 | Melqart: Encyclopedia II - Melqart - Mythology
Melqart - Mythology
Athenaeus (392d) summarizes a story by Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 355 BCE) telling how Heracles the son of Zeus by Asteria (= ‘Ashtart ?) was killed by Typhon in Libya. Heracles' companion Iolaus brought a quail to the dead god (presumably a roasted quail) and its delicious scent roused Heracles back to life. This purports to explain why the Phoenicians sacrifice quails to Heracles. It seems that Melqart had a companion similar to the Hellenic Iolaus. Sanchuniathon also makes Melqart under the name Malcarthos or Melcathros the son of Hadad who is normally identified with Zeus.
The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (10.24) speaks of the tombs of various gods including "that of Heracles at Tyre, where he was burnt with fire." The Hellenic Heracles also died on a pyre, but the event was located on Mount Oeta in Trachis. A similar tradition is recorded by Dio Chrysostom who mentions the beautiful pyre which the Tarsians used to build for their Heracles, referring here to the Cilician god Sandan.
Gregory Nazianzen (Oratio 4.108) and Cassiodorus (Variae 1.2) relate how Tyrian Heracles and the nymph Tyrus were walking along the beach when Heracles' dog, who was accompanying them, devoured a murex snail and gained a beautiful purple color around its mouth. Tyrus told Heracles she would never accept him as her lover until he gave her a robe of that same color. So Heracles gathered many murex shells, extracted the dye from them, and dyed the first garment of the color later called Tyrian purple. The murex shell appears on the very earliest Tyrian coins and then reappears again on coins in Imperial Roman times.
It is generally suspected that the Greek Melicertes son of Ino was in origin a reflection of Melqart though no classical source explicitly connects the two.
Because of the scanty evidence scholars vary widely on what kind of a god Melqart was. William F. Albright in Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore, 1953; pp. 81, 196) suggested Melqart was a god of the underworld partly because a god Malku who may be Melqart is sometimes equated with the Mesopotamian god Nergal, a god of the underwold, whose name also means 'King of the City'. Others take this to be coincidental, since what we know about Melqart from other sources does not suggest an underworld god and it is more natural to understand the city to be Tyre. It has been suggested that Melqart began as a sea god who was later given solar attributes or alternatively that he bgan as solar god who later received the attributes of a sea god. In fact little is known of his cult.
To be sure, in Nonnus' Dionysiaca (40.366–580) the Tyrian Heracles is very much a sun god. However there is a tendency in the later Hellenstic and Roman periods for almost all gods to develop solar attributes and for almost all eastern gods to be identified with the sun. Nonnus gives the title Astrochiton 'Starclad' to Tyrian Heracles and has his Dionysus recite a hymn to this Heracles, saluting him as: the son of Time, he who causes the threefold image of the Moon, the all-shining Eye of the heavens. Rain is ascribed to the shaking from his head of the waters of the his bath in the eastern Ocean. His sun disk is praised as the cause of growth in plants. Then, in a climactic burst of syncretism, Dionysus identifies the Tyrian Heracles with Belus on the Euphrates, Ammon in Libya, Apis by the Nile, Arabian Cronus, Assyrian Zeus, Serapis, Zeus of Egypt, Cronus, Phaethon, Mithras, Delphic Apollo, Gamos 'Marriage', and Paeon 'Healer'.
The Tyrian Heracles answers by appearing to Dionysus. There is red light in the fiery eyes of this shining god who clothed in a robe embroidered like the sky (presumably with various constellations). He has yellow, sparkling cheeks and a starry beard. The god reveals how he taught the primeval, earthborn inhabitants of Phoenicia how to build the first boat and instructed them to sail out to a pair of floating, rocky islands. On one of the islands there grew an olive tree with a serpent at its foot, an eagle at its summit, and which glowed in the middle with fire that burned but did not consume. Following the god's instructions, these primeval humans sacrificed the eagle to Poseidon, Zeus, and the other gods. Thereupon the islands rooted themselves to the bottom of the sea. On these islands the city of Tyre was founded.
Other related archives1 Kings, 355 BCE, 935 BCE, 965, Ahab, Akkadian, Ammon, Amphitryon, Apis, Apollo, Arabian, Assyrian, Astarte, Asteria, Athenaeus, Ba‘al, Ba‘al Hammon, Belus on the Euphrates, Cape Saint Vincent, Cartagena, Carthage, Carthago Nova, Cassiodorus, Cilician, Cronus, Cádiz, Delphic, Dio Chrysostom, Dionysus, Egypt, Eshmun, Eudoxus of Cnidus, Europa, Gamma, Greek, Gregory Nazianzen, Hadad, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, Heliodorus of Emesa, Hellas, Hellenistic period, Herakles, Hercules, Herodotus, Hiram I, Ibiza, Ino, Iolaus, Israel, Jehu, Josephus, Kappa, Latin, Lebanon, Libya, Macedonian, Melicertes, Mithras, Moloch, Nergal, Nile, Ocean, Olympian, Phaethon, Phoenician, Pillars of Heracles, Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, Punic, Qoppa, Sanchuniathon, Saturn, Serapis, Sicily, Sidon, Strabo, Tanach, Tarsians, Thasos, Typhon, Tyre, William F. Albright, William Whiston, Zeus, life-death-rebirth deity
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Mythology", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
