Carthage Blog 6 - Gadir
- Scot Stoddard
- Jun 24
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 20
Welcome to Gadir!
Cádiz is a city located in southern Spain near Gibraltar. It is perhaps the oldest continually-inhabited city in all of Europe and was founded as a Phoenician trading post. Inscriptions in the Phoenician language identify and record this site as "Gadir", meaning wall, compound or stronghold. For the purposes of my album, I've naturally gone with the Phoenician spelling of Gadir, but it's the same place as modern-day Cádiz, Spain. In Latin, the city was known as Gades, and in Arabic the Latin name became Qadis, from which the Spanish derived the name Cádiz. Whew!
Like I said, we're going to call it Gadir from here out; we're all about the Phoenicians here!
Gadir was founded by Phoenicians from Tyre, somewhere around 1100 BC, as an outward-lying trading post, although no real records show up immediately and no archeological strata on the site has been established until around 900 BC. Originally, Gadir consisted of two small islands that have since become interconnected. While the ancient Phoenician ruins underneath the modern-day city of Cádiz remain mostly untouched, excavations have occurred in the southern cemeteries.
Some background!
The expeditions of the Carthaginians Himilco and Hanno both began in Gadir. By the sixth century BC, the Tyrian Phoenicians had lost control over Iberia due to the fall of Tyre to the Babylonians, then the Persians, and Gadir became much more under the control of Carthage, as Carthage was entering the height of its civilization curve. The city was a very important trading hub, especially in the commodities of gold, silver and tin!
One of Gadir's most notable features, and we were talking about this in the Carthage Blog 5 - Melqart a bit, was a temple on the south end of the island dedicated to the Phoenician god Melqart, who was conflated with Hercules by the Romans and Heracles by the Greeks. Melqart was known to them as the Tyrian Heracles or the Phoenician Heracles. In Greek mythology, Heracles was sometimes credited with founding Gadir. According to ancient Greeks historians, the Temple to Melqart in Gadir was still standing as late as the first century AD. Some historians, based on this fact, believe that the columns of this temple were the basis for the myth of "The Pillars of Heracles", which is Track 7 on the album and the subject of my next blog!
Here's a map of the Carthaginian Empire at it's height, so you can see the territory involved in this discussion.
After a while, Gadir was joined by several other Phoenician colonies in Spain and expanded even more upon the fall of Tyre to first the Babylonians, then the Persians, and many people moved from Tyre to the colonies, especially to Carthage, as it was becoming a very powerful city state around the sixth century BC. Gadir later become the starting point for Hannibal's conquest of Iberia leading up to the Second Punic war in 218 BC. It was then lost to the Romans in 216 BC, before the onset of the Third Punic War.
Let's talk about the music!
Due to the fact of the location of this peaceful little Phoenician trading post being in Spain, I thought why not give at least the opening section of the track Gadir a Latin rock feeling, similar to the style of Carlos Santana, although he's not Spanish, but you get the point. I like Latin rock! So that's where we start off.
The track starts off with some Latin percussion, bass guitar and piano, introducing the main Latin rock theme. So key of C, and a major chord progression, happy and light, with a descending bass line.
C, C/B, a-7, F+7, e-7, G
C, C/B, e-7, a-7, d-7, F+7 to a quick Gsus4, alternating with G#dim7 the second pass.
After the intro, the piano is playing the chords, the lead guitar takes the melody, clean/chorus rhythm guitars panned off to both sides, Latin percussion and a bouncy bass line. The second pass sees a harmony guitar lead enter in.
Now we continue into the bridge part of this section:
a-7, set up by the G#dim7 there, then e-7, d-7, F+7
e-7, a-7, d-7 to Gsus4. There's more of a minor feeling here for variety!
Pretty much a lot of the same chords in a different order, nothing fancy here. Then back to the first chord chain to end this section. Guitar solos continue over this whole thing, bass and Latin percussion is steady and the piano is banging out the chords with some nice suspensions and movement.
At about 1:09 we enter the second section. There's a brief interlude to connect the sections, and it's now a half time feeling, more sullen and emotional in a different way. We have switched now to the relative minor key, Ami, from C major. The chord chain goes:
a-7, e-7, b-7, F+7, d-7, Bb (!!), F, E7 (repeat twice)
Then this section's bridge:
d-7, e-7, F+7, e-7, d-7, C+7, Bb, G#dim7, to again set us up to go back to the a-7 of the first chain, then we repeat that first chain. Only now we're in straight time and it starts driving a little more. This section has a beautiful melody over that nice chord chain, it's still pretty light and very melodic. Rhythm guitars until this point were clean/chorus, but now get some overdrive in the straight time part. The piano is still there lightly playing the chords with the guitars. The lead builds in the straight time part. There's again two passes through the first chord chain, and in the second pass the drums go into a double kick pattern to build the intensity! Then the section ends:
a-7, e-7, c-7, and now we're in C minor, the parallel minor key to the original key of C major. See what I've done here? We need to get back to C major eventually, and the parallel minor was an easy way to get there.
But not yet.
First we gotta do some heavy riffing on the 7-string guitar! Because... Variety! It's the spice of life? And I love a good heavy riff. The guitar solos intensify during the heavy riff (go figure!), and we go from half time to straight time to double time again!
Then there's a little pattern of:
c, G#+7, D#, C#, c, D#, F, G#. a really strange progression that sets up the next ... you guessed it ... heavy riff!
This is a broken-up more staccato riff set up in the bass, then carried on in unison with the 6-string guitars with some synth there doing some sort of broken-up stuff (technical description) before the lead comes back in. Then we're going to drop that riff an octave and give it to the 7-string guitars, with a soaring, high lead doused up with heaping helpings of widespread chorus and delay that climbs up to the sky, then breaks into a tapping pattern as the rhythm continues to build, then we transition out of this section back to where we started the track, and C major, bass, piano,
We're going to repeat that whole section, only now the rhythm guitars have a lot more drive on them, pretty distorted, and the section really rocks out this time. The Latin percussion is gone this time in favor of a straight 4/4 feeling on the drum kit. The bridge of this Section 1 repeat slips briefly into half time, just to build the track up more and give, again, variety!
Then straight into our Section 2 in A minor, no break, no transition, just moving the song along. Again, we start with the half time feeling, but it's heavier. Then in the Section 2 bridge, we go to the straight time 4/4 feeling, then back to the verse section in double time with the final buildout. It ends on our friendly transitional chord chain from before, because why not, a-7, e-7 to c-7, ending on the parallel minor chord, a C minor.
A lot of what I've done with the key changes here is for feeling. As with our happy little outward-lying trading post of Gadir, there were many changes in their existence. They weren't so happy when to multiple raiding parties when through, but perhaps more happy when Hannibal launched his expedition, and again unhappy when the Romans conquered the area. This is what I've tried to depict in this track. Major keys sound happier, minor keys sound sadder. So it's all about the emotion.
Conclusion
I love to exhibit varying genres and feelings in every track. So here we have a light Latin rock start, then a more minor and serious yet beautifully melodic section, some heavy riffing, intense soloing, and back and around again. A little bit of a lot of things. To me, this is how life evolves. You don't want to eat the same thing for dinner every night! To show no emotion in music is a sin, so I'm going to show all I can and attempt to elicit many different feelings and emotions in each track. I have only the music to tell these stories, and now the blogs can help you get the full picture of what I'm trying to do.
I hope you enjoyed this analysis of the track Gadir and the history involved!
Visit the main site, please subscribe, listen to the songs there, read the other blogs and have a great summer. Album release date is July 16! Until then, there's only one place to be to hear the music, and that's right here!
Comments