Melqart

The roof beams were the original beams. Priests at the temple in Gades made a point of telling visitors so: no carpenter had touched the timbers since the place went up, the wood had simply declined to rot, and from that they drew the conclusion they wanted. The god was still living in the building. Inside, men moved between the altars barefoot and shaven-headed, in loose linen with a broad stripe on the sacrificial robe and a bright fillet across the brow. A fire burned on the altar stones and was never allowed to go out. Women could not cross the threshold. Neither could pigs. And in the whole of that sanctuary, in every niche and on every plinth, there was no statue of the god at all.

That last detail is the first strange thing about Melqart and probably the most important. His name means king of the city, from the Phoenician mlk qrt, and the city was Tyre. He stood at the head of its pantheon, was addressed as Lord of Tyre, and his high priest ranked second only to the king himself. Yet the people who built him the richest houses on the Mediterranean seem not to have given him a face.

He surfaces first not in Tyre but inland, on a slab of basalt. In 1939 a stele turned up in Roman ruins at Bureij, seven kilometres north of Aleppo, carrying five lines of Old Aramaic: the stele which Bar-Hadad, son of somebody the break has taken, king of Aram, erected to his Lord Melqart, to whom he made a vow and who heard his voice. Ninth century BCE. It is the earliest surviving occurrence of the name anywhere, and scholars have been arguing since about which Bar-Hadad set it up and whether he ruled at Damascus or further north. The stone gives the god no story. It gives him a satisfied customer.

The temple at Tyre was old before any Greek came asking about it. Josephus, quoting the Tyrian historian Menander of Ephesus, credits King Hiram with cutting timber on Lebanon, pulling down the ancient shrines, raising the house of Melqart and the house of Astarte, and being the first to celebrate the god’s awakening in the month of Peritios. Herodotus sailed out there in the fifth century because he wanted to settle a question about Heracles and thought the priests would know. He found the place heavy with offerings and two pillars standing at the entrance, one of solid gold and one of a green stone that he says shone through the dark. The priests told him the temple had gone up when the city did, and that the city was two thousand three hundred years old. Herodotus, not usually shy about other people’s arithmetic, simply wrote it down.

The awakening was the centre of the cult, and its shape is legible even though the script is lost. Each year, in the month the Greeks called Peritios and we would call late winter, Melqart died. Fire was in it somewhere, a pyre or an effigy given to the flames, and then he was raised. The word the Greek sources use is egersis, a waking-up, the ordinary word for what you do to a sleeper. Some accounts put a marriage at the heart of the rite, the god restored and returned to Astarte. The timing falls where the winter rains stop and the sailing season opens, which for a city that lived off its harbour was the same thing as the world starting again. There is a line in the Book of Kings where Elijah taunts the prophets of Baal by suggesting their god may be asleep and in need of waking, and it is hard to read it without hearing Tyre in the background.

One version of the death survives, and it is stranger than the ritual. Eudoxus of Cnidus told of the god killed by Typhon somewhere in Libya, and of his companion Iolaus bringing a quail to the body and holding it out. The bird had been roasted. The smell reached the dead god and he sat up. Phoenicians sacrificed quails to him ever afterwards, which is the kind of detail nobody bothers to invent.

Where he came from, the Tyrians told as a story about their own harbour. The first people on that coast were earthborn and had no boats; the god taught them to build one and sent them out to a pair of rocks drifting loose on the sea. On one rock grew an olive tree with a serpent coiled at the root and an eagle sitting in the crown, and in the middle of the tree burned a fire that did not consume it. They took the eagle and sacrificed it, as instructed, and the rocks stopped wandering and set fast. Tyre was built on them. In the same late poem the god arrives in a robe stitched like the night sky, red light behind the eyes, a beard full of stars, and takes the name Astrochiton, star-clad.

What he looked like the rest of the time depends entirely on who was doing the looking. Tyrian coins of the late fifth century show him riding a seahorse across the waves with a bow in his hand and a dolphin beneath. Later Tyrian shekels give him a laureate head, heavily bearded, and set his club on the reverse beside an eagle standing on a ship’s prow. On Cyprus, from the sixth century, he wears a lion’s skin and carries that club openly, because by then the Greeks had decided who he was.

They decided he was Heracles, and the identification travelled better than any temple. The twelve labours drag their hero across precisely the coastline Tyre’s merchants worked, and it is difficult not to read them as a Greek attempt to account for why there was a Phoenician shrine at every good landfall. At Gades, on the Atlantic edge of the known world, the sanctuary kept two bronze pillars eight cubits high, and everyone who sacrificed there was assured these were the true Pillars of Heracles. Strabo did not believe a word of it. He noted that the inscriptions on them mentioned no Heracles at all, only what the Phoenicians had spent on the bronze.

Tyre required every colony to build the god a house, and so he went west with the ships. Carthage sent a tenth of its public revenue back to his temple in Tyre, year after year, into the Hellenistic period. A Punic headland in Sicily was called Cape Melqart, the town now known as Cefalù. Two marble pillars set up on Malta by a pair of brothers, dedicated to him in Phoenician and Greek at once, sat in obscurity until 1758, when Jean-Jacques Barthélemy used the doubled text to read the Phoenician alphabet for the first time. The god with no image handed the world back the key to his own script.

He also had a soldier. Hannibal was said to have sworn eternal enmity to Rome at nine years old, and before he took the army north he made the pilgrimage to Gades and sacrificed at the altar there. He came back to New Carthage with the god on his mind. On the eve of departure a figure of divine beauty stood over him in the night and told him to follow and not look behind; when he looked anyway, he saw a serpent crashing through forest and thicket with thunder gathering at its back. He asked what it meant. The desolation of Italy, he was told, and no further questions.

What he could do was hold a city together across open water. Oaths sworn in his name sealed contracts; his temple doubled as the treasury; he was patron of the sea, of kingship, of hunting and of the whole colonial enterprise. Even Tyre’s fortune was laid at his feet. His dog bit into a murex snail on the beach and came away with its mouth stained a colour nobody had seen, and the nymph Tyros would not have him until he could give her a robe of it, so he learned to draw the dye out of the shells. Purple made that city rich for a thousand years.

His limits are written into the same record. He dies. Every year, on schedule, and he needs a staff of priests to get him upright again. Herodotus was shown a tomb inside the sanctuary at Tyre, and a later Christian writer names the city flatly as the place where Heracles was burnt with fire, which has led more than one reader to wonder whether there was a man somewhere under all of this. And the identification that carried him across the sea also swallowed him: by the Roman period the Tyrian Heracles is simply Heracles, lion skin, club, Greek labours and all, and the older figure shows only in the gaps. We do not have his myths. We have his accounts, his ritual calendar, his real estate and a roasted quail.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Melqart?

Melqart was the tutelary god of the Phoenician city of Tyre and the head of its pantheon. His name means king of the city, and his high priest ranked second only to the Tyrian king. As Tyre planted colonies across the Mediterranean, each was required to build him a temple, so he was worshipped from Cyprus and Malta to Carthage and Cadiz.

What was the egersis of Melqart?

The egersis was the annual ritual awakening of Melqart, held in the month of Peritios in late winter. The god died, apparently by fire, and was then raised, and the Greek word used for it simply means a waking-up. Josephus, citing the Tyrian historian Menander of Ephesus, says King Hiram of Tyre was the first to celebrate it.

Why do Greek and Roman writers call Melqart Hercules?

The Greeks identified Melqart with Heracles, and the Romans with Hercules, so classical sources usually call him the Tyrian Heracles. The twelve labours cover much the same territory as Tyre’s trading network, and the identification may have been a way of explaining why a Phoenician shrine stood at every major landfall. By the Roman period Melqart is normally shown with Heracles’ lion skin and club.

What did Melqart look like?

There was no statue of Melqart in his own sanctuaries, which kept a perpetual fire on the altar stones instead of an image. The surviving likenesses come from coins and from workshops in the colonies: a bearded, laurel-wreathed head on Tyrian shekels, a rider crossing the waves on a seahorse with a bow, and on Cyprus a figure in a lion’s skin carrying a club.

Where was the most famous temple of Melqart?

The oldest was at Tyre, where Herodotus saw two pillars at the entrance, one of gold and one of a green stone that shone at night. The most famous in the west was at Gades, modern Cadiz, whose bronze pillars were widely claimed to be the true Pillars of Heracles. Hannibal sacrificed at the Gades altar before marching on Italy.

Related Entries

Baal, El, Anat, Asherah, Mot, Yam (Yamm), Dagon, Tanit, Cadmus, Europa, Heracles (Hercules), Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris, Nergal