Málaga, Iberia · c. 8th c. BCE
Malaka
mlkʾ
The river-mouth door
A Tyrian door on the Iberian string, west of Sexi, east of the Pillars. Cerro del Villar sat in the Guadalhorce. Malaka kept the harbor.
Hill above Malaka
Later fortress on the hill of the Phoenician harbor · Málaga / mlkʾ
Alcazaba of Málaga — later walls, older door
Wikimedia Commons · Alcazaba de Málaga
Gad Yaton: Honest: these walls are later. The harbor under them was Tyrian. Cerro del Villar sat in the river mouth.
Cerro del Villar
Before the later city sat tight on the hill, Tyre’s people built on an islet in the Guadalhorce mouth — Cerro del Villar, a workshop and a quay toward Tartessos and the Strait. Houses of brick, streets, kilns. The islet silted. The people moved four kilometres to Malaka.
The photograph is the Alcazaba — later walls on the hill above that harbor. Honest: these battlements are not Phoenician. The door under them is.
On the string
Malaka is not Gadir. It is the next door east: fish, clay, a stop before the Pillars. Sexi and Abdera continue the string. Ibiza sits offshore on the same road.
The west remembers Málaga as a later kingdom. The letters were already in the river mouth.
Gad Yaton: they kept the later fortress in the postcard. The river mouth was ours. Amphorae from that islet sit in the Museo de Málaga.