IDENTIFIED IN THE MYTH OP ADONIS. 60 



Germans have said concerning myths; or shall we, emboldened by the 

 example of many great men and true scholars in the past, and unde- 

 terred by their partial failure, give the myth another opportunity of 

 proving itself to be history in disguise ? My practical ansv^er to this 

 question has been an enquiry into the mythology, not only of ancient 

 Grreece and Rome, but of India, Persia, Arabia, Egypt, and even of 

 the Germanic and Celtic races; the end of which, I trust, may be the 

 formation of a System of Comparative Mythology, that will furnish us 

 with the history of a period too long regarded as pre-historic. 



Among the many myths that have occupied my attention of late, and 

 for which I profess to have found solutions, I have chosen for the sub- 

 ject of my first paper that of Adonis ; the principal reason for this 

 choice being that the story itself, and the historical narrative with which 

 it is compared, are within the reach of every intelligent reader. In 

 the case of identity which it will be my aim to prove, I might make 

 my proof much stronger by means of connections furnished in Hindoo 

 mythology and Persian mythical history; but, as these connections 

 are only confirmatory, and not essential to the argument, I prefer to 

 restrict myself mainly to what is said on Egyptian monuments and by 

 Greek writers, bearing upon the two characters that are to be reduced 

 to unity. 



The scene of the story of Adonis is laid either in Cyprus, or near 

 Byblus in Phoenicia, and it formed the subject of an annual ceremony 

 observed in almost every Grecian city of any importance. The story 

 of the Exodus, on the other hand, belongs almost entirely to Egypt, 

 only connecting in a very secondary way with Arabia Petraea and 

 Palestine. That the story of Adonis came from the East there can be 

 no doubt. The very name Adonis, as the Hebrew Adonai (Lord), 

 sufficiently indicates its Syrian or Phoenician origin. Since we have 

 thus a clear case of the transportation of a well-known story and an all 

 but universal rite from an oriental and so-called Semitic region into the 

 midst of a so-called thoroughly Indo-European population, why may we 

 not, after examining more closely into rite and story, find them exotic 

 even in Asiatic Phoenicia, and discover their original habitat among the 

 so-called^^ Hamites of the world's cradle, African Egypt. There is no 



15 I use the word so-called in the above triple connection because I can find no evidence that 

 the Phoenicians were originally in any appreciable degree a Semitic people, the rulers of Egypt 

 a Hamitic stock at all, or the Greeks (a very mixed race) free from admixture of both these 

 elements with their Aryan base. To ignore Syria, Palestine and Egypt, in connection with the 

 spread of the Aryans and their civUization, is to shut the eyes wilfuUy to evidence monumental. 



