Melqart
Punic · deity · mythic · Recorded classification
'King of the City' (Tyre), the Tyrian Herakles: the dynastic god of Tyre and inherited ancestral patron of Carthage, to whose temple at Tyre Carthage sent an annual tithe. His mythic profile is the death-and-awakening cycle (egersis), here given as a two-phase lifecycle (death by fire → egersis awakening). Shares theonym and origin with the eastern Phoenician Melqart (corpus id phoenician_melqart); authored here in his Punic/Carthaginian role. Father of Sid of Sardinia (punic_sid). The Herakles/Hercules interpretatio is recorded here, not wired as a relation (counterpart not in this batch). The death-by-fire is reconstructed from Greek material; a perpetual fire at Tyre is uncertain.
Children
Domains
- kingship
- colonization and the sea
- ancestral patron of carthage
Powers
- Dies and is annually awakened at the egersis
- Founds and guards the Tyrian colonies overseas
Epithets
- Baʿl Ṣur (bʿl ṣr, 'Baal/Lord of Tyre')His defining title — the lord of the mother-city Tyre.Cippi of Melqart, KAI 47 (l-mlqrt bʿl ṣr) (primary)
- Archēgetēs ('Founder-Leader'; Greek of the Cippi)The Greek interpretatio styles him Herakles Archēgetēs, founder of the colonies.Cippi of Melqart, KAI 47 (Greek: Hēraklei archēgetei) (primary)
Relations
- father of: SidSid of Sardinia is the son of Melqart-Herakles. The filiation rests on the Antas cult assemblage plus the classical genealogy of Sardus son of Makeris (= Melqart); flagged as partly reconstructed (no single 'Sid bn Mlqrt' formula).Pausanias 10.17 and Sallust (Sardus, eponym of Sardinia, as son of Makeris = the 'Libyan' Herakles = Melqart); cult assemblage at the temple of Antas (Melqart + Sid/Sardus Pater + Astarte) (primary); E. Lipiński, Dieux et déesses de l'univers phénicien et punique (Studia Phoenicia XIV, 1995) (secondary)