Maronites, which ended in 1860 with Druse massacres of local Christians.
This was used by France as an excuse to occupy Lebanon. 6 It is within this
context that Renan’s work took place. Ernest Renan (1823–92) was an expert
on Semitic languages who came to archaeology through his interest in the
study of the Bible and the Semitic languages. HisWrst celebrated book was
Histoire ge ́ne ́rale et systeme compare ́des langues se ́mitiques(General History of Semitic Languages). At the time of the tensions between Druses and Christians he was sent by the French Emperor Napoleon III (r. 1848–70) to the area to write a report on the ancient sites of Phoenicia. For this he became part of the military expedition. He was not theWrst to undertake excavations in the area, as in 1855 the chancelier of the General Consulate of France in Beirut, Aime ́ Pe ́retie ́, had excavated in Magharat Tabloun, the ancient cemetery of Sidon. The sarcophagus he discovered and then sent to the Louvre had an inscription on the cover which was that of Eshmunazor II, aWfth-centurybceking of Sidon. The inXuence of Renan’s work would be further-reaching. Using soldiers as his workforce, he directed four digs in Aradus (Arvad, mentioned in 1 Macc. 15:23), Byblos (the city to which the Bible owes its name), Tyre (described by the Prophet Ezekiel) and Sidon (Gen. 10:15; 1 Ch. 1:13). He published his results—documentation on monuments, rock-cut tombs and inscriptions—in his monumental volume Mission en Phe ́nicie (1864) (Moorey 1991: 17). Soon after his return from his travels to the Levant, Renan was called to the chair of Hebrew in the College de France. However,
when in his inaugural discourse he denied the divinity of Christ, he fell out of
favour and was forced to resign his professorship in 1864. He would be
readmitted in 1870.
The Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarumwas his second major work in
archaeology and one that would occupy him for the rest of his life. This
compendium aimed to reproduce all monuments and inscriptions, and
translate them. It followed the scheme set by the Corpus Inscriptionum
Latinorumthat had started to be organized just a couple of years earlier by
the German Theodor Mommsen (Chapter 5). In fact, there was a precedent,
a project that had been undertaken in Germany: in 1837 Wilhelm Gesenius
(1786–1842), a German Orientalist and biblical critic, Professor of Theology
at the University of Halle, had assembled and commentated on all the
Phoenician inscriptions then known in his volumeScripturae liv quaeque
Phoeniciae monumenta quotquot supersunt(1837). During the 1870s and
6 In 1864 a semi-autonomous Christian-dominated province was set up, governed by a non-
Lebanese Ottoman Christian responsible to Constantinople. French inXuence would be unoY-
cial until the First World War, but after the confrontation it crystallized in a French mandate
being established in the area.
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