The two Melqart Cippes, Greek-Phoenician stelae, are temporarily reunited in Malta

The two Melqart Cippes, Greek-Phoenician stelae, are temporarily reunited by Heritage Malta and the Musée du Louvre at the National Museum of Archaeology, Malta as part of an exhibition running until March 2025.

These stelae are exceptional in several respects:

 the base features bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Phoenician: it mentions that two Phoenician brothers are making an offering to the Phoenician god Melqart. In Greek, the two brothers use Hellenistic-sounding names and the ex-voto is dedicated to the god Heracles.

 the base is surmounted by a baluster decorated with acanthus leaves, possibly evoking an agyeus (an anthropomorphic column of the god Apollo) or a candelabra typical of Roman interior architecture.

 the bilingual inscriptions on the base enabled the French abbot Jean-Jacques Barthélémy to decipher the Phoenician alphabet in 1758. This scholar of his time had already deciphered the Palmyrene alphabet used in ancient Syria four years earlier.

 in recognition of this linguistic achievement, one of the two stelae was donated to France by the Grand Master of the Order, Emmanuel de Rohan-Polduc, in 1782. Since 1864, it has been kept in the Oriental Antiquities section of the Louvre Museum.