Carthage: The great city of antiquity

Carthage is now a residential suburb of the city of Tunis, Tunisia. Built on a promontory on the Tunisian coast, it was placed to influence and control ships passing between Sicily and the North African coast as they traversed the Mediterranean Sea. Rapidly becoming a thriving port and trading centre, it eventually developed into a major Mediterranean power and a rival to Rome. The archaeological site of Carthage was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1979.

According to tradition, Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians of Tyre in 814 bce; its Phoenician name means “new town.”

Carthage was probably not the earliest Phoenician settlement in the region; Utica may have predated it by half a century, and various traditions concerning the foundation of Carthage were current among the Greeks, who called the city Karchedon. The Roman tradition is better known, however, because of the Aeneid, which tells of the city’s foundation by the Tyrian princess Dido, who fled from her brother Pygmalion (the name of a historical king of Tyre). The inhabitants of Carthage were known to the Romans as Poeni, a derivation from the word Phoenikes (Phoenicians), from which the adjective Punic is derived. The traditional date of the foundation of Carthage as 814 bce was probably exaggerated by the Carthaginians themselves, for it does not necessarily agree with the archaeological data. Nothing earlier than the last quarter of the 8th century bce has been discovered, a full century later than the traditional foundation date.

The Phoenicians selected the locations of their maritime colonies with great care, focusing on the quality of harbours and their proximity to trade routes. The site chosen for Carthage in the centre of the shore of the Gulf of Tunis was ideal; the city was built on a triangular peninsula covered with low hills and backed by the Lake of Tunis, with its safe anchorage and abundant supplies of fish.

This location offered access to the Mediterranean but was shielded from many of the violent storms that afflicted other Mediterranean ports. The site of the city was well protected and easily defensible, and its proximity to the Strait of Sicily placed it at a strategic bottleneck in east-west Mediterranean trade. On the south the peninsula is connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land. The ancient citadel, the Byrsa, was on a low hill overlooking the sea. Some of the earliest tombs have been found there, though nothing remains of Carthage’s domestic and public buildings.

Although Punic wealth was legendary, the standard of cultural life enjoyed by the Carthaginians may have been below that of the larger cities of the Classical world. Punic interests were turned toward commerce rather than art, and Carthage controlled much of the Western trade in the luxurious purple dye from the murex shell. Arguments about the virtual lack of Punic literature are largely moot; when the Romans sacked the city, Carthage’s libraries and archives were either given to Numidian kings or did not survive the destruction.

One notable exception was the work of a Carthaginian writer named Mago, whose 28 books on agriculture were translated into Greek by Cassius Dionysius and later cited by Romans such as Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. In Roman times Punic beds, cushions, and mattresses were regarded as luxuries, and Punic joinery and furniture were copied.

Much of the revenue of Carthage came from its exploitation of the silver mines of North Africa and southern Spain, begun as early as 800 bce near Gadir (modern Cádiz, Spain) and in the 3rd century bce near what is now Cartagena, Spain. From the middle of the 3rd century to the middle of the 2nd century bce, Carthage was engaged in a series of wars with Rome. These wars, which are known as the Punic Wars, ended in the complete defeat of Carthage by Rome and the expansion of Roman control in the Mediterranean world.

When Carthage finally fell in 146 BCE, the site was plundered and burned, fulfilling the demand by the senator and orator Cato the Elder that had been distilled in the phrase delenda est Carthago: “Carthage must be destroyed.”

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