Carthage

A Biography

Dexter Hoyos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138788206
• eBook ISBN: 9781000328165
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Carthage tells the life story of the city, both as one of the Mediterranean's great seafaring powers before 146 BC, and after its refounding in the first century BC. It provides a comprehensive history of the city and its unique culture, and offers students an insight into Rome's greatest enemy.

Hoyos explores the history of Carthage from its foundation, traditionally claimed to have been by political exiles from Phoenicia in 813 BC, through to its final desertion in AD 698 at the hands of fresh eastern arrivals, the Arabs. In these 1500 years, Carthage had two distinct lives, separated by a hundred-year silence. In the first and most famous life, the city traded and warred on equal terms with Greeks and then with Rome, which ultimately led to Rome utterly destroying the city after the Third Punic War. A second Carthage, Roman in form, was founded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC and flourished, both as a centre for Christianity and as capital of the Vandal kingdom, until the seventh-century expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate.

Carthage is a comprehensive study of this fascinating city across 15 centuries that provides a fascinating insight into Punic history and culture for students and scholars of Carthaginian, Roman, and Late Antique history. Written in an accessible style, this volume is also suitable for the general reader.

1

DIDO’S CITY

Foundation

Around the year 813 bc a small flotilla of Phoenician ships moored along the shore by the northern entrance to the lake of Tunis in North Africa. Their landfall was a narrow coastal strip bounded to its north by a broad headland, today’s La Marsa-Gammarth, and on its western side by an arc of low hills less than 500 metres from the water’s edge. Flat and marshy ground stretched between the southernmost hill and the shore of the lake, which was actually a small bay opening into the outer sea, the Gulf of Tunis. The whole area formed the terminus, arrowhead-shaped, of a narrow isthmus between the lake on its southern side and another inlet at its northern edge, today the salt lake called Sebkha Ariana. Westward lay the rest of the country which Greeks called Libya, approximately today’s Tunisia. The Phoenician arrivals had chosen this site for their new settlement.

Figure 1.1 View of Carthage from Byrsa hill: the enclosed harbours in the middle distance, and Jebel Bou Kornine across the Gulf of Tunis.

Source: Getty Images

They were led, the story goes, by a young princess of Tyre who had fled with her supporters from the tyranny of her brother, the king. The story is told by a late-Roman author, Justin, who condensed a lengthy world history written by one Pompeius Trogus in the time of the emperor Augustus. Her original name was probably Halishat or Alishat—in strict transliteration, ‘lšt (like Hebrew, Phoenician-Punic did not show vowels), which Greeks turned into Elissa. One historian five hundred years later, Timaeus of Sicily, instead called her Dido (supposedly a Libyan word meaning ‘wanderer’), the name that the Roman poet Virgil would immortalise.

As Trogus’ Justin told it, after her vicious brother Pygmalion murdered her uncle-husband, the priest of Tyre’s patron god Melqart, Elissa escaped by sea with followers and the treasure coveted by Pygmalion, sailed to a Phoenician settlement in Cyprus (called Alashia in Phoenician) to gather more followers including the chief priest of ‘Jupiter’ (probably the Phoenician god Baal Shamem) and his family—plus 80 virgins, rescued from ritual prostitution to ‘Venus’ (Astarte) to be colonists’ wives—and voyaged from there to Libya.¹

Ancient Libya corresponded roughly to the northern half of today’s Tunisia, blending on its west into the highlands and valleys of Numidia (more or less modern Algeria north of the Sahara). The many peoples of this vast region and of Mauretania beyond it were Berbers—Amazigh in their own language, ‘Moors’ to the Romans later—who were farmers and pastoralists. Later Greek fable had the disdainful local Libyans concede to the newcomers only so much ground as an ox hide (a byrsa in Greek) could cover: the astute Elissa stripped the byrsa into a single long thread and with it encircled the southernmost hill. This 55-metre height was thenceforth named Byrsa and the new city Qart Hadasht: in Phoenician, New City. This became Karchedon for Greeks, and for Romans Carthago. Elissa-Dido later committed suicide rather than be forced to marry the local Libyan king, Iarbas, but her foundation prospered.

This famously vivid legend (exploited and adapted by the Roman poet Virgil for his epic the Aeneid; see Chapter 13) is generally thought to be pure myth. Yet it may reflect elements of fact. Although archaeological finds at Carthage previously dated to no earlier than the mid-eighth century bc, recent research suggests that the city was already in place around 800. A small item in Justin’s account is worth notice: that the initial site was soon vacated in favour of a more promising one nearby. The mid‑eighth-century evidence, like later materials, comes from sites close to the city’s shoreline, whereas some archaeological evidence from Byrsa hill supports the revised date—animal bones carbon-dated to the late ninth century.

‘Byrsa’, meaning ox hide, is a Greek etymological fantasy, but the Greek name‑form could have arisen from Phoenician-Punic brt, ‘stronghold’, or from Phoenician perša supposedly meaning ‘measured space’. Byrsa would remain the sacred citadel, crowned by a temple of the god Eshmun (where today the Acropolium stands), while the citizens dwelt on the lower ground down to the shore.²

What then of Elissa-Dido? According to Justin, she was afterwards revered and treated as a goddess. Ancient mythologies, incidentally, include very few women city-founders. Votive inscriptions from later times at Carthage included some dedicated by women called Halishat, showing that Carthaginians were familiar with the name, and perhaps the story, even if it was a legend. The Carthaginians were certainly conscious of family tradition and descent, for on some later inscriptions the dedicators listed not only their fathers, but one or more male ancestors: in one or two cases, no fewer than sixteen. These, if genuine, recorded the dedicator’s genealogy back even to the eighth century.

Tyrian annals, cited by the later Jewish author Josephus from the third-century bc Greek historian Menander of Ephesus, included a Pygmalion who was king for forty-six years from around 831 bc—or by another reckoning 820—and in whose seventh year Dido fled from Tyre. King Pygmalion, or Pumayyaton, seems to be recorded in the western Mediterranean too: the oldest Phoenician inscription found in the west, set up at the Phoenician settlement of Nora in Sardinia about the year 800 bc, mentions him, at least in one interpretation, as the lord of the dedicator. And a gold pendant, unearthed in 1894 on Douimès hill just north of Byrsa, was dedicated to Astarte by ‘Yadomilk son of Pidiy, a soldier’ who (again in one interpretation) had a ‘Pumayaton’ as his lord. Though found with items of around 700 bc, its lettering is ninth-century Phoenician script; a sacred and valuable possession, it could have been passed down several generations until put in the earth.

Even though certainty is not possible, Yadomilk’s pendant adds to the chances of Carthage being founded sometime late in the ninth century bc. Interestingly, the Augustan-era Roman historian Livy, in an otherwise lost sketch of Carthage’s history, named Dido’s fleet-captain as ‘Bitias’, which would be the Greek form of Pidiy. Livy’s source is not known but must have been a Greek—or a Carthaginian writing in Greek—who gave an account of Carthage’s early days. Josephus also records the Tyrians as dating Carthage rather exactly to 155 years (and eight months) from their king, Hiram I, who reigned from about 962 to 929; the time-span was evidently seen as starting from Hiram’s accession.

It would be too bold to see Yadomilk’s pendant as a sign that Pygmalion was the true founder via his sister. Yadomilk (and his father?) could have changed allegiance but brought important possessions along, as Dido supposedly did. Later Carthaginians had no obvious reason to invent a woman founder, a unique example among ancient city-founders both genuine and mythical; if Pygmalion was unsatisfactory, they could have credited the next Tyrian king, Ittobal II, or even Pygmalion’s and Dido’s father, Mattan II.³

Whether or not Dido slew herself to avoid forced marriage with a neighbouring Libyan king, this part of the story resonated with Greeks and Romans too. Virgil, in the time of the emperor Augustus, banished chronology to make her love and briefly wed the exiled Trojan prince Aeneas, another wandering royal—though everyone knew that Troy had fallen nearly four centuries before her time—and movingly told how she slew herself when Aeneas deserted her to fulfil his destiny as the ancestor of the Romans. But her suicide, genuine or invented, to avoid a Libyan husband fitted Carthage’s delicate early relations with the peoples in the extensive Libyan countryside. The settlers had to pay a yearly tax to them, though its details are unknown, as a permanent mark of their foreign status. Efforts to shake it off finally succeeded only after the mid-fifth century (Chapter 5). All the same the impost made little difference to the city’s steady growth in size, trade, and wealth.

The early city

Carthage was not the sole Phoenician settlement in the west. Tyre and Sidon sent colonists out to many places suitable for travel and commerce, starting with colonies in Cyprus, then moving on to settle even as far as the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Almost always they avoided islands and regions where Greeks or Greek colonists dwelt—bypassing Crete and southern Italy, for instance. The earliest western Phoenician colonies were Sardinia’s Nora mentioned above, Gades in south-west Spain (modern Cádiz), and Lixus (near Larache 80 kilometres south of Tangier) in Morocco.

Greeks and Romans believed that Gades, and Carthage’s close neighbour, Utica, were already hundreds of years old when Elissa-Dido came to found her city, but up until now, archaeological finds at both go back no further than the eighth century, just as do the Phoenician settlements in Sicily at Motya (Mozia near Marsala) and Panormus (Palermo). If these dates are correct, the Carthaginians’ belief that they were one of the youngest Phoenician colonies, or indeed the very youngest, was a mere fancy.

Greeks were also colonisers. Various Greek city-states busily sent out settlers in the eighth and following centuries, notably from Chalcis in Euboea, Phocaea and Miletus on Asia Minor’s side of the Aegean Sea, and Corinth and its neighbour Megara in mainland Greece. As just noted, Greeks and Phoenicians seldom crossed paths; the furthest south Greek colonists ventured was Cyrene inland from the African coast near Egypt. Sicily brought Phoenicians and Greeks closest together, with Phoenicians founding Panormus, Solous close by, and Motya, and Greeks settling at Syracuse, Messana, Acragas, and other places, nearly all of them on or near a coast. Some of these cities then set up their own colonies in turn. All would play a major role in Carthage’s future.

‘New City’ was not a unique name for a Phoenician settlement. Cyprus’ Citium was also first called Qart Hadasht by its Phoenician rulers, and today’s Nabeul on the Gulf of Hammamet south of Cape Bon, though called Neapolis (‘New City’ in Greek) by Greeks and Romans, must have been another Qart Hadasht to Carthaginians, who perhaps founded it. Lepcis Magna, 900 kilometres away near Khoms on the modern Libyan coast, was another such, if reputable Greek and Roman geographers were also right in sometimes calling it Neapolis.⁴

Carthage, in its first three centuries or so, was small, perhaps covering a couple of dozen hectares at first. The early city extended from Byrsa eastward to the shore 500 metres away, and was edged by metalworking shops on its southern side and beside the shore, along with sites where murex (the sea-snail) was crushed to make purple dye. From early on too, if not from its beginning, it was guarded by fortified walls. Just outside these, burial grounds dotted the slopes of Byrsa and the lower hills to its north now called Juno, Odéon, Douimès, and Borj Jedid. A spring at the foot of Borj Jedid, and wells dug elsewhere, supplied the settlers with fresh water.

Archaeological finds show that the city was carefully planned from the start, with streets of beaten earth laid out in a grid pattern on the flat ground by the sea, and semicircular streets around Byrsa’s slopes. Temples including Eshmun’s stood on Byrsa (Greeks and Romans identified him with the god of healing, Asclepius/Aesculapius), and one on the lower ground, a few streets inland from the shore, was perhaps the temple of Reshef, whom Greeks and Romans identified with Apollo, as such a temple in that area is reported by ancient authors. Houses with gardens have been noted even at the earliest levels, no doubt dwellings of the city’s dominant elite. As in later times, the houses probably had underground cisterns for storing rainwater and (as elsewhere in North Africa) flat roofs as cool sleeping-quarters in oppressive summers. Early houses are not likely, though, to have reached up to six storeys as some later ones did.

Arriving ships were beached by their crews or moored in the shallows. As trade grew, reception facilities were enlarged and added. To improve safety, a narrow stream flowing south from Byrsa’s edge, through marshy ground to Lake Tunis, was in time widened and deepened to let ships in: traces of wooden docks survive. Recent study of the city’s Mediterranean shoreline suggest that ships could anchor at points there too. Late in Punic Carthage’s life, two shallow lagoons in marshy ground by the shore south-east of Byrsa, in today’s Salammbo district—one with a small island in it, used by artisans, and the other roughly oval—were developed into two handsome enclosed ports, famous as the ‘hidden harbours’ of Carthage. Their remains are still visible too (Chapter 3).

Carthage’s position was exceptionally rewarding for trade, travel, and security. It lies more or less halfway between Phoenicia and Gibraltar, while the south-west coast of Sicily is only 200 kilometres away and the south coast of Sardinia 260 to the north. The city’s peninsular setting, linked to its hinterland by a narrow isthmus, lent security. With fortifications that were extended as the city grew, Carthage was often besieged, yet it was captured only twice in its Punic existence—the first time by a rebel Carthaginian (Chapter 5). Both the Libyan countryside beyond, watered by the rivers Bagradas (Mejerda), Siliana, and Catadas (Miliane), and the broad Cape Bon peninsula on the eastern side of the Gulf of Tunis produced food and goods that the Carthaginians could barter for in return for their own or overseas products. The Libyans were happy to trade—from the very beginning, wrote Justin—and as time passed and Carthage undertook overseas warfare, to serve as mercenary troops in Punic pay. So did their fellow North Africans the Numidians, whose forte was light infantry and formidably versatile light cavalry.

From the start, the Carthaginians kept up close ties with nearby sister-colonies: notably Utica 33 kilometres up the coast (the site, Henchir Bou Chateur, is now well inland), Hippou Acra (or Hippacra, Greek versions of the Punic name; now Bizerte), and Hadrumetum, Leptis, Thapsus, and others on the Gulf o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Maps
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Dido’s city
• 2 Trade and the beginnings of empire
• 3 City life and religion
• 4 Society and government
• 5 Politics, politicians, and Carthage in Libya
• 6 Carthage versus the Greeks
• 7 Fighting Rome
• 8 The death of Punic Carthage
• 9 Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago
• 10 Christianity and Carthage
• 11 Carthage Vandalised
• 12 Byzantine Carthage
• 13 Conclusion
• Appendix on sources
• References
• Index