Hannibal\'s ashes

[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.