Carthage

← Encyclopedia

The tradition begins with a measuring trick. A princess of Tyre named Elissa — the Romans called her Dido — fled her own city after her brother Pygmalion murdered her husband for his gold, and put in on a low hill above a North African bay. She asked the local Libyan chief for only as much land as could be covered by an oxhide. He agreed, expecting a courtyard. She cut the hide into a single thread and ringed a whole hill with it. That hill, the Byrsa, became the citadel of the new town, and the name the settlers gave it was plain to the point of bluntness: Qart-hadasht, new city. Greek and Latin tongues wore it down to Karchedon and Carthago. Justin, drawing on the lost history of Pompeius Trogus, preserves the legend; the Sicilian chronicler Timaeus of Tauromenium fixed the foundation to 814 BCE by reckoning against Tyrian king-lists and Olympiads. The spade roughly agrees with him — no settlement layer at the site predates the last quarter of the eighth century — even if no Phoenician inscription names a queen called Elissa at all.

Carthage was a daughter of Phoenicia, planted on the coast of present-day Tunisia, near the mouth of the Gulf of Tunis where Africa reaches nearest to Sicily. The homeland that sent her — the Levantine cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, and the alphabet they carried west — belongs to its own account. What grew on the African shore was something the parent never became: a centralized maritime empire that for three centuries set the terms of trade across the western sea, then broke itself against Rome. The people Rome called Poeni — from the Greek Phoinikes, Phoenicians — gave the adjective that names everything Carthaginian: Punic.

The reach of a trading city

The genius of Carthage was the harbor and the ledger, not the plow or the phalanx. It sat astride the narrows between the two basins of the Mediterranean, and it made that position into a system. From the African coast its ships ran metals out of Iberia — the silver of the southern Spanish mines, the tin that came down the Atlantic routes — purple-dyed textiles, worked ivory, salt fish, and the grain and oil of its own widening African hinterland. The colonial network it inherited and extended reached across western Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic island of Ibiza, Malta, and the southern Spanish seaboard, with treaty rights and trading posts threaded between them. The earliest treaty between Carthage and the young Roman Republic, which the historian Polybius dates to 509 BCE, already reads as the document of a power confident enough to tell Roman ships which waters they might and might not enter.

This was a thalassocracy in the literal sense — rule resting on command of the sea. Its instrument was the cothon, the great double harbor whose outline still scars the ground near Tunis: a rectangular commercial basin opening into a circular naval one, the inner ring lined with covered ship-sheds said to hold more than two hundred warships, an admiral’s island at its center. Around the fifth century an admiral remembered as Hanno the Navigator is said to have sailed a fleet of sixty ships out through the Pillars and down the West African coast, planting colonies as he went; the Greek translation of his report, the Periplus, is the only Carthaginian first-person voice that survives in any quantity, and even that comes to us secondhand.

Power on land followed a different logic from power at sea. The city’s small citizen body could not garrison an empire, so Carthage fought, increasingly, with hired men — Libyan and Numidian cavalry, Iberian and Celtic infantry, Balearic slingers, Greek mercenaries — paid out of the same trade that the wars defended. The reform that turned a city militia into a professional military machine is credited to Mago in the mid-sixth century, founder of the Magonid line that dominated Carthaginian affairs for generations. Its early reach into Greek Sicily met a hard check at the Battle of Himera in 480 BCE, where the tyrant Gelon of Syracuse broke a Carthaginian army and killed its general; the long, grinding Sicilian wars against the western Greeks ran on for the better part of two centuries before Rome ever entered the field.

Suffetes and senate

Carthage outgrew kingship early. By perhaps the early sixth century executive power rested with two annually elected magistrates, the suffetes — the word is the same Northwest Semitic shophetim, judges, that names the leaders in the Hebrew book of Judges — who presided over the courts and the assembly but did not command armies; generals were appointed and answered, sometimes fatally, to the state. Above the magistrates sat a powerful council, an aristocratic senate drawn from the great merchant families, and a smaller tribunal of one hundred and four that audited returning commanders with a severity the sources found notable. The assembly of citizens carried weight when the council and suffetes disagreed.

The arrangement impressed an outside observer who had every reason to be skeptical of foreigners. In the second book of the Politics, Aristotle ranks the Carthaginian constitution among the best-governed states he knew, alongside Sparta and Crete — a mixed regime balancing monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, stable enough that it had never, in his telling, suffered a tyrant or a serious revolt. The praise is the more striking for coming from a Greek in the Hellenistic period’s near horizon, looking across a sea his countrymen had contested with Carthage for centuries. Wealth, not birth alone, opened the council; the same commercial energy that filled the harbors filled the offices.

The gods of the new city

Carthage carried its gods west from the Levant, then let them change in African soil, so that the Punic pantheon became recognizably its own. Its theology is the deep matter of Phoenician religion and behind it the Ugaritic and West Semitic religion of the Late Bronze Age — the world of Canaan and its storm-god Baal — and the doctrine belongs to those accounts rather than to this one. What can be said of the city specifically is the shape of its cult.

Two powers stood at the head of it. Baal Hammon — a sky-and-fertility lord whose epithet the Greeks and Romans answered with the names of Kronos and Saturn — was the supreme god of the western Phoenician world from the city’s early centuries. Beside him, and from roughly the fifth century before him in the dedications, rose Tanit, a goddess who bore the title pene Baal, the face of Baal, as though she were the turned countenance through which the high god met his worshippers. Her emblem — a flat-based triangle topped by a horizontal bar and a disk, the so-called sign of Tanit — recurs on thousands of carved stelae and became the visual signature of Punic religion. The Tyrian city-god Melqart kept his hold on Carthaginian loyalty across the whole life of the city: for centuries Carthage sent a tithe of its revenues back to the temple of Melqart in Tyre, and the cult preserved the priestly office the inscriptions call mqm ʾlm, raiser of the god, tied to Melqart’s festival of awakening. Eshmun, a healing god the Greeks read as Asclepius, crowned the great temple on the Byrsa. The names are Levantine; the way the city held them — the tithe sailing east to a mother long since reduced to a Persian and then a Macedonian subject — is the local fact.

The tophet and the question over it

On the southern edge of the city, in the precinct of Salammbô, lies the ground that has fixed Carthage in the imagination above any harbor or battle. Modern scholars borrowed a Hebrew word for it — tophet, the name in 2 Kings and Jeremiah for a place of burning near Jerusalem — because the Punic name is unknown. It is an open-air sanctuary, used from the city’s earliest decades down to its fall, layered with thousands of small cinerary urns. The urns hold the cremated remains of infants, often very young, sometimes mingled with the bones of lambs or kids. Many were marked above ground by carved stone stelae dedicated to Baal Hammon and to Tanit, and a number of the inscriptions use the term mlk (vocalized molk), a word for a kind of offering — with the variant phrase molk ʾmr, rendered on later Latin-letter stones as molchomor, apparently offering of a lamb. Whether mlk names the rite of giving a child, or the substitute given in a child’s place, is itself part of the dispute.

The classical record is lurid and unanimous in one direction. Cleitarchus in the third century, Diodorus Siculus in the first — describing the panic of the siege of 310 BCE, when the Syracusan Agathocles had landed in Africa — Plutarch, and the Christian apologist Tertullian all report that Carthaginians burned their own children as offerings to the god the Greeks called Kronos, some adding the detail of a bronze image whose sloped arms let the body roll into a fire. These authors were, almost to a man, hostile witnesses: Greeks and Romans who had fought the city, or Christians arguing against pagan cruelty.

Against that testimony stands the difficulty of the bones. In 2010 a team led by Jeffrey Schwartz published in PLoS ONE an osteological study of cremated remains from hundreds of tophet urns and argued that the age profile — heavily weighted toward the prenatal and the newborn, with many who never drew breath — matched ordinary perinatal and infant mortality rather than the selection a sacrifice of living children would produce; the tophet, on this reading, was a cemetery for those who died at or near birth (journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0009177). A reply followed quickly. A 2013 study in Antiquity by Paolo Xella, Josephine Quinn, Valentina Melchiorri, and Peter van Dommelen weighed the convergence of urns, dedicatory stelae, the mlk vocabulary, and the classical sources together, judged the osteological aging unreliable for cremated and shrunken bone, and concluded that the precinct was first of all a sanctuary where the depositions were offerings (cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/cemetery-or-sacrifice-infant-burials-at-the-carthage-tophet). The general phenomenon of sacrifice — the offering of a thing of value to bind the divine to the giver — frames the architecture of the rite without settling what was given. The architecture is firm: a precinct, urns, stelae, a vocabulary of vowing. The reading of it is not, and the two camps continue to publish.

Rome, three times over

For its first centuries Carthage’s enemies were Greek. Then a new power consolidated the Italian peninsula, and in 264 BCE a dispute over the Sicilian city of Messana drew the two into the First Punic War — a contest the Roman Republic could only win at sea, against the established naval state, by building fleets it had never owned. Twenty-three years of attrition ended in 241 BCE with Carthage ceding Sicily and agreeing to a heavy indemnity. Worse followed at once: unpaid mercenaries and Libyan subjects rose in the Mercenary War, a revolt so savage that Polybius held it up as the cruelest of all the wars he knew, and Rome used the chaos to seize Sardinia for itself.

Out of that humiliation rose the family that gave the wars their second act. Hamilcar Barca, who had held out in Sicily undefeated, carried Carthaginian power into Spain and built there a base of silver and soldiers. His son Hannibal turned it on Rome. In 218 BCE, rather than wait for invasion, Hannibal marched an army with war-elephants over the Alps into Italy — losing perhaps a third of his men and most of the elephants to the crossing — and for fifteen years fought on Roman ground. He shattered Roman armies at the Trebia, ambushed another at Lake Trasimene in 217, and at Cannae in 216 BCE enveloped and destroyed the largest force Rome had ever fielded, in the maneuver every later war-college would study. Yet Rome would not negotiate, and the war turned where Hannibal could not be: a young commander, Scipio, took Spain and then carried the fight to Africa, forcing Hannibal home to defend the city. At Zama in 202 BCE Scipio — afterward Africanus — beat him in the field. The peace of 201 stripped Carthage of its overseas empire, its war-fleet, and its freedom to make war without Rome’s leave, and left it paying a fifty-year indemnity.

It paid, and it prospered, and the prospering proved fatal. A revived commercial Carthage, its harbors full again, alarmed a faction at Rome past reason; the elder Cato is remembered closing every speech, whatever its subject, with the demand that Carthage be destroyed — Carthago delenda est. A border war with Rome’s Numidian ally gave the pretext. In 149 BCE Rome declared the Third Punic War and laid siege; Scipio Aemilianus, grandson by adoption of Africanus, took command and tightened the ring. In the spring of 146 BCE the legions broke in and fought street by street up the slope of the Byrsa over roughly six days. The city was burned, its walls thrown down, its surviving population — some fifty thousand — sold into slavery, and the site formally cursed. (The much-repeated story that the Romans sowed the fields with salt appears in no ancient source; it is a flourish of the nineteenth century.)

The ground that did not stay empty

A cursed site is still a good site. Within a generation the reformer Gaius Gracchus tried to plant a citizen colony there, Colonia Junonia, in 122 BCE; the attempt failed against political resistance and lingering dread. Julius Caesar planned a refoundation that his death interrupted, and it was Augustus who in 29 BCE settled the place in earnest as Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago. Roman Carthage rose over the Punic levels — the Byrsa leveled and re-platted, a new forum, the aqueduct from Zaghouan, the circus and the theaters — and within a century it ranked among the greatest cities of the Roman Empire, capital of the rich grain province of Africa Proconsularis. Even the old gods walked up out of the ash under Latin names: Baal Hammon answered to Saturn across the African countryside, and Tanit became Juno Caelestis, the Heavenly Juno, with her own temple in the refounded city, woven now into the public cult of Roman religion. The shipping that had made the first city made the second; the grain fleets that fed Rome sailed from the same shore from which Carthage had once contested the sea, the same African seaboard along which her old trade had run east toward Egypt and the kingdoms of the Nile.

Sources and scholarship

Carthage poses a hard documentary problem: the city kept records, and Rome burned them. The great Carthaginian libraries were dispersed after 146 BCE — the Roman senate is reported to have handed them to Numidian kings, saving only the agronomist Mago’s treatise on farming for translation into Latin — so the Punic voice survives almost entirely in stone: tens of thousands of votive inscriptions, gathered in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum begun under Ernest Renan in the nineteenth century, and the bilingual and Latino-Punic texts of the later African countryside. Everything else comes through the enemy. Polybius, a Greek hostage in Roman circles who knew Scipio Aemilianus and watched the city fall, is the indispensable narrative source for the wars and the constitution; Livy carries the Roman tradition of the Second War; Diodorus Siculus preserves the Sicilian and the sacrificial material; Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus holds the foundation legend.

Modern study runs along two main tracks. For the religion, Corinne Bonnet’s Melqart: Cultes et mythes de l’Héraclès tyrien en Méditerranée (Studia Phoenicia VIII, Peeters, 1988) remains the standard treatment of the Tyrian god and his western cult, set against the broader West Semitic background recovered at Ras Shamra. For the civilization and its wars, Dexter Hoyos’s The Carthaginians (Routledge, 2010) and the synthetic surveys of Glenn Markoe, Phoenicians (British Museum / University of California, 2000), provide the working frame. The tophet controversy is its own dense literature, and the two papers that define its present poles are openly accessible: the cemetery argument of Schwartz and colleagues in PLoS ONE (2010) and the sacrifice argument of Xella, Quinn, Melchiorri, and van Dommelen in Antiquity (2013), with the methodological exchange over the aging of cremated infant bone continuing in the same journal (Smith and colleagues, Antiquity).

For three hundred years the western sea answered to a city whose own books are gone. The oxhide cut into a thread is a story the Carthaginians told about themselves — about taking by craft a ground that was offered as a courtyard — and it reads, in hindsight, less like a charter than a measure of the whole enterprise: a thalassocracy improvised out of a foothold, its gods carried in the hold beside the silver, its accounts balanced in offerings burned within sight of the wharves, until the one rival it could not outsail came across the strait and closed the ledger for good.

→ Related: Phoenician Religion · Canaan · Ugaritic West Semitic Religion · Baal · Sacrifice Ritual · Roman Republic · Roman Empire · Ancient Roman Religion · Hellenistic Period · Ancient Egypt