar II (Phoenician: , a theophoric name meaning 'Eshmun helps') was the Phoenician King of Sidon, reigning to . He was the grandson of King Eshmunazar I and a vassal king of the Achaemenid Empire. Eshmunazar II succeeded his father, Tabnit I, on the throne of Sidon. Tabnit I ruled briefly before his death, and his sister-wife, Amoashtart, acted as an interregnum regent until the birth of Eshmunazar II. Amoashtart then ruled as Eshmunazar II's regent until he reached adulthood. Eshmunazar II, however, died prematurely at age 14 during the reign of Cambyses II of Achaemenid Persia, and was succeeded by his cousin Bodashtart. Eshmunazar II, like his mother, father and grandfather, was a priest of Astarte. Temple building and religious activities were important for the Sidonian kings to demonstrate their piety and political power. Eshmunazar II and his mother, Queen Amoashtart, constructed new temples and religious buildings dedicated to Phoenician gods such as Baal, Astarte, and Eshmun.
History
Phoenician funerary practices
The Phoenicians emerged as a distinct culture on the Levantine coast in the Late Bronze Age as one of the successor cultures to the Canaanites. They were organized into independent city-states that shared a common language, culture, and religious practices. They had, however, diverse mortuary practices, including inhumation and cremation.
Archaeological evidence of elite Achaemenid period burials abounds in the hinterland of Sidon. These include inhumations in underground vaults, rock-cut niches, and shaft and chamber tombs in Sarepta, Ain al-Hilweh, Ayaa, Magharet Abloun, and the Temple of Eshmun in Bustan el-Sheikh. Elite Phoenician burials were characterized by the use of sarcophagi, and a consistent emphasis on the integrity of the tomb. Surviving mortuary inscriptions from that period invoke deities to assist with the procurement of blessings, and to conjure curses and calamities on whoever desecrated the tomb.
The first record of the discovery of an ancient necropolis in Sidon was made in 1816 by English explorer and Egyptologist William John Bankes.
Modern discovery
The sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II was discovered on 19 January 1855 by the workmen of Alphonse Durighello, an agent of the French consulate in Sidon hired by Aimé Péretié, an amateur archaeologist and the chancellor of the French consulate in Beirut. Durighello's men were digging on the plains southeast of the city of Sidon in the grounds of an ancient necropolis (dubbed Nécropole Phénicienne by French Semitic philologist and biblical scholar Ernest Renan). The sarcophagus was found outside a hollowed-out rocky mound that was known to locals as Magharet Abloun (The Cavern of Apollo). It had originally been protected by a vault, of which some stones remained in place. One tooth, a piece of bone, and a human jaw were found in the rubble during the sarcophagus extraction.
Cornelius Van Alen Van Dyck, an American missionary physician, made it to the scene and made a transcript of the inscription which was first published on 11 February 1855 in The United States Magazine.
On 20 February 1855, Durighello informed Péretié of the find. Durighello had taken advantage of the absence of laws governing archaeological excavation and the disposition of the finds under the Ottoman rule, and had been involved in the lucrative business of trafficking archaeological artifacts. Under the Ottomans, it sufficed to either own the land or to have the owner's permission to excavate. Any finds resulting from digs became the property of the finder. To excavate, Durighello had bought the exclusive right from the land owner, the Mufti of Sidon, Mustapha Effendi.
Ownership dispute
Durighello's ownership of the sarcophagus was contested by the British vice-consul general in Syria, Habib Abela, who claimed he had entered into agreements with the workers and the landowner to assign and sell him the rights to any discoveries. The matter quickly took a political turn; in a letter dated 21 April 1855 the director of the French national museums, Count Émilien de Nieuwerkerke, requested the intervention of Édouard Thouvenel, the French ambassador to the Ottomans, stating that "It is in the best interest of the museum to possess the sarcophagus as it adds a new value at a time in which we start studying with great zeal Oriental antiquities, until now unknown in most of Europe." A commission was appointed by the governor of the Sidon Eyalet, Wamik Pasha, to look into the case, and, according to the minutes of the meeting dated 24 April 1855, the dispute resolution was transferred to a commission of European residents that unanimously voted in favor of Durighello.
The United States Magazine reported on the issue of the legal dispute:In the meantime, a controversy has arisen in regard to the ownership of the discovered monument, between the English and French Consuls in this place, one having made a contract with the owner of the land, by which he was entitled to whatever he should discover in it; and the other having engaged an Arab to dig for him, who came upon the sarcophagus in the other consul's limits, or, as the Californians would say, within his "claim".
Péretié purchased the sarcophagus from Durighello and sold it to wealthy French nobleman and scholar Honoré de Luynes for . De Luynes donated the sarcophagus to the French government to be exhibited in the Louvre.
Removal to the Louvre
Péretié rushed the sarcophagus' laborious transportation to France. The bureaucratic task of removing the sarcophagus to France was facilitated with the intervention of Ferdinand de Lesseps, then the French consul general in Alexandria, and the French minister of education and religious affairs, Hippolyte Fortoul. During the transportation to the Sidon port, the citizens and the governor of Sidon gathered, escorted, and applauded the convoy; they adorned the sarcophagus with flowers and palm branches while 20 oxen, assisted by French sailors, dragged the carriage to the port. At the wharf, the crew of the French navy corvette loaded the sarcophagus' trough, and then its lid, onto a barge, before lifting it to the ship. The commander of Sérieuse, Delmas De La Perugia, read an early translation of the inscriptions, explaining the scientific importance and historical significance of the cargo to his crew.
The sarcophagus of King Eshmunazar II is housed in the Louvre's Near Eastern antiquities section in room 311 of the Sully wing. It was given the museum identification number of AO 4806.
Description
The Egyptian anthropoid-style sarcophagus dates to the 6th century BC and is made of a solid, well polished block of bluish-black amphibolite. It measures long, wide, and high.
The lid displays a relief carving of the figure of a deceased person in the style of Egyptian mummy sarcophagi. The effigy of the deceased is portrayed smiling, wrapped up to the neck in a thick shroud, leaving the head uncovered. The effigy is dressed with a large Nubian wig, a false braided beard, and an usekh collar ending with falcon heads at each of its extremities, as is often seen at the neck of Egyptian mummies.
Two other sarcophagi of the same style were also unearthed in the necropolis.
Inscriptions
The Egyptian-style sarcophagus has no hieroglyphs; however, there are Phoenician inscriptions on its lid and trough. De Luynes and American philologist William Wadden Turner believed that the inscriptions were traced directly on the stone free-hand without the use of typographic guides for letter-spacing, and that these tracings were followed by the carving artisan.The inscriptions of the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar are known to scholars as CIS I 3 and KAI 14; they are written in the Phoenician language and alphabet. They identify the king buried inside, tell of his lineage and temple construction feats, and warn against disturbing his repose. The inscriptions also state that the "Lord of Kings" (the Achaemenid King of Kings) granted the Sidonian king "Dor and Joppa, the mighty lands of Dagon, which are in the plain of Sharon" in recognition of his deeds. According to Scottish biblical scholar John Gibson the text "offers an unusually high proportion of literary parallels with the Hebrew Bible, especially its poetic sections". French orientalist Jean-Joseph-Léandre Bargès wrote that the language is "identical with Hebrew, except for the final inflections of a few words and certain expressions."
As in other Phoenician inscriptions, the text seems to use no, or hardly any, matres lectionis, the letters that indicate vowels in Semitic languages. As in Aramaic, the preposition (ʾyt) is used as an accusative marker, while (ʾt) is used for "with".
Lid inscription
The lid inscription consists of 22 lines of 40 to 55 letters each; it occupies a square situated under the sarcophagus' usekh collar and measures in length and width. As is customary for Phoenician writing, all the characters are written without spaces separating each word, except for a space in the 13th line, which divides the text into two equal parts. The lid letters are not evenly spaced, ranging from no distance to a spacing of . The lines of the text are neither straight nor evenly spaced. The letters in the lower part of the text (after the lacuna on line 13) are neater and smaller than the letters in the first part of the inscription. The letters of the first three lines of the lid inscription are cut deeper and rougher than the rest of the text which indicates that the engraver was either replaced or made to work more neatly.
Trough inscriptions
A copy of the first part (twelve and a half lines) of the lid inscription is carved delicately and uniformly on six lines around the head curvature on the trough of the sarcophagus, with the letters corresponding in size and style to the second part of the lid inscription. An unfinished seventh line matches the first nine characters that form the beginning of the text that begins after the lacuna on the 13th line of the lid inscription. It measures in width, significantly wider than the lid inscription.
The relationship between the trough and the lid inscription has been discussed amongst scholars. Turner believed that the similarity of the trough's characters to those of Part II of the lid inscription suggested that the trough was inscribed immediately after the completion of the lid. Turner speculated that this may have been to claim both parts of the sarcophagus as Eshmunazar's property, and suggested that the original intention was to copy the whole of the lid inscription, but after the copy of Part II had started, it was concluded that the ornamental line which runs round the outside of the sarcophagus would have divided the inscription in an unattractive manner. Turner's theory was in contrast to German theologian Heinrich Ewald's earlier proposal that originally the entire inscription had been intended to be engraved around the trough, to represent it as proceeding from his mouth, but error(s) made in the writing caused it to be abandoned, and the inscription started again on the lid.
The external surface of the trough bears also an isolated group of two Phoenician characters. De Luynes believes that they may have been trial carving marks made by the engraver.
Translations
Copies of the sarcophagus inscriptions were sent to scholars across the world, and translations were published by well-known scholars (see below table). Several other scholars worked on the translation, including the polymath Josiah Willard Gibbs, Hebrew language scholar William Henry Green, Biblical scholars James Murdock and Williams Jenks, and Syriac language expert Christian Frederic Crusé. American missionaries William McClure Thomson and Eli Smith who were living in Ottoman Syria at the time of the discovery of the sarcophagus successfully translated most of the text by early 1855, but did not produce any publications.
Belgian semitist Jean-Claude Haelewyck provided a hypothetical vocalization of the Phoenician text. A definitive vocalization is not possible because Phoenician is written without matres lectionis. Haelewyck based the premise of his vocalization on the affinity of the Phoenician and Hebrew languages, historical grammar, and ancient transcriptions.
A list of early published translations follows below:
English translation of the lid inscription
Dating and attribution
The sarcophagus, along with two others found at the nearby Royal Necropolis of Ayaʿa, are considered the only Egyptian sarcophagi that have ever been found outside of Egypt. Marie-Louise Buhl's monograph The late Egyptian anthropoid stone sarcophagi confirmed the sarcophagus as belonging to the 26th dynasty, which began in 664 BC and ended with Cambyses II's conquest of Egypt in 525 BC – many centuries after the last of the known Egyptian Stelae in the Levant. These three Egyptian sarcophagi are considered to have contained the bodies of the same family – i.e. Eshmunazar II and his parents Tabnit and Amoashtart. Whereas Tabnit's sarcophagus reemployed a sarcophagus already dedicated on its front with a long Egyptian inscription in the name of an Egyptian general, and Amoashtart's was uninscribed, the sarcophagus used for Eshmunazar II was new and was inscribed with a full-length dedication in Phoenician on a clean surface. According to French archaeologist and epigrapher René Dussaud, the sarcophagi and their inscriptions may have been ordered by Amoashtart.
Scholars believe these sarcophagi were originally made in Egypt for members of the Ancient Egyptian elite, but were then transported to Sidon and repurposed for the burial of Sidonian royalty. Gibson and later scholars believe that the sarcophagi were captured as booty by the Sidonians during their participation in Cambyses II's conquest. Herodotus recounts an event in which Cambyses II "ransacked a burial ground at Memphis, where coffins were opened up and the dead bodies they contained were examined", possibly providing the occasion on which the sarcophagi were removed and reappropriated by his Sidonian subjects.
Significance
The discovery of the Magharet Abloun hypogeum and of Eshmunazar II's sarcophagus caused a sensation in France, which led Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, to dispatch a scientific mission to Lebanon headed by Ernest Renan.
Significance of the inscription
The lid inscription was of great significance upon its discovery; it was the first Phoenician-language inscription to be discovered in Phoenicia proper. Furthermore, this engraving forms the longest and most detailed Phoenician inscription ever found anywhere up to that point, and is now the second longest extant Phoenician inscription after the Karatepe bilingual.
Due to its length and level of preservation, the inscription offers valuable knowledge about the characteristics of the Phoenician language and, more specifically, of the Tyro-Sidonian dialect. Additionally, the inscription displays notable similarities to texts in other Semitic languages, evident in its idiomatic expressions, word combinations, and the use of repetition.
Stylistic impact on later Phoenician sarcophagi
The sarcophagi of Tabnit and Eshmunazar may have served as a model for the later sarcophagi of Sidon. After Tabnit and Eshmunazar II, sarcophagi continued to be used by Phoenician dignitaries, but with marked stylistic evolutions. These local anthropoid sarcophagi, built from the 5th century BC to the first half of the 4th century BC, continued to be carved in the form of a smooth, shapeless body, but used white marble, and the faces were progressively sculpted in more realistic Hellenic styles. It is uncertain whether they were imported from Greece or produced locally. This type of Phoenician sarcophagi has been found in the ruins of Phoenician colonies throughout the Mediterranean.
See also
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Further reading
External links
6th-century BC works
1855 archaeological discoveries
Kings of Sidon
Phoenician inscriptions
KAI inscriptions
Ancient Near East steles
Phoenician sarcophagi
Archaeology of the Achaemenid Empire
1855 in the Ottoman Empire
Phoenician alphabet
Near Eastern and Middle Eastern antiquities in the Louvre
France–Lebanon relations
6th-century BC artifacts
Archaeological discoveries in Lebanon