trait in the character of Baalat by which she could be
assimilated to Isis or Hathor: she was fierce, warlike, and licentious,
and wept for her lover, while the Egyptian goddesses were accustomed
to shed tears for their husbands only. It was this element of a common
grief, however, which served to associate the Phonician and Egyptian
goddesses, and to produce at length a strange blending of their persons
and the legends concerning them; the lady of Byblos ended in becoming an
Isis or a Hathor,* and in playing the part assigned to the latter in the
Osirian drama.

* The assimilation must have been ancient, since the Egyptians of the
Theban dynasties already accepted Baalat as the Hathor of Byblos.

[Illustration: 101.jpg THE TREE GROWING ON THE TOMB OF OSIRIS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Prisse d'Avennes

This may have been occasioned by her city having maintained closer
relationships than the southern towns with Buto and Mendes, or by her
priests having come to recognise a fundamental agreement between their
theology and that of Egypt. In any case, it was at Byblos that the most
marked and numerous, as well as the most ancient, examples of borrowing
from the religions of the Nile were to be found. The theologians of
Byblos imagined that the coffin of Osiris, after it had been thrown into
the sea by Typhon, had been thrown up on the land somewhere near their
city at the foot of a tamarisk, and that this tree, in its rapid growth,
had gradually enfolded within its trunk the body and its case. King
Malkander cut it down in order to use it as a support for the roof of
his palace: a marvellous perfume rising from it filled the apartments,
and it was not long before the prodigy was bruited abroad. Isis, who was
travelling through the world in quest of her husband, heard of it, and
at once realised its meaning: clad in rags and weeping, she sat down
by the well whither the women of Byblos were accustomed to come every
morning and evening to draw water, and, being interrogated by them,
refused to reply; but when the maids of Queen Astarte* approached
in their turn, they were received by the goddess in the most amiable
manner--Isis deigning even to plait their hair, and to communicate to
them the odour of myrrh with which she herself was impregnated.

* Astarte is the name taken by the queen in the Phoenician
version: the Egyptian counterpart of the same narrative
substituted for it Nemanous or Saosis;