About us

Melkarth (or Melqart) was the tutelary god of the city of Tyre and of sailors on the East-West route. According to mythology, he lived in a cave near the modern Cape Spartel in Morocco.  In order to cover great distances, stopping places were necessary and the Phoenicians, who normally sailed within sight of the coast and islands, built on the coast of North Africa, in Sicily, Ibiza and in Spain trading ports, “frontier posts that not only provided resting places for them but created further opportunities for trading with local populations”. The Phoenicians made the entire Mediterranean an economic space where all the goods, objects, divinities, cultures and techniques would be the object of exchanges giving rise to a cosmopolitan culture. Everything circulates: gods, handicrafts, ideas… In the seventh century, when the Phoenicians would no longer encounter an empty Mediterranean because of the competition of the Etruscans and Greeks, it would be Carthage that would play a dominant role and continue to spread Phoenician culture.

The figure of Melkarth inspired the birth of the Greek and Roman Heracles/Hercules and the legends about the Pillars of Hercules. This was the place where East and West and South and North and above all the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea met. The special figure of Melkarth helps us understand the perfect link between discovery, trade and raw materials. Thousands of years ago, like now. The link does not change although the technology changes that drives society. “The Phoenicians  used to build a sanctuary dedicated to Melkarth in all the points they reached when trading, both when they opened trading posts and later when they started to found the first colonies. The trading posts were stopovers, but their fundamental structure was the sanctuary where they kept their treasures and signed contracts with different ethnic groups”.

Herodotus talks of a journey to Tyre, where he had visited a temple adorned by two pillars, one of pure gold and the other of emeralds, an allusion to the columns of Melqart in the Straits of Gibraltar; the reason for this choice can be explained by the fact that their creation myths are based on those of Mesopotamia according to which the world was divided into two large earths: the realm of the dead and the realm of the living, separated by the waters of the ocean known as the “waters of death”. Nobody was allowed to cross it alive. When Melkarth was on the Straits of Gibraltar, he faced the mighty ocean and announced that those were the waters of death and the frontier of the realm of the living. In order to warn sailors, he placed two columns there, known as the Pillars of Melqart, which then became the “Pillars of Heracles” for the Greeks. But the other Phoenicians, and above all the Carthaginians interpreted those pillars and Melkarth’s message differently. It was not the realm of the dead that lay beyond but what we would today call our “comfort zone”. Going beyond the comfort zone it was not hard to address the limits of society and human limits. How? With technology.