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home / papers / 2022 / The Youthful Heracles-Melqart in Tyre. Choosing a Visual Language for a Phoenician God in the Hellenistic Period

The Youthful Heracles-Melqart in Tyre. Choosing a Visual Language for a Phoenician God in the Hellenistic Period

Summary

The article asks why the silver coins that Tyre struck after gaining autonomy in 126/125 BC show its chief god, Melqart, in his Greek guise of Heracles as a beardless, heavy-set young man. Lichtenberger first surveys the city's cults through literary sources and Greek inscriptions. These sources show Heracles-Melqart as the leading civic deity among many others, several of whom carry Semitic-style epithets. He then describes Tyrian civic coinage and examines the obverse portrait trait by trait, setting it against the two Greek Heracles types (youthful and bearded) and especially against the Heracles head on Alexander the Great's tetradrachms. The Tyrian head shares that model's jaw, mouth, nose, brow, hair and oversized die. It differs in having a temple curl and a laurel wreath where Alexander's Heracles wears a lion scalp. The author concludes that the design was formally dependent on the Alexander type but also drew on a local notion of Melqart as a young god. Because the image blended these strands, different viewers could read it in different ways. This, he argues, helps explain why the coinage was so popular across the southern Levant.

Key points

  • Tyre issued civic coins under the Persians and again from 126/125 BC, once the Seleucids granted it autonomy. Its silver was widely trusted in the southern Levant and was even used to pay the Jerusalem Temple tax.
  • The obverse type is a beardless Heracles with a laurel wreath, a side curl, and a lion skin knotted at the neck. The reverse shows an eagle standing on a ship's prow, a motif inherited from Ptolemaic coins. The obverse stayed essentially unchanged for about 200 years.
  • Three inscriptions illustrate Heracles' place in the city:
    • In 188/187 BC he appears with Hermes as a protector of the gymnasium.
    • In 54/55 AD he is honoured as Theos Hagios Herakles.
    • Under the Severans he is addressed as Kyrios Herakles alongside Thea Leukothea.
  • Tyrian minting lasted unusually long, continuing until Valerianus and Gallienus (253–268 AD). Silver went out of use in the 1st century AD, and colonial bronzes brought many new reverse types.
  • Alexander-type coins were struck at Tyre after its conquest, but they stopped circulating in Phoenicia once Ptolemaic rule began. It is therefore unclear whether the later design looked back to an Alexander-era local model.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Greek sources treat Melqart and Heracles as one deity known under two cultural names (interpretatio graeca), so the same referent sits behind different labels. — For Mova (world): The ontology layer could store one entity node with culture- or source-specific aliases. Mentions of either name would then resolve to the same object in the world of the text.
  • I2. Epithets such as "lord", "holy god" or "goddess" attached to Greek divine names are taken as clues to an underlying Semitic setting, so small modifiers reveal hidden context. — For Mova (frames): Coreference and frame filling could weigh title-like modifiers as evidence of which entity or register is meant, instead of relying on the head noun alone.
  • I3. The author refuses to identify a bearded head as Melqart, because beardedness would be both the evidence and the conclusion, a circular argument. — For Mova (learn): When building silver data or repair rules, the feature used to assign a label should never also be the evidence for checking that label. Negative controls should test exactly this.
  • I4. Dependence on the Alexander model is argued by listing shared traits and the specific differences one by one, while admitting the match is incomplete. — For Mova (tree): The same explicit diff of agreements and divergences could document how a converted UD dialect or a gparse output relates to its reference treebank.
  • I5. One image is designed so different audiences read different meanings into it, and the paper treats this layered reading as a strength. — For Mova (frames): Implicature and irony modules could keep several audience-dependent interpretations side by side rather than forcing a single reading too early.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4000/mythos.5419

@inproceedings{lichtenberger2022youthful,
  title = {{The Youthful Heracles-Melqart in Tyre. Choosing a Visual Language for a Phoenician God in the Hellenistic Period}},
  author = {Lichtenberger, Achim},
  booktitle = {Mythos 16},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.4000/mythos.5419},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4000/mythos.5419}
}

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