Cippi of Melqart
| The Cippi of Melqart | |
|---|---|
 The Louvre Cippus | |
| Material | White marble |
| Size | 1.05m x 0.34m x 0.31m |
| Writing | Greek script and ancient Phoenician alphabet |
| Created | Early Roman era (2nd century BC) |
| Discovered | 17th century, undocumented circumstances |
| Present location | National Museum of Archaeology (Malta Cippus) and, Sully wing, Ground floor, Mediterranean world, Room 18b, at the Louvre Museum[1][2] (Louvre Cippus) |
| Registration | CIS I, 122/122 bis or KAI 47 (Malta Cippus), AO 4818 (Louvre Cippus) |
The Cippi of Melqart is the collective name for two Phoenician marble cippi that were unearthed in Malta under undocumented circumstances and dated to the 2nd century BC. These are votive offerings to the god Melqart, and are inscribed in two languages, Ancient Greek and Phoenician, and in the two corresponding scripts, the Greek and the Phoenician alphabet. They were discovered in the late 17th century, and the identification of their inscription in a letter dated 1694 made them the first Phoenician writing to be identified and published in modern times.[3] Because they present essentially the same text (with some minor differences), the cippi provided the key to the modern understanding of the Phoenician language. In 1758, the French scholar Jean-Jacques Barthélémy relied on their inscription, which used 17[n 1] of the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet, to decipher the unknown language.
The tradition that the cippi were found in Marsaxlokk was only inferred by their dedication to Heracles,[n 2] whose temple in Malta had long been identified with the remains at Tas-Silġ.[n 3] The Grand Master of the Order of the Knights Hospitaller, Fra Emmanuel de Rohan-Polduc, presented one of the cippi to Louis XVI in 1782.[6] This cippus is currently in the Louvre Museum in Paris, while the other rests in the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, Malta. The inscription is known as KAI 47.
Description and history[]
The importance of the cippi to Maltese archaeology is inestimable.[5] On an international level, they already played a significant role in the deciphering and study of the Phoenician language in the 18th and 19th centuries.[5][7] Such was their importance to Phoenician and Punic philology, that the inscriptions on the cippi became known as the Inscriptio melitensis prima bilinguis (Latin for First bilingual Maltese inscription), or the Melitensis prima (First Maltese).[8]
A cippus (plural cippi) is a small column. Cippi serve as milestones, funerary monuments, markers, or votive offerings.[9] The earliest cippi had a cubic shape and were carved from sandstone. By the late fifth century BC, these became gabled delicate stelae in the Greek fashion.[10] The Maltese marble cippus is about 96.52 centimetres (38 in) high at the highest point, and is broken at the top.[11] The Louvre Cippus is currently 1.05 metres (3 ft 5 in) high at its highest point, 0.34 m (1 ft 1 in) wide, and 0.31 m (1 ft 0 in) thick.[2] "Their form is light and gracefully executed ..." with a " ...Greek inscription upon the pedestal, [and] a masterpiece of Phoenician epigraphy."[11] The artifacts are carved in white marble, a stone which is not found naturally in the Maltese islands.[5] As it is unlikely that skilled marble-carvers were available, they were probably imported in their finished state.[5] The inscriptions, however, were probably engraved in Malta on behalf of the two patrons, Abdosir and Osirxamar. Judging by the names on the main inscription, the patrons were of Tyrian extraction. The addition of a synopsis of the dedication in Greek, with the names of the dedicators and of Melqart given in their Hellenised versions, confirms the existence and influence of Hellenistic culture.[5] Additionally, while Malta had been colonised by the Phoenicians since the 8th century BC, by the second century, the Maltese islands were under Roman occupation.[2][12] The use of Phoenician script also confirms the survival of Phoenician culture and religion on the islands.[n 4]
Although it is not rare for cippi to have dedications,[14] the Cippi of Melqart have an unusual construction, as they have two parts. The base, or pedestal, is a rectangular block with mouldings at the top and bottom.[2] The inscriptions in Greek and Phoenician are at the front, three lines in Greek and four in Phoenician. The inscriptions are lightly incised.[2] The bases support pillars which are interpreted as candelabra. The lower parts of the candelabra are decorated with a shallow relief of acanthus leaves. Calligraphic differences in the incised text, varying positioning of the words and differences in the depth of the relief and the mouldings, imply that the two cippi are separate offerings, carrying the same inscription because the patrons were brothers.[n 5]
When the Greek inscription was published in the third volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum in 1853, the cippi were described as discovered in the coastal village of Marsaxlokk.[15] Before, their Marsaxlokk provenance had not been proposed by anyone, and it was more than a century later that the claim was discredited.[16] The attribution to Tas-Silġ was apparently reached by inference, because the candelabra were thought, with some plausibility, to have been dedicated and set up inside the temple of Heracles.[5][n 6][18]
Inscriptions on the Cippi[]
The Phoenician inscription reads (from right to left;[n 7] characters inside brackets denote a filled in lacuna):