Carthage Blog 7 - Pillars of Heracles
- Scot Stoddard
- Jun 27
- 10 min read
Updated: Jul 20
The Pillars of Heracles
Many, many years ago, the Mediterranean Sea was completely closed off to the Altantic Ocean, until an event occurred that formed what we now call the Strait of Gibraltar.
What was that event, you may ask. I will give some background here.
About 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean went through a vicious cycle of what's called the Messinian Salinity Crisis. In other words, through some massive geological event, where there was once an opening to the Atlantic Ocean from the Sea, the opening became closed off. Due to the extreme dry climate of the region, evaporation quickly drained the majority of the water in the Sea because no water from the Atlantic could come in. When the salt water from the ocean evaporated, what was left was a LOT of salt. Think the Dead Sea. This is the Messinian Salt Crisis. This massive desiccation left a deep, dry basin with huge salt deposits.
The climate slowly changed and wetter conditions resulted in the region receiving more water, which accumulated in small, brackish pools. This Messinian Salinity Crisis ended when the Strait of Gibraltar was once again opened up by an event called the Zanclean Flood.
The Zanclean Flood is theorized to have refilled the Mediterranean basin 5.33 million years ago, although during the preceding period there may have been partial connections between the ocean and the Sea reestablished. Some theorize that erosion of these fissures caused the Strait to open up; some think it was another enormous geological event that shifted tectonic plates once again. Whichever theory you believe, it's generally agreed that the refilling of the Mediterranean basin happened quickly, taking anywhere from a few months to a couple years.
So basically, the sea was closed off, it dried up, it got really salty, then the Strait of Gibraltar opened again, refilling the sea. However, even today, the Mediterranean maintains a high salinity content, higher than the Atlantic, due to evaporation and the amount of salt that was accumulated during the period the sea was closed off.
So what about Heracles and the Pillars?
If you've been following along with the series of blog posts regarding the Carthage album tracks, the history behind them and the Phoenician mythology, you already know the answer! We touched on this story in Blog Post 5 about Melqart and Blog Post 6 about Gadir, which is near Gibraltar. Did you do your homework?
Probably everybody has heard of Hercules and his feats of massive strength. Hercules was a Roman god, and he had a Greek equivalent or parallel known as Heracles. Well, even before those folks, the Phoenicians also had a deity who was later conflated with Hercules and Heracles, and his name was Melqart. The Romans and Greeks referred to him as "The Tyrian Heracles".
So some mythology here. According to Greek/Roman/Phoenician mythology (I'm going to lump it all together here, they were all conflated or blended together), and I quote from Wikipedia to make this easier, there's lots of links to click:
When Hercules had to perform twelve labours, one of them (the tenth) was to fetch the Cattle of Geryon of the far West and bring them to Eurystheus; this marked the westward extent of his travels. A lost passage of Pindar quoted by Strabo was the earliest traceable reference in this context: "the pillars which Pindar calls the 'gates of Gades' when he asserts that they are the farthermost limits reached by Heracles". Since there has been a one-to-one association between Heracles and Melqart since Herodotus, the "Pillars of Melqart" in the temple near Gades/Gádeira (modern Cádiz) have sometimes been considered to be the true Pillars of Hercules.
Plato placed the legendary island of Atlantis beyond the "Pillars of Hercules". Renaissance tradition says the pillars bore the warning Ne plus ultra (also Non plus ultra, "nothing further beyond"), serving as a warning to sailors and navigators to go no further.
So this is how I came up with the title "Pillars of Heracles". I've used the parallel between Heracles and Melqart, the Phoenician Heracles. I could have gone with "Pillars of Melqart", but I believe that term is lesser known as more modern people have greater knowledge of Greek and Roman civilization and mythology than that of the Phoenicians.
To put all this into summary, Phoenician legend or mythology has it that Melqart was responsible for opening up the Mediterranean once again and creating the two megalithic structures on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar, what was referred to as the Pillars of Heracles. On the Spanish side you have what is known as the Rock of Gibraltar, and on the Moroccan side you have either Monte Hacho or Jebel Musa.
At the time of the height of the Phoenician Empire, they had control over the majority of the Mediterranean Sea, and they were excellent navigators. The reference above to "nothing further beyond", however, was a common belief among navigators of other cultures; they didn't dare venture past the Pillars of Heracles. The Phoenicians were the first to travel past the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic, exploring down the coast of Africa into the sub-Saharan region, even building a few small colonies in that region. A lot of this exploration was led by a Carthaginian known as Hanno the Navigator who, in about 520 AD, was directed by Carthaginian leaders to explore these regions of Africa to colonize and/or set up trading. Hanno's journeys led him to encounter many African peoples, and he was the first to meet up with animals such as the Hippopotamus and Rhino, and he even became the first to have a famous meeting with a Gorilla!
So the Pillars of Heracles was a very important part of the Phoenician story, and that is exactly why I have included a track with that name on my Carthage album. It's a great story!
Let's get to the music!
Pillars of Heracles was NOT released as a single, so you probably haven't heard it yet, unless you've gone to my website to listen to the album. So you can find it there on the Carthage page as Track 7 in the music player.
The track starts off heavy, with a sample of rocks being crushed (Heracles smashing a mountain) and what may sound like a fog horn, done with a low synth. I'm thinking Hanno the Navigator would have hit his foghorn when going through the Pillars of Heracles; that is, if he had had a foghorn in 520 BC.
Anyway, the start of the track is heavy, a rather dissonant chordal riff on the rhythm guitars and a whole bunch of histrionics on the lead guitar. Standard instrument set here, two rhythm guitars, bass, drums, and piano playing some sort of spacey pattern in a higher register. I needed this section to be somewhat violent to fit the events. We're in Drop D tuning for this track, and the tempo is a slow 74 BPM.
After this introduction section comes Section 2, with an interesting meter of basically three measures of 3/8 and then one measure of 5/8. Count it 1-2-3, 2-2-3, 3-2-3, 1-2-3-4-5 and you'll get it. Over this odd meter comes an interestingly somehow still free-flowing melody that gets harmonized on the second pass. Then for the bridge of this section it switches to a straight (er) 6/8 meter with the lead continuing. Then there's a repeat of our odd meter section again, still with a nice melody going over top. Through this section the rhythm guitars and bass all play in unison, with that piano still doing something up high as counterpoint.
Now Section 3 begins, and we're into a series of heavy Drop D riffs. The first riff starts in a half-time feel, once through that pattern, with a pad synth now doing some higher chords in the background. Then it goes to straight time and a lead guitar section. That brings us to Heavy Riff 2 for this section, and back to half-time, both guitars and the bass playing in unison. Then, just like Riff 1, it breaks into a straight-time feel, building up. Then it's Heavy Riff 3, only with double kick drums, still building up, and we're going to go through that twice. Now we're at Heavy Riff 4, and one of my favorite strange parts of the entire album. This riff features some broken up rhythms and the bass doing all kinds of chords and little fills, and it just works so well. It's different! And our bass player likes to do things like this! Then to Heavy Riff 5, because there's never enough heavy riffs, only this time we get a nice harmony lead over the top.
Then it abruptly stops at 3;48, and the water flows in to fill the Mediterranean basin! Praise to Melqart! Our epic hero, the Tyrian Heracles, has done his thing! We now have Pillars of Heracles after that long build-up.
I felt this was a good time to slow it way down and put in a nice, melodic section. And speaking of the melody, it came about as a surprise! Sometimes things happen during the recording process that totally take you off guard; a fluke, a mistake, some weird bit of a tail of something, a string scrape. I look at these anomalies as an opportunity to put in something random, different. Sometimes it just gets erased. But I've learned to listen to these things and see if they can be used for anything. You can always delete it later. But just listen to it, it might be something.
In this case, it was certainly something. When I was writing this track, I've included this melodic section again at the end of the song, like how I often like to repeat a theme later in a track. So the bass part was already written, the nice chord progression was already there in the pad synth and the drums were done. There was no melody yet, as I hadn't decided what was going to go there. So there I am, basically doing a copy and paste of the drums, bass and synth tracks from this middle section to build the end section. Only something unpredictable happened to that bass track. I have no idea how it happened: A cat walked across my laptop, or a storm knocked out the power, or solar flares, or... Melqart only knows. But somehow, when I was copying the bass part over from the middle section to the end section, it got randomly dropped onto the piano track of the middle section. Only it wasn't lined up like the bass part. And it actually took me a minute to figure out just what the heck was going on there. Suddenly I'm hearing a melody in the piano, but I didn't write that there! I listened to it and said: Wait! This could actually work. With only a little bit of editing, we had a piano melody there based off an out-of-synch bass part. It basically turned into a round or a canon, like Row, Row, Row Your Boat. One line is started by one instrument or voice, then started later by the next instrument or voice, until they overlap, and then it cycles or circles around. That's exactly what I did with this section. Then I (more carefully) copied this piano melody over to the end section for the repeat.
As is usual, when I'm writing these tracks, I listen to the track on playback over my speakers to hear how it sounds. This particular occasion was similar to the occasion of how Cat Corelli came to play on the track Utique. So Cat was in the room at the time I was working out the guitar parts and heard the section, what I thought I was going to play there, and I said: What do you think? She says: Well, that's one way to do it, but it's kind of plain. So I know at that point she's got something else in mind, and I say: Okay, what do you got? So she sits down, I hand her the guitar and she works out those awesome clean/chorus guitar parts you hear in this melodic section, then played it again, slightly differently, because of the accents, on the repeated end section. I think it added a lot, so I gave her a featured artist slot on this track. She plays more guitar on this track, as well.
Interesting chord progression here, too. I switch here to the parallel major key, D Major. So the chords go:
D+7, G, D#+7, C6/9
then
D+7, g-7 (this time it's a minor 7 chord!), D#+7, C6/9
and repeat both phrases a couple times to end on
E7 - a-7, for a V7 to i cadence to set us up to go back to D minor! Pretty unusual, but I love it!
Okay, then at 4:50 we're back to the heavy stuff, half-time, and basically there's a repeat of the opening section with lead.
Next section at 5:16 comes a brand new riff you haven't heard yet. It's a rather heavy ascending pattern that the phrases end in +7 chords, so once again I invited Cat to play the second rhythm guitar on this brief section, just because I knew she would voice those +7 chords differently than I would; she always does! And this worked out nicely. She also played the pattern with a more staccato palm-mute feeling to be tight with the bass, where I played it more open. This lent variety to this section.
Then at 5:45 we hit the last unison heavy riff of the track, do a couple repeats of that, and then back, abruptly, once again, to that melodic section.
Again, Cat plays the clean/chorus rhythm guitar parts. However, this time, instead of the piano getting the melody all the way through, Cat once again gets invited to play the melody on guitar in her own unique style, and it really seals off the deal on this track nicely. Lots of variety here, and even though the basis of some sections get repeated, there's always going to be something different going on in these tracks from an original first pass. This time through this section, the starts of the phrases are all accented as anticipations, as well, instead of landing on the downbeats such as in the first straighter pass. This was to highlight the guitar solo a bit more.
And there we have it!
And that's the breakdown of the history of the Pillars of Heracles, both the geological sequence, or you can take the mythological route, and of course, the music that all this history and mythology inspired! This track was a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoyed a listen. Thanks for being here, thanks for reading, listening and supporting my music. Subscribe to the site! And I'll be back in a couple days with the blog for Track 8, Battle Elephants!
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