Rome and the Western Mediterranean · Part 2 · Before Rome · B2
Carthage: The Phoenician City of the West
Part 2 of Rome and the Western Mediterranean: for five hundred years, the greatest city of the western Mediterranean was not Rome but Carthage, a colony of Tyre in North Africa. Its ships reached Britain and West Africa, its farmers wrote the best book on agriculture, and almost everything we know about it was written by its enemies. Possessives (Carthage’s harbour, the walls of the city, a friend of Hannibal’s), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
The city that Rome destroyed and covered with salt.
Destroyed, yes. The salt is a story that will be invented two thousand years from now. Let us look at what was there before.
Mostly its enemies. That is the first thing to remember.
Carthage, in modern Tunisia, was founded by settlers from the Phoenician city of Tyre. Its name meant “New City”. Tradition says it was founded in 814 BCE by a princess, Elissa, whom the Romans called Dido; the oldest remains found so far date from a little later.
Carthage became the centre of a Phoenician world in the west, with cities and trading posts in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain and North Africa. Its people spoke Punic, a form of Phoenician, and worshipped gods such as Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit.
Carthage fought the Greeks of Sicily for centuries, and then Rome, in three great wars. In 146 BCE Rome destroyed the city. Most of what we know about Carthage was written by Greeks and Romans, its rivals; its own books were lost or scattered.
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