Hannibal\'s ashes

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

I read this fascination bit from the Times of Malta:

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/vie...ta-.372431

An inscription was found in Punic characters commemorating the ashes of a Hannibal the son of Bar-Melek. There is speculation that this might refer to the famous Barcid himself.

Thoughts?

[barcid]

interesting report...be nice if it is true but we may never know. thanks for sharing

[Macedon]

Wouldn't it be something to find the remains of Hannibal Barca??... To my opinion the greatest tactician of antiquity...

[ParthianBow]

Fascinating, if tenuous! Thanks for posting.

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

Tenuous because Hannibal was by no means an uncommon name among Phoenicians and because I somehow don't see an etymological link between Hamilcar and Bar Melek. Also the area where this was found is known as Ben Ghisa (the 'gh' is silent in Maltese) and people are trying to see this as a corruption of the Carthaginian Gisgo. This too,IMO, is really stretching it. Ben Ghisa could simply be from the Arabic Ibn Isa (lit. 'son of Jesus'). After all Malta was under Arab rule for a good two centuries.

[Epictetus]

Interesting idea. I’m a huge fan of Malta and while I was there a couple years ago I bought a book by Anthony Bonanno called Malta: Phoenician, Punic and Roman. Here is what I found there:

Another inscription, engraved in a tomb at Benghisa dated to the fourth-third century BC (CIS 1, 124), speaks of the tomb as the ‘eternal home’ (or ‘house of eternity’) of the dead, a concept met with also in funerary contexts back in the Phoenician motherland and in the Bible. The date of the inscription, which strictly speaking, places it in the following phase, shows the permanence of certain beliefs during this earlier phase and into the next…

Another inscription was found in a rock-cut tomb discovered in Benghisa, near Birzebbuga in 1761 (CIS 1, 124), to which we have already referred in the previous chapter. It is now kept in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. The text seems to have been engraved on the rock wall of the burial chamber and mentioned a man called ‘Hannibal son of Barmelech (or Bodmelek)’ who is thought to be either the buried person or the eponymous magistrate of the year of interment. This funerary is dated to the fourth-third century BC.