The Carthaginians

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A magistrate finishing his year in office at Carthage could expect to be questioned. Two judges sat at the head of the state, elected for the year and answerable when it ended; a council of elders weighed the city’s money and its wars; and a tribunal whose members the Greeks numbered at one hundred and four sat in judgment on generals who came home from the field, so that a commander who lost a fleet might lose his life to his own people rather than to the enemy. This was not a kingdom. It was a republic of merchants on the African shore, and for three centuries it was the strongest single thing in the western sea. The people who built it called their tongue by no name that survives in their own mouth; the Romans called it Punic, and the people who spoke it the Poeni, and from that distance — through the language of the power that finally burned their city — most of what is remembered of them has had to come.

A daughter of Tyre on the African shore

The Carthaginians were Phoenicians of the west. Their parent stock came out of the Levantine cities — Tyre above all, with Sidon and Byblos — the seafaring Canaanite people whose merchants and colonists had been threading the Mediterranean since the early Iron Age. Carthage itself, on the gulf of what is now Tunisia, was by tradition a foundation of Tyre. The Greek and Roman writers fixed its beginning to the late ninth century before our era — the chronicler Timaeus of Tauromenium reckoned it to 814 by counting back against the Tyrian king-lists, and the spade roughly agrees, for no settlement layer at the site clearly predates the last quarter of the eighth century. The town’s own name was blunt: Qart-hadasht, the new city, worn down by Greek and Latin tongues to Karchedon and Carthago. The legend of the Tyrian princess Elissa, whom the Romans called Dido, fleeing her murderous brother to found the city with an oxhide cut into a thread, belongs to the city’s own account; the people are the matter here.

What grew on that shore was something the homeland never became. The cities of Phoenicia had been a loose array of trading states under the shadow of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia in turn. Carthage outgrew its mother and, as the Levantine cities fell one after another under eastern empires, became the head of a confederation of the western Phoenician towns — Motya and the other Sicilian foundations, Tharros and the Sardinian colonies, Gades and the Spanish seaboard beyond the Pillars, Ibiza, Malta, the African coast from the Libyan desert toward the Atlantic. The people who held this together were, in their own and their neighbors’ reckoning, Phoenicians still; modern scholarship calls them the Punics or the western Phoenicians, and the distinction is largely one of geography and date. Their language, the Romans’ Punic, was a dialect of Phoenician — a Northwest Semitic, Canaanite tongue, kin to Hebrew and Ugaritic and Aramaic — and it outlived the city itself by centuries, still spoken in the African countryside in the fourth century of our era, when Augustine, bishop of a Punic-speaking province, could still cite it. What the Carthaginians called themselves is less certain. A line in Augustine has been read to mean that the country people of his day, asked their origin, answered Chanani — Canaanites — though scholars dispute how much weight the phrase can bear.

The empire of the ship and the market

The Carthaginians were a people of the harbor, the colony, and the ledger before they were a people of the army. Their wealth came from the carrying-trade and from the things the trade carried: the silver and the tin of Spain, the purple dye won from the murex along the African coast, worked ivory and ostrich plumes from the African interior, salt fish, wine, and the grain and oil of a widening hinterland that the city’s great families farmed with an order so methodical that its handbook outlived the empire. They were the keepers of the sea-roads — a thalassocracy in the plain sense, a power resting on command of the water. The instrument of it was the fleet, and the symbol the great double harbor of Carthage, a rectangular commercial basin opening into a circular naval one ringed with covered ship-sheds. Their treaties with the young Roman Republic, the first of which the Greek historian Polybius dated to the end of the sixth century, read already as the documents of a confident sea-power telling other men’s ships which waters they might enter.

A votive stele from the tophet of Carthage, carved above with the disc-and-crescent sign of Tanit. BishkekRocks, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

In their great age — from roughly the sixth century before our era — the Carthaginians were governed not by kings but by magistrates and a council. The chief office was held by two suffetes, elected annually; the word is the same Northwest Semitic root, shophetim, judges, that names the leaders in the Hebrew book of Judges, and it has nothing to do with command of armies. The suffetes presided over the courts and the assembly. Above them sat a powerful council, an aristocratic senate of the great merchant houses, with a smaller tribunal — the Greeks counted one hundred and four — that audited returning generals, and a popular assembly that carried weight when council and magistrates were divided. Generals were appointed separately and answered, sometimes with their lives, to the state (worldhistory.org). The arrangement struck an outside observer who had no love of foreigners: in the second book of the Politics, Aristotle ranked the Carthaginian constitution among the best-governed he knew, alongside Sparta and Crete, a mixed regime stable enough that it had — in his telling — never bred a tyrant. Wealth, not birth alone, opened the offices; the same commercial energy that filled the harbors filled the council.

Because the citizen body was small and could not garrison an empire, the Carthaginians fought increasingly with hired men — Libyan and Numidian horsemen, Iberian and Celtic foot, Balearic slingers, Greek mercenaries — paid out of the trade the wars protected. This was a strength and, in the end, a fault line; an army of contractors could turn, and once, after the first great war with Rome, it did, in a revolt of unpaid mercenaries so savage that Polybius held it the cruelest war he knew.

The gods carried west

The Carthaginians carried their gods with them out of the Levant and let them change in African soil, so that the western Punic pantheon became recognizably its own — a matter that belongs in full to Phoenician religion and behind it to the older world of Canaan. Two powers stood at the head of the city’s cult. Baal Hammon was the elder lord, the supreme god of the western Phoenician world from the early centuries, a sky-and-fertility power whose name the Greeks and Romans answered with their own Kronos and Saturn. Beside him, and rising from roughly the fifth century before him in the dedications, stood Tanit, the great heavenly mother, who bore the title pene Baal, the face of Baal, as though she were the turned countenance through which the high god met his people. Her emblem — a flat-based triangle topped by a bar and a disc, what the scholars call the sign of Tanit — recurs on thousands of carved stones and is the visual signature of the whole Punic world. Whether Tanit grew from the Levantine Astarte, to whom she is kin, or rose as a goddess of the west in her own right, is not settled.

The Tyrian city-god Melqart kept his hold on Carthaginian loyalty across the life of the city: for centuries Carthage sent a tithe of its revenues east to his temple in Tyre, and preserved the priestly office the inscriptions call the raiser of the god, tied to Melqart’s yearly festival of awakening. The healer Eshmun, whom the Greeks read as their Asclepius, crowned the great temple on the citadel of Carthage; the antique war-and-plague archer Reshef, older than any of them and known across the Semitic east from Ebla and Ugarit down into Egypt, traveled west into the Punic colonies as well. The names are Levantine; the way the Carthaginians held them — the tithe sailing back across the sea to a mother-city long since reduced to a subject of greater powers — is the local fact.

The signature of their sacred world is written in stone. Across the Punic Mediterranean, from Carthage to the Sardinian and Sicilian colonies, lay the precincts the modern scholars call tophets — the word is borrowed from the Hebrew of Kings and Jeremiah, a label applied by archaeologists because the Punic name is lost. A tophet is an open-air sanctuary layered with small cinerary urns holding the cremated remains of the very young, often marked above ground by carved votive stelae dedicated to Baal Hammon and to Tanit. Many of the inscriptions use the term mlk (vocalized molk), the name of a kind of offering, vowed to the god — sometimes in the variant phrase that seems to mean the offering of a lamb. In the worshippers’ own understanding, the stele was the record of a vow paid: a thing given, or promised and given in another’s place, to bind the god to the giver. The architecture is firm and recurs from city to city across the western sea; what was given, and in what sense, is the deepest dispute in the study of these people, and is taken up below.

Three Roman wars and the burning of the city

For its first centuries the great rival of the Carthaginians was Greek — the western Greeks of Sicily, with whom they fought for nearly two centuries over the island, a contest checked hard at Himera in 480 before our era, where Syracuse broke a Carthaginian army. Then a new power consolidated the Italian peninsula, and the long Roman contest began.

In 264 a dispute over the Sicilian city of Messana drew Carthage and Rome into the First Punic War — a contest the land-power of Rome could only win by building, against the established naval state, fleets it had never owned. Twenty-three years of attrition ended in 241 with Carthage ceding Sicily and agreeing to a heavy indemnity; Rome seized Sardinia in the chaos that followed. Out of that humiliation rose the house that gave the wars their second act. Hamilcar Barca, who had held out undefeated in Sicily, carried Carthaginian power into Spain and built there a base of silver and soldiers; his son Hannibal turned it on Rome. In 218 he marched an army with war-elephants over the Alps into Italy and fought for fifteen years on Roman ground, destroying the largest force Rome had ever fielded at Cannae in 216 in the double envelopment that every later war-college would study. Yet Rome would not negotiate, and the war turned where Hannibal could not be — in Spain and then in Africa, where the commander Scipio, afterward called Africanus, beat him at Zama in 202. The peace of the following year stripped Carthage of its overseas empire, its war-fleet, and its freedom to make war without Rome’s leave (britannica.com).

The Phoenician and Punic commercial network across the Mediterranean — the sea-roads the Carthaginians of the west inherited and held. DooFi, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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. A border war with Rome’s Numidian ally gave the pretext. Rome declared the Third Punic War in 149 and laid siege; in the spring of 146 the legions broke in and fought street by street up the slope of the citadel over some days. The city was burned and its walls thrown down, its surviving people — tens of thousands — sold into slavery, and the ground formally cursed. The much-repeated tale that the Romans sowed the fields with salt appears in no ancient source; it is a flourish of the nineteenth century. With the city went the people as a sovereign nation, though Punic-speakers and Punic gods persisted under Roman rule for centuries: Baal Hammon answered to Saturn across the African countryside, and Tanit became the Heavenly Juno of the refounded Roman colony.

A people known through their enemies

The hard fact that governs everything written about the Carthaginians is that they wrote much, and almost none of it survives. They were a literate people — their votive and dedicatory inscriptions number in the tens of thousands, and the classical sources speak of Carthaginian books, histories, treatises, and a great library. When the city fell in 146, the Roman senate is reported to have handed those libraries to the allied kings of Numidia; only the agronomist Mago’s treatise on farming was judged valuable enough to translate into Latin, and even that survives now in fragments, quoted by later Roman writers. The rest was dispersed and lost. So a people who recorded a great deal comes down to us mainly through the words of the power that destroyed them, and through the stones they left in the ground. Their record stands at three distances, and a reader who wants to understand them must keep the three apart.

The first is the most quoted and the least trustworthy. The Greek and Roman authors — Polybius, who knew the Scipios and watched the city fall; Diodorus Siculus; Plutarch; Justin’s epitome of the lost history of Pompeius Trogus; Livy for the war with Hannibal; the Christian writers of the African provinces — are external, interested, and often hostile, much of it the slander of the victors. From this tradition descends the topos of “Punic faith,” fides Punica, the Roman byword for treachery, and the larger image of a cruel and alien east set against a virtuous Rome. That image is not evidence about the Carthaginians; it is evidence about how Rome wished to remember the enemy it had destroyed, and the modern reader must handle it as a problem in historiography rather than as testimony. The same caution governs the most charged charge of all.

The second distance is the one at which the Carthaginians speak in their own voice. The native epigraphy is abundant — the votive stelae of the tophets, the dedicatory and building inscriptions, the bilingual and Latino-Punic texts of the later African countryside — gathered since the nineteenth century into the great corpora of Semitic inscriptions. With it stands the archaeology: the harbors and walls of Carthage, the preserved Punic town at Kerkouane, the island city of Motya, the Sardinian headland of Tharros, the precincts and urns of the tophets. Here the Carthaginians are not described by their enemies; they are read directly, in their own language and their own works, and this is the decisive difference between them and the mute steppe peoples whose religion survives only at second hand. The third distance is the comparative one — the onomastics and the Northwest Semitic philology that read the Punic theonyms and the religion through the wider Canaanite family, setting Tanit and Baal Hammon and Melqart against their Levantine and Ugaritic kin.

The tophet question lives where the first and second distances collide. The classical record is lurid and nearly unanimous: Cleitarchus, Diodorus describing the panic of the siege of 310 before our era, Plutarch, and later Christian apologists report that the 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 the fire. These were hostile witnesses almost to a man. Against them stands the difficulty of the bones. A 2010 study in PLoS ONE led by Jeffrey Schwartz argued from the cremated remains that the age profile — heavily weighted toward the prenatal and the newborn — matched ordinary perinatal mortality rather than the selection a sacrifice of living children would produce, reading the tophet as a cemetery for those who died at or near birth (journals.plos.org). A 2013 reply in Antiquity by Paolo Xella, Josephine Quinn, Valentina Melchiorri, and Peter van Dommelen weighed the urns, the dedicatory stelae, the mlk vocabulary, and the classical sources together, judged the aging of cremated bone unreliable, and concluded that the precinct was first of all a sanctuary of offerings (cambridge.org). The debate runs along a further seam, between scholars who weigh the hostile sources heavily and others — including Tunisian scholars such as M’hamed Hassine Fantar — who read the precincts against the grain of Roman propaganda. The vow is real and written on the stones; what stood behind it is argued still, and the honest course is to hold the question open rather than to settle it in either the Roman direction or the flatly exculpatory one.

To recover the Carthaginians, then, is to read past a tradition of victors. They were not the monsters the Roman annalists made of them, nor were they innocents; they were the western Phoenician people, a literate, sea-ruling, god-fearing trading nation of the African shore, with a republic that Aristotle admired and a religion as coherent as any of their neighbors’. The modern effort — the archaeology of the cities, the patient reading of the Punic stones, the critical handling of the Greco-Roman authors, the comparison across the Semitic family that scholars such as Josephine Quinn have pressed in re-examining who the Phoenicians and Punics even were — has been to render them soberly, in their own terms. Their Berber neighbors, the Numidians and the Mauretanians who inherited their libraries and their gods and outlived their fall, have their own accounts; and the wider story of the Phoenicians of east and west is the frame that holds them all. The Carthaginians are what is left when the slander is set aside and the stones are allowed to speak.

Sources and further reading

The documentary problem is the subject itself. For the Greco-Roman narrative tradition, Polybius is indispensable and Diodorus, Livy, Plutarch, and Justin fill it out, all to be read with the caution their interest demands. The Punic voice survives in the epigraphic corpora and in the archaeology of Carthage and the western colonies. For modern synthesis, Dexter Hoyos, The Carthaginians (Routledge, 2010), is the standard English account of the people; Josephine Quinn, In Search of the Phoenicians (Princeton, 2018), reopens the question of Phoenician and Punic identity itself; and the tophet debate can be followed through the 2010 PLoS ONE and 2013 Antiquity papers cited above.

→ Related: Carthage · Phoenicia · The Phoenicians · Phoenician Religion · Tanit · Baal Hammon · Melqart · Eshmun · Reshef · Motya · Kerkouane · Tharros · The Temple Of Eshmun · The Numidians · The Mauretanians · Tyre · Sidon · Byblos · The Canaanites · Tophet · Canaan · Astarte