Cippi of Melqart

The importance of the cippi to Maltese archaeology is inestimable. Such was their importance to Phoenician and Punic philology, that the inscriptions on the cippi became known as the (Latin for First bilingual Maltese inscription), or the Melitensis prima (First Maltese). A cippus (plural cippi) is a small column. Cippi serve as milestones, funerary monuments, markers, or votive offerings. 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. The Maltese marble cippus is about high at the highest point, and is broken at the top. The Louvre Cippus is currently high at its highest point, wide, and thick. As it is unlikely that skilled marble-carvers were available, they were probably imported in their finished state. The use of Phoenician script also confirms the survival of Phoenician culture and religion on the islands. Although it is not rare for cippi to have dedications, 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. Before, their Marsaxlokk provenance had not been proposed by anyone, and it was more than a century later that the claim was discredited. 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. Inscriptions on the Cippi The Phoenician inscription is a Phoenician votive inscription to Melqart, and it reads (from right to left; characters inside brackets denote a filled in lacuna): {{fs interlinear|lang=phn|number=line 1 {{fs interlinear|lang=phn|number=line 2 {{fs interlinear|lang=phn|number=line 3 {{fs interlinear|lang=phn|number=line 4 The following is the Greek inscription, a rendering to polytonic and bicameral script and adding spaces, a transliteration including accents, and a translation: {{fs interlinear|lang=grc|number=line 1 ==Discovery and publication==

Initial identification In 1694, a Maltese canonicus, Ignazio di Costanzo, was the first to report an inscription on the cippi which he considered to be in the Phoenician language. Di Costanzo immediately recognised the Greek inscriptions, and he thought the other parts were written in Phoenician. However, the Maltese historian Ciantar claimed that the cippi were discovered in 1732, and placed the discovery in the villa of Abela, which had become a museum entrusted to the Jesuits. The contradiction in the dates of the discovery is confusing, given di Costanzo's 1694 letter. Copies of the inscriptions, which had been made by Giovanni Uvit in 1687, were sent to Verona to an art historian, poet and Knight Commander in the Hospitaller order, Bartolomeo dal Pozzo. The first attempt had come in 1741, by the French scholar Michel Fourmont, who had published his assumptions in the same journal. Deciphering the Phoenician script The shorter Phoenician text was transliterated and translated more than twenty years after Fourmont's publication, by the Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy. He correctly identified 16 of the 17 different letters represented in the text, but still mistook the Shin and the He. This was refuted by Wilhelm Gesenius, who like Abela before him, held that Maltese was a dialect of Arabic. In 1782, Emmanuel de Rohan-Polduc, Grand Master of the Order of Malta, presented one of the cippi to the Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres. The cippus was moved to the Bibliothèque Mazarine between 1792 and 1796. In 1864, the orientalist Silvestre de Sacy, suggested that the French cippus should be moved to the Louvre. ==Idiomatic use and cultural impact==

The term Rosetta stone of Malta has been used idiomatically to represent the role played by the cippi in decrypting the Phoenician alphabet and language. The cippi themselves became a treasured symbol of Malta. Their image has appeared on local postage stamps, and hand-crafted models of the artifacts have been presented to visiting dignitaries. The two cippi were reunited for the first time in 240 years at an exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2023. == Notes and references ==

Notes References Bibliography • • • ==See also==