In Search of Ancient North Africa

A History in Six Lives

Barnaby Rogerson

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781912208784, 9781909961548
• eBook ISBN: 9781909961555
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

During years of travelling through North Africa, author Barnaby Rogerson has encountered a handful of stories so complicated that he could not place them into neat, tidy narratives. These are stories of characters who were neither distinctly good nor noticeably bad, neither malicious nor noble. In Search of Ancient North Africa is a journey into the ruins of a landscape to make sense of these stories through the multilayered lives of six individuals. Rogerson digs into the lives of Queen Dido, who was a sacrificial refugee; King Juba II, a prisoner of war who became a compliant tool of the Roman Empire; Septimius Severus, an unpromising provincial who, as its leader, brought his empire to its dazzling apogee; St. Augustine, an intellectual careerist who became a bishop and a saint; Hannibal, the greatest general the world has ever known; and Masinissa, the man who eventually defeated him. Together these six lives, clouded with as much myth as fact, are characters that represent classical North Africa. Among these life stories, we explore ruins and monuments tell of their lives and see the multiple connections that bind the culture of this region with the wider world, particularly the spiritual traditions of the ancient Near East.

In Search of Ancient North Africa sheds new light on a time and place at the crossroads of numerous histories and cultures. It offers the first history of ancient North Africa told through the lives of North Africans themselves.

1

Dido of Carthage, Princess Elissa, the Wanderer

When Purcell created the first English opera, he chose the famous story of the doomed love affair between Queen Dido, the founder of Carthage, and Aeneas, the founder of Rome. They are a pair of star-crossed lovers, both princely refugees from two ancient Asian cities of Tyre and Troy, meeting on the alien shore of North Africa. By happy chance, the first time I listened to Purcell’s opera, I was in North Africa, seated in the Roman theatre at Sabratha in Libya. It was a transfixing performance, if not also touched by the bizarre, for the cast, musicians, instruments and even the audience had all been shipped out from Britain to this romantic Roman backdrop. Only the drivers and security guards were locals. We were seated in the soft light of late afternoon, but it seemed a wonderfully poignant measure of our alien nature that even the British musical instruments brought along for this, the shortest of all operas, had to be shielded from the destructive power of the North African light by sunshades.

The audience were totally entranced by the combination of music and setting, which was spell-binding. It was an instance of total art, playing with three forms and five ages simultaneously: the young musical troupe (all dressed in simple black jeans and T-shirts) performing Purcell’s baroque composition which is so redolent of seventeenth-century Restoration London, all framed by the architecture of imperial Rome at its exuberant zenith, with a story-line based on Virgil’s Aeneid that itself rested on historical legends from the Iron Age foundation of Carthage. Song interwoven with music, story, myth and the warm touch of sun-kissed ancient stones.

The Roman theatre of Sabratha is magnificent in both scale and detail, be it the fortress-like curve of its exterior wall, the marble-lined walls of its flanking green room, or the evocative details of theatrical life that have been frozen in time on the carved marble of the pulpit stage-terrace. As you sit within the theatre, the three-storey backdrop both encloses and bedazzles an audience, and also succeeds in totally removing it from the outside world, with its tiers of variegated columns rising from an undulating line of projecting porches and inverted apses that announce the various stage doors. But just as Purcell’s music rested on Virgil’s epic poetry, which rested on a Greek historian’s understanding of the foundation legends of an Iron Age Phoenician colony, so this vast imposing architectural edifice is not the work of one time, but a curious fusion of many ages.

I still remember the shock of seeing an old photograph of the jumble of broken stone, and imagining that someone had made a mistake with the caption, before the truth gradually sank in. For the Roman theatre of Sabratha was entirely rebuilt by the Italian fascist regime, during the reign of the charismatic governor Italo Balbo. His engineers skilfully ‘reassembled’ the fallen stones, as graphic proof of how civilisation had finally returned to North Africa, the new Rome of fascist Italy restoring the Rome of yesterday. This great monument to Italian engineering and conservation would be turned into international propaganda when Mussolini attended the first night of Oedipus Rex, staged in March 1937 in the restored theatre – an Italian cast performing before an Italian audience. This was also the occasion when the famous Marble Arch, a new monument marking the old historical frontier between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, was formally opened. These dates are known and recorded, but due to the rebuilding of the theatre, architectural historians cannot now be sure when the original Roman theatre was constructed. We do however know the last possible day on which a performance could have been staged here, which was 20 July AD 365, for the theatre was demolished by a tsunami later described in terms that will at once be familiar to those caught up in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

Slightly after daybreak … the solidity of the whole earth was made to shake and shudder, and the sea was driven away, its waves rolled back, and the waters disappeared, so that the abyss of the depths was uncovered and every odd variety of sea-creature could be seen stuck in the slime; as well as the great wastes of those submarine valleys and mountains, which the very creation had dismissed beneath the vast ocean, at that moment were exposed to the sun’s rays. Many ships were stranded as if on dry land, and people wandered at will about the paltry remains of the waters to collect fish and the like in their hands … but then the roaring sea as if insulted by its repulse rolled back in turn, and through the teeming shoals dashed itself violently on islands and extensive tracts of the mainland, and flattened innumerable buildings in towns or wherever they were found. Thus in the raging conflict of the elements, the face of the earth was changed to reveal wondrous sights. For the mass of waters returning when least expected killed many thousands by drowning, and with the tides whipped up to a height as they rushed back, some ships, after the anger of the watery element had grown old, were seen to have sunk, and the bodies of people killed in shipwrecks lay there, faces up or down. Other huge ships, thrust out by the mad blasts, perched on the roofs of houses, as happened at Alexandria, and others were hurled nearly two miles from the shore, like the Spartan vessel outside Methone which I saw when I passed by …

These words of the historian Ammianus Marcellinus describe what happened to all the cities, such as Sabratha, within reach of the immediate circle of destruction of the Cretan earthquake of 365. As I listened to Purcell and looked out over the lengthening shadows, I was not aware of any ghosts from the destruction of the theatre. For the very simple reason that plays were normally performed in the comparative cool of the late afternoon and early evening, with some evidence that sails were rigged to keep the theatre seats in the shade.

The tsunami-flattened theatre would have been very low down on the list of vital assets to be restored in the aftermath of the disaster, and any chance of this was ended when all theatres were closed by order of a Christian emperor in 391. So the ruins became a no-man’s-land, squatted on by a slum of huts, and used now and then as a quarry of carved stone, especially when a necessary capital was needed, or stone required in a hurry so as to build defensive walls.

I was attending the opera as a lecturer, and was idly wondering how much of this hidden history I should share with the audience at the after-dinner talk, but held my tongue. They were so obviously relishing the belief that they were listening to Purcell’s opera about the Queen of Carthage in a real Roman theatre. There is surely a limit to how much historical deconstruction anyone wants when caught up in the afterglow of opera. In just the same way I used to feel irritated when a medically trained friend would reel off the flow of hormones, rather than purely relish that other magic theatre of the bedroom. Just after listening to Purcell in Sabratha, did one want to be told that the theatre wasn’t a true survival, that Virgil spun Aeneas out of nothing and added him to the old myths, or for that matter that many modern historians now doubt that Dido ever existed?

I am always in favour of the legends, but enough of a historian to be delighted by the quest for truth, and fortunately now old enough to realise that these change with the seasons and will change again.

It is an ancient legend that a refugee from Syria, Princess Elissa of Tyre, established the great city of Carthage. She is also known to us as Dido, for she was saluted by the native Berbers of North Africa as Deido (the Wanderer) and given permission to settle on their land. Her foundation was called Carthage, which is no more than a corruption of the Phoenician for New City. The citizens of Carthage remained visiting merchants for many generations, paying rent to their Berber landlords for centuries, before this community waxed into a city that would conquer a North African empire.

Nothing remains above ground of the glory and ancient terror of this Carthage, certainly nothing that would give substance to all those dense volumes of Livy, which like some vast soap opera chronicle the bitter succession of wars that Rome fought against her one-time ally, transformed into her most dangerous rival and arch-enemy. But like many others before me I have not been deterred by the warnings of my predecessors, and have spent many weeks criss-crossing modern Carthage in the hope of catching some glimpse of its Punic past.

It has been in vain. Carthage is like Wimbledon, a suburb filled with garden villas and tarmac crescents and traversed by a commuter railway track. There are Roman ruins aplenty from the Second Foundation of Carthage, some over-enthusiastically restored and serving as an amusement park for coach tours, others remaining empty and evocative. So the elemental lesson I have learned about trying to convey Punic Carthage to a friend is that it should begin with a mid-afternoon meal of grilled fish topped by an afternoon swim. Stripping the flesh from the spine of a bream as you sip at the local wine, dunking flat bread into a saucer of olive oil and harissa, then feasting on peeled fruit is as good a communion with the passions of the past as anything built of mere masonry. And then stay as long as you can by the sea, in order to catch some of that clear dusk light that cuts through the miasma of the midday humidity of bustling greater Tunis – to catch the light from the west as it sharpens the distant horizon.

The mountain that rises to the south, Jebel Boukornine, slowly begins to stand out, growing into a sacred watchtower, with its two horns acting like a mythic beacon, signalling to distant shipping that here, clasped by the skirts of her forested slopes, lies the safe harbour of Carthage. At such moments the importance of Carthage looks to be predetermined, as the centre of a great bay in the central crossing point of the Mediterranean, defined by two great arms of land, the southern of which is the orchard- and vineyard-planted hills of the Cap Bon peninsula, so that to place a city here starts to look like elementary geography. Hence the three distinct cities that have emerged from out of this region to dominate the central Mediterranean: Punic Carthage, Romano-Byzantine Carthage and Islamic Tunis.

A special point of birth looks so necessary to the human mind in search of meaning that economic historians have questioned the truthfulness of the famous founding myth. Was Carthage–Tunis, this great commercial success story written across three thousand years of human history, really established at the whim of a refugee princess fleeing her home city of Tyre? Or was this legend, which famously ends in a spectacular suicide, much more likely to be the creation of hostile others, especially those Greek and Roman historians who chose to demean their Eastern rivals by casting them as female-ruled from day one, and like any skirt-governed group of men, destined for ultimate destruction?

For it is a truism of historical narratives that when you hear of a people led by a warrior-queen, then they must hurtle headlong down towards their final chapter. There will be the glory of a bloody first victory to come, but whether it is the revolt of the Britons led by Boudicca, queen of the Iceni (battling the Romans), or the Berber tribes of the Aurès mountains, led by their witch-queen Kahina (fighting off the Arabs), or such early Arab heroines as Kawlah or Queen Zenobia of Palmyra (fighting the Romans), the story arc ends only one way. Nor is it just the old-time women who suffer: Joan of Arc expelling the English from France or La Fraila resisting the Napoleonic invasion of Spain – they too must pay the price. For having inspired their menfolk, both Joan and La Fraila get burned alive, just like the fate recorded for Queen Dido of Carthage.

Historians label these familiar recurrent narratives as ‘tropes’, which is an elegant way of saying that they don’t need to have actually happened, but storytellers (just like newspaper editors) have learnt to keep their audience’s attention by giving them what they wanted, embroidered with variations.

What makes things even more suspicious to academic trope-hunters is that the Elissa–Dido storyline did not seem to lead back beyond Timaeus, a Greek historian of the fourth–third century BC. Timaeus came from the Sicilian city of Taormina (though he spent most of his working life in mainland Greece), but ended his days as a pensioned historian at the big Sicilian city of Syracuse. He was a good historian, certainly good enough to be used as a principal source by all the major historians who succeeded him (such as Plutarch, Pompeius Trogus, Diodorus Siculus and Justin), who in the manner of their kind liked to gently rubbish their predecessor once they had picked his bones clean of knowledge. And that is how Timaeus’ work has survived, through references and quotations from the writers who succeeded him.

Timaeus actually lived well before any of the three Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, and yet he was the first to take the measure of the growing power of Rome. This was perceptive judgement, for he was born just after the life of Alexander the Great, at a time when everything Greek and Hellenistic was totally dominant. Timaeus lived in a world where all the great men who dominated the Mediterranean, be it the tyrant Agathocles, the master tactician King Pyrrhus of Epirus, the Ptolemaic lords of Egypt, or his own employer (King Hiero II of Syracuse) were Greek. However as a Greek born in Sicily, he absorbed with his mother’s milk a certain oppositional stance to the ancient enemy of the Greeks of Sicily, namely Carthage, which ruled the western third of the island of Sicily. Carthage had repeatedly waged war and stopped the creation of a single Greek–Sicilian power. So the question is, did Timaeus put deliberate hostile spin on his history, inventing or exaggerating the Queen Dido tale, in order to soften up an old enemy? Did he denigrate Carthage as woman-led from the start, making the city into a ‘pre-doomed other’? This is an exciting way of decoding history, for it corresponds with more recent fashionable themes such as Orientalism, the notion that the West has distorted and romanticised the history of its Eastern opponents as a prelude to weakening and then conquering them.

So for a long time, this was the approved and instructive way to look at Timaeus’ history, as Greek propaganda aimed at undermining Carthage, for on the face of it there was small likelihood of a refugee princess personally establishing a successful trading port. This view was also backed up by the most recent excavation evidence, which seemed to rubbish all the old claims of ordered colonial settlement from a mother city. Excavations into the origins of such early trading stations as Italian Ischia, Greek Euboea and Syrian Al-Mina (which all pre-date Carthage) have revealed a much less ordered story, shorn of any prevailing ethnic identity. Instead the ancient dust has revealed a hotchpotch of Phoenician, Etruscan, Ligurian, Campanian, Cilician and Ionian craftsmen and merchants all working together, and all found buried side by side in the same small cemeteries escorted by a rich multicultural confusion of grave goods.

All the early trading centres (which numbered populations of between five and ten thousand) reveal this same foundation deposit, a rich tilth of Levantine craftsmen muddled up together, just as you would expect from the examples around us today, be it Manhattan, Singapore, London or Hong Kong. And these digs also scotched all the early attempts at creating ‘linguistic divisions’ between the Greeks and the Phoenicians. So typically the oldest ceramics yet found in Carthage come not from its mythical mother city of Tyre but from Greek Euboea (that long thin island hugging the coast of Greece just north of Athens). Just as the earliest deposits in Greek Euboea and Greek Corinth have been found not to be Greek but Phoenician. This was clearly a period of total cultural flux, when the Greek alphabet first emerged out of the Phoenician alphabet, as the haphazard spinoff from enterprising Greeks trading along the Syrian and Egyptian coast and of enterprising Phoenicians trading into the Aegean and up into the Black Sea. It seems that trading cities grew for the sound reason of trade, not through the political will of a colonial settlement ordained by a mother city. This is also true of Marseille (ancient Massalia), which first emerged as a melting pot of Greek, Etruscan and Carthaginian merchants all drawn to the market in tin, though the actual carrying trade was in the hands of the locals, the Ligurians and Celts.

When we read the descriptions in Homer, of the two silver belts and a pair of tripods given to Menelaus, or see how the Bible describes Jehu of Israel giving a ‘golden bowl, a golden vase with a pointed bottom, golden tumblers, golden buckets, tin ingots, a staff fit for a king and spears’ to his liege lord, the king of Assyria, we get a feel for the power of these early trading settlements, which alone could produce these gifts worthy of kings. They are also refreshingly modest and personal. And just now and then a sample of one of these wonderful things described in our most ancient books has managed to survive. They dominate our museums and our imagination, as they did the chroniclers and praise-singers of old. They were surely made in one of those far-flung assortment of trading towns along the Mediterranean shore.

Meanwhile the day-to-day business of a merchant tended to be far more prosaic. Preservable, transportable food has always been the backbone of Mediterranean trade – specifically the trinity of grain, olive oil and salted fish, eked out by small quantities of honey, dried fruits and wine. Bread, vegetables and meat were all part of the local economy, and were traded at the weekly marketplace. All cultures recognised the need for a fresh food market every seven or eight days, which was how long bread and vegetables can last on a kitchen shelf before becoming stale.

Now that we have (for the moment) banished Princess Dido from the process of creating a trading station, how might we better first imagine the birth of Carthage? Not with the footfall of a scented princess, but with the squalor of a seasonal fish factory, drenched in the stench of rotting fish guts, the scraping of fish skin, the drying of split fish, the squelch of marsh mud being damped up into squares. Add to that the weaving of baskets from the reeds of the marshland, and of rope for the nets, and the sifting of ever-thickening masses of sun-dried tidal mud into salt. For the place was a virtual island, a triangle of land attached by the slenderest arms of its beach front to the mainland, and separated by two great lagoons, which were once the size of an inner sea and which were themselves fed by a further network of brackish lagoons. It was a paradise for fish, offering up every degree of salinity, a home for virtually every species. And to add one further twist to nature’s already abundant bounty, the largest of these lagoons connected to the sea through the narrow throat of a natural canal, which at the times of the seasonal migration of fish could be netted with ease. This also doubled in the winter months as a vast reserve of migrating birds, flying south from the cold zones of Europe, including every species of edible (and nettable) duck imaginable. And that was just landwards, for the potential tonnage of fish, including the bountiful tuna, extended ever outwards into the rich Mediterranean.

Surrounded by brackish swamps to the south – a natural breeding ground for mosquitoes – and pervaded by salt spray from the north, it was never likely to be an especially healthy place. And it would have almost certainly remained a deserted headland, a seasonal place for the fishing fleets to do their dirty work, had...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Dido of Carthage, Princess Elissa, the Wanderer
• 2. They Met at Zama: Hannibal of Carthage, Scipio of Rome and Masinissa of Numidia
• 3. The Tomb of the Christian Woman and King Juba II
• 4. The Walls of Volubilis
• 5. Dougga
• 6. The Villa Selene
• 7. The New Forum of Leptis Magna
• 8. Septimius Severus
• 9. St Augustine of Hippo
• 10. Aurelius Augustinus
• 11. The Oasis of Ghadames