the Christian era,
throughout the Greco-Roman world, and had acquired an especial amount of
credit in Rome. Nevertheless, the date of these last monuments renders
it possible to look upon the representation of the first pair beside the
tree of Paradise, of which they are about to eat, as directly borrowed
from the Old Testament itself, as well as from the cosmogony of Chaldea
or Phenicia. But the existence of this tradition in the cycle of the
indigenous legends of the Canaanites seems to me placed beyond doubt by
a curious painted vase of Phenician workmanship of the seventh or sixth
century B.C., discovered by General di Cesnola, in one of the most
ancient sepulchres of Idalia, in the Isle of Cyprus.[70]

There we actually see a leafy tree, from the branches of which hang two
large clusters of fruit, while a great serpent is advancing with
undulating movements towards the tree, and rearing itself to seize hold
of the fruit.[71]

Now, we are justified in doubting that in Chaldea, and still more in
Phenicia, a tradition parallel to the Biblical account of the Fall ever
assumed a significance as exclusively spiritual as it does in Genesis,
or that it contained the moral lesson also to be found in the story as
given in the Zoroastrian scriptures. The spirit of grossly materialistic
Pantheism in the religion of those lands rendered this impossible.
Nevertheless, we may remark that among the Chaldeans, and their
disciples the Assyrians, at all events from a given epoch, the notion of
the nature of sin and the necessity of repentance was to be found more
precisely formed than amongst the majority of ancient peoples, and
consequently it is difficult to believe that the Chaldean priesthood did
not, in their profound speculations on religious philosophy, seek for
some solution of the problem of the origin of evil and sin.

With the foregoing reservation, it is, indeed, probable that the
Chaldean and Phenician legend of the fruit of the tree of Paradise was
nearly akin in spirit to the cycles of ancient myths common to all the
branches of the Aryan race. To the study of these M. Adalbert Kuhn has
contributed a book of the highest interest.[72] He deals with such as
refer to the invention of fire, and to the beverage of life. These are
to be found in their most ancient form in the Vedas, and they then
passed over, more or less modified by the course of time, to the Greeks,
Romans, Slavs, as well as the Iranians and Indians. The