Melqart- The Burning man...
 |
| Sephiroth - From Final Fantasy. |
Melqart, properly Phoenician Milk-Qart "King of the City", less accurately Melkart, Melkarth or Melgart , Akkadian Milqartu, was tutelary god of the Phoenician city of Tyre, as Eshmun protected Sidon.
Melqart was often titled Ba‘l Ṣūr "Lord of Tyre", the ancestral king of the royal line. In Greek, by interpretatio graeca he was identified with Heracles and referred to as the Tyrian Herakles.
As he watched, and listened, as he asked questions, it seemed to
Him that there ware so many similarities between the Phoenician God Melqart and Heracles, that surely Heracles wasn't entirely Greek!
Herodotus wasn't alone in taking this view.
Him that there ware so many similarities between the Phoenician God Melqart and Heracles, that surely Heracles wasn't entirely Greek!
Herodotus wasn't alone in taking this view.
And there exist in Syria temples of a date not much later than those of Egypt, many of which I have seen myself, such as the temple of Herakles [i.e. Melqart] in Tyre. This is not the Herakles of Greek legend, but a much older Tyrian hero.[Quote from Citation with stable link: Philip A. Harland, 'Syrian perspectives: Lucian of Samosata on The Syrian Goddess in full (mid-second century CE),' Ethnic Relations and Migration in the Ancient World, last modified May 12, 2024, https://philipharland.com/Blog/?p=7012.]
"I visited the temple, and found it richly adorned with a number of offerings, among which were two pillars, one of pure gold, the other of smaragdos, shining with great brilliance at night."
But of course, the temple is long gone...
There is an image that might give a clue? It was found on a relief in the palace of Sennacherib, the relief itself is now lost. But one image does remain, drawn by a diligent archaeologist. It shows someone, possibly King Luli (729–694 BC) handing over one a child to be saved. And there is a suggestion that the building behind the castle might have been the temple of Melkart.
Things about Tyre and the Temple become more complicated as the years go by. Nonnos-5th Century, AD possibly copying from Josephus? writes of Tyre...
" Inform me, Astrochiton (Heracles) what god built this city in the form of a continent and the image of an island? What heavenly hand designed it? Who lifted these rocks and rooted them in the sea? Who made all these works of art? Whence came the name of the fountains? Who mingled island with mainland and bound them together with mother sea?" He spoke, and Heracles satisfied him with friendly words: " Hear the story, Bacchos, I will tell you all. People dwelt here once whom Time, bred along with them, saw the only age-mates of the eternal universe, holy offspring of the virgin earth, whose bodies came forth of themselves from the unplowed unsown mud. These by indigenous art built upon foundations of rock a city unshakable on ground also of rock. Once on their watery beds among the fountains, while the fiery sun was beating the earth with steam...."
Flavius Josephus (AD 37 – c. 100) records in The Book of The Jews Book VIII, Chapters III, IV, V, the building of The Temple. gives far more detail:
SOLOMON began to build the temple in the fourth year of his reign, on the second month, which the Macedonians call Artemisius, and the Hebrews Jur, five hundred and ninety-two years after the Exodus out of Egypt; but one thousand and twenty years from Abraham's coming out of Mesopotamia into Canaan, and after the deluge one thousand four hundred and forty years; and from Adam, the first man who was created, until Solomon built the temple, there had passed in all three thousand one hundred and two years. Now that year on which the temple began to be built was already the eleventh year of the reign of Hiram; but from the building of Tyre to the building of the temple, there had passed two hundred and forty years.
Before this work, Tyre was an island build on rock. And there is a rather strange story of two Ambrosial rocks...
Josephus continues:
Now Solomon sent for an artificer out of Tyre, whose name was Hiram; he was by birth of the tribe of Naphtali, on the mother's side, (for she was of that tribe,) but his father was Ur, of the stock of the Israelites. This man was skillful in all sorts of work; but his chief skill lay in working in gold, and silver, and brass; by whom were made all the mechanical works about the temple, according to the will of Solomon. Moreover, this Hiram made two [hollow] pillars, whose outsides were of brass, and the thickness of the brass was four fingers' breadth, and the height of the pillars was eighteen cubits and their circumference twelve cubits; but there was cast with each of their chapiters lily-work that stood upon the pillar, and it was elevated five cubits, round about which there was net-work interwoven with small palms, made of brass, and covered the lily-work. To this also were hung two hundred pomegranates, in two rows. The one of these pillars he set at the entrance of the porch on the right hand, and called it Jachin 3 and the other at the left hand, and called it Booz.
The most popular and well known tarot design is the Waite/Colman-Smith cards, it's worth remembering that Waite was a Freemason (as were most members of the early Golden Dawn).
The word Herodotus uses is stelae, which are often more like elaborately carved tomb stones than pillars. Nevertheless, this stele recorded by Jean Spiro in Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum seems to show the goddess Tanit - or perhaps her priestess?- between two pillars.
Between 980 to 947 BC King Hiram ruled Tyre and his town grew into perhaps the most important city along the coast. Its wealth was due to the skill of its people as ship builders and traders who travelled the seas to bring back ivory, gold, baboons and apes.
......slaves, cypress, cedar, oak, ebony, ivory, embroidered linen, purple and scarlet cloth, gold, silver, iron, tin, lead, bronze, horses, mules and other livestock, coral, rubies, corn, wax, honey, tallow, balm, wine, wool and spices. The word cinnamon is Phoenician, as are probably the words cumin, coriander, crocus, myrrh, aloe, balsam, jasper, diamond and sapphire (Bikai, 1992: 48).And the secret process of dying cloth purple.
 |
| Picture of a dog with purple dye coming from his mouth after biting the shellfish that contains the dye. |
William F. Albright in Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore, 1953; pp. 81, 196) suggested that Melqart was a originally a god of the underworld, something more than a hero.
MLK means Lord. and is more often found as Baal.
QRT is a Phoenician syllable meaning city.
As Tyrian trade and colonization expanded, Melqart became venerated in Phoenician and Punic cultures from Syria to Spain. The first occurrence of the name is in a 9th-century BCE stela inscription found in 1939 north of Aleppo in northern Syria, the "Ben-Hadad" inscription, erected by the son of the king of Arma, Link...
A similar name in Akkadian is Nergal. The name means Lord of the Great City, a euphemism for the Underworld.
So, fire...
...in the 'Dionysiaka' by Nonnos of Panopolis. Here the Tyrian Herakles Astrochiton appears, a Light God and fire master in a star cloak on whose altar the thousand year old Phoenix is burning himself and then regenerated resurges again. This god reports of the 'Ambrosial rocks', which are floating on the sea. Between them entwined by a snake a mighty oil-tree was growing with an eagle which lives on its branches in an eyrie. A gorgeous bowl was there too - a precursor of the Holy Grail. All was imbedded in fire which didn't burn the branches or leafs. It is told of an oracle which commanded the first man on earth to built a ship, go to the floating rocks, and capture the eagle and sacrifice him. So he did. After that the two rocks grew together, stranded at the beach of Phoenicia, and Tyre was founded on the rocks. (Cited from: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/tyre-and-the-ambrosial-rocks.354385/)
Sophocles in his play, The Trachiniae describes the agony and burning of Heracles:
Thither, then, thou must carry me up with thine own hands, aided by what friends thou wilt; thou shalt lop many a branch from the deep-rooted oak, and hew many a faggot also from the sturdy stock of the wild-olive; thou shalt lay my body thereupon, and kindle it with flaming pine-torch. And let no tear of mourning be seen there; no, do this without lament and without weeping, if thou art indeed my son. But if thou do it not, even from the world below my curse and my wrath shall wait on thee for ever.
And this is where we return to fire, and the burning man.
The story began when Nergal refused to bow to the visor of the queen of the underworld. When Nergal is commanded to go to the land of the dead to apologise it is as if he must clone himself or remain forever dead. To this end, Nergal was split into twins...Nergal and Erra.
Body and something else, soul?
It seems that Erra would have managed the impossible feat of dying and living at the same time if it hadn't been for sex. In older Mesopotamian myths there is no soul as such. The etemmu (the ghost) is not the immortal soul. It seems to be within the flesh of the dead, and if the body is destroyed by animals or by fire, the ghost is destroyed as well.
Heracles also burns because of love. He had been given a toxic 'love potion, that will never kill him because he is immortal - and so he choses to be consumed by flame. He builds his own funeral pyre and climbs into the flames...but is instantly transported to heaven.
Likewise, Nergal burns after sleeping with the Queen of the Underworld, and must remain as the Lord of The Great City - the land of the dead.
This makes understanding what exactly is transported during cremation difficult to understand. Especially the cremation of a living beings, children...to Moloch, Molk, difficult to understand unless there is an idea that death by fire could be a kind of teleportation to a better afterlife - to the Summer-isles, the Elysium?
Richard Miles writes in Carthage Must Be Destroyed (2011):
The word Hammon has been linked to a root 'word' meaning hot, but it has been confused with the Egyptian Amun-Ra in Ancient Libya and Nubia, as Zeus Ammon came to be identified with Zeus in Ancient Greece. Amun, before being linked to Ra was believed to create via breath, and so was identified with the wind rather than the sun.
The breath of life.
The connection between wind and flame is well known to cultures who practice metalwork. Bellows push air through the furnace to increase the temperature. If human sacrifice was practised at the tophets, surely the mythology of Heracles and Nergal indicate that a faster death, in the hottest flame possible, would be the best thing. But there does not seem to be any evidence for this, the cremated remains from tophets do not show that a temperature greater than average was used.
The mythology of Melqrt is lost, but we do know that fire was part of Melqrts festival.
Josephus, quoting Menander of Ephasus says that at each spring equinox there was a carefully organised festival in honour of Melqart during which all foreigners were sent out of the city for the duration of the ceremony. As part of the festival an effigy of Melqart was placed on a giant raft and ritually burnt. Hymns accompanied its departure as it floated away, over the sea. This represented the rebirth of Melqart...
In keeping with the connection in both the Nergal and Heracles myth celibacy was required of Melqrt's priests, and possibloy a period of celibacy may have been required of the king until the body of Melqrt had been consumed by fire and sea,
.
Afterwards the king and his chief consort would take on the roles of Melqart and Astarte in a Heiros Gamos, a ritual marriage which guaranteed the well being and fertility of the king and provided his legitimate authority.
In this way the king became the living Melqart, purified by fire each New Year.
Night speeds by, And we, Aeneas, lose it in lamenting. Here comes the place where cleaves our way in twain. Thy road, the right, toward Pluto's dwelling goes, And leads us to Elysium. But the left Speeds sinful souls to doom, and is their path To Tartarus th' accurst. -Virgil, Aeneid (6.641)There are bones of small children found within Phoenician temples. At first it seems that the offerings are still born infants, but centuries latter bones are found of older children. Likewise in Mesopotamia at Tepa Gawra, one of Iraq's oldest towns and Nuzi, child remains are found in sacred areas, but unlike those in Phoenician temples they show no sign of cremation.
Richard Miles writes in Carthage Must Be Destroyed (2011):
"Although such conclusions correlate with the material from the early phases of activity at the Carthaginian tophet, they work far less well with later evidence. When the contents of the urns from the fourth and third centuries BC were analysed, they were shown to contain a much higher ratio of human young. Furthermore, whereas the human remains from the seventh and sixth centuries BC tended to be of premature of newborn babies, the single interments from the later period were of older children (aged between one and three years). Some urns from this phase even contained the bones of two or three children--usually one elder child of two to four years, and one of two newborn or premature infants. The age difference between them (up to two years) suggests that they may have been siblings. One possible explanation is that neither stillborn children nor animal substitutes were now considered enough to appease Baal or Tanit, and that an elder child had to be sacrificed as a substitute when a particular infant promised to the deity was stillborn. In inscriptions incised on to the steles, Carthaginian fathers would routinely use the reflexive possessive pronoun BNT or BT to underline the fact that their sacrificial offering was not some mere substitute, but a child of their own flesh. One of many such examples from the Carthaginian tophet makes the nature of the sacrifice explicit:
'It was to the Lady Tanit Face of Baal and to Baal Hammon that Bomilcar son of Hanno, grandson of Milkiathon, vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him you!'"(p. 72)
The word Hammon has been linked to a root 'word' meaning hot, but it has been confused with the Egyptian Amun-Ra in Ancient Libya and Nubia, as Zeus Ammon came to be identified with Zeus in Ancient Greece. Amun, before being linked to Ra was believed to create via breath, and so was identified with the wind rather than the sun.
The breath of life.
The connection between wind and flame is well known to cultures who practice metalwork. Bellows push air through the furnace to increase the temperature. If human sacrifice was practised at the tophets, surely the mythology of Heracles and Nergal indicate that a faster death, in the hottest flame possible, would be the best thing. But there does not seem to be any evidence for this, the cremated remains from tophets do not show that a temperature greater than average was used.
The mythology of Melqrt is lost, but we do know that fire was part of Melqrts festival.
In keeping with the connection in both the Nergal and Heracles myth celibacy was required of Melqrt's priests, and possibloy a period of celibacy may have been required of the king until the body of Melqrt had been consumed by fire and sea,
.
Afterwards the king and his chief consort would take on the roles of Melqart and Astarte in a Heiros Gamos, a ritual marriage which guaranteed the well being and fertility of the king and provided his legitimate authority.
In this way the king became the living Melqart, purified by fire each New Year.
So, the burning man, sex and death in myth. A ritual not unlike Guy Fawkes and Bonfire night, here. And the possibility of child sacrifice for success in war..to suicide bombers.
On a lighter note! Silius Italicus in his epic poem The Punica described 'what he saw' at the Temple of Melqart at Gedes: ( c. 26 – c. 101 AD)
- Priests are the only ones with the honor of entering the sanctuary
- No women allowed.
- No pigs.
- The priests have shaved heads
- They are barefoot.
- They are celibate.
- They wear long white linen tunics.
- They wear 'Persian' headbands.
- When they are to perform a sacrifice the tunic they wear has a broad stripe (purple?).
- Heliodorus describes the priests of Melqart dancing in a spinning fashion, like the Dervishes.
- Link.
